Today, many people are protesting the detention of the artist Ai Weiwei at Chinese Embassies and consulates around the world with a 'sit-in' homage to Ai's 2007 1001 Chairs exhibition. Check out video from the Berlin protest here. Other creative protests by artists can be found here and here. I'm pulling up a virtual chair and following up on my previous post about dissidents Ai Weiwei and Gao Zhisheng and the recent clampdown on dissidents in China and taking a look at what some of the authors we have read previously have had to say about recent events:
To appreciate Ma Jian's (The Noodle Maker) contribution, you first need to take in Ai Weiwei's show at the Tate in London:
The Tate has now incorporated a protest of Ai's detention into the exhibit. Ma Jian's editorial on the artist's detention, 'Sunflower Revolutionary', plays around with the seeds metaphor.
This Human Rights Day we pause to honor Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo by acknowledging the empty chair at the Nobel ceremonies. Amnesty International urges you to take action:
Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo was charged with "inciting subversion of state power" and given an 11-year prison sentence on December 25, 2009 simply for co-authoring a proposal for political and legal reform in China. On October 7, the Beijing Municipal Higher People's Court upheld Liu Xiaobo's prison sentence. Urge Chinese authorities to release Liu Xiaobo immediately and unconditionally.
And we urge you to slip in a reference to Group 22 Pasadena's Chinese prisoner of conscience case Gao Zhisheng too. Check out the Globe and Mail's profiles of a courageous "Gang of 10" dissidents to watch, including Gao. To learn more about Liu Xiaobo, visit PEN's resource page. You might also want to check out PEN President Kwame Anthony Appiah's piece on Liu in Foreign Policy: China's Burden of Shame which also mentions Gao. The NYT offers a Liu poem today.
Though now better off than they have ever been in material terms, the Chinese people are denied any real opportunity to retain and refine their own dignity beyond the quest for wealth and luxury goods. Liu's prize is a rebuke to the regime, because it rejects the dogma that nothing but the pursuit of economic interest matters.
We wouldn't want to overlook the Nobel Literature Laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa. Many years we enjoyed reading Death in the Andes. Rights Readers author Daniel Alarcon (Lost City Radio) reacts to the news of his award on WNYC and offers up a bit of fan worship in the Paris Review. Vargas-Llosa's Nobel speech is well worth the read for this thoughts on reading, exile, and human rights, not missing the chance to acknowledge the empty chair himself,
...a dictatorship represents absolute evil for a country, a source of brutality and corruption and profound wounds that take a long time to close, poison the nation’s future, and create pernicious habits and practices that endure for generations and delay democratic reconstruction. This is why dictatorships must be fought without hesitation, with all the means at our disposal, including economic sanctions. It is regrettable that democratic governments, instead of setting an example by making common cause with those, like the Damas de Blanco in Cuba, the Venezuelan opposition, or Aung San Suu Kyi and Liu Xiaobo, who courageously confront the dictatorships they endure, often show themselves complaisant not with them but with their tormenters. Those valiant people, struggling for their freedom, are also struggling for ours.
Now that we've caught up with our authors writing on Tibet, here are three familiar names weighing in on the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen:
Ma Jian (The Noodle Maker) writes a moving account of how Tiananmen has touched him and his friends-- from one whose arm was crushed by a tank to another frightened young army conscript. He even sneaks in a reference to W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz,
Xidan Book Store, a five-minute walk down Changan Avenue from the Zhongnanhai government compound, is the largest bookshop in Asia. A few days after meeting Chen Guang, I went there to buy a Chinese translation of WG Sebald's Austerlitz. Like the protagonist, I too am always struggling to find out how many memories a human life needs. This five-floor bookshop sells 100,000 books a day. A huge poster of smiling President Obama is displayed close to the main entrance. Inside you can buy translations of the latest scientific or economic tomes, and books charting China's 5,000-year history, but you will not find a word about the Tiananmen massacre, or any accurate accounts of the other tragedies that the Communists have inflicted on China since 1949. These missing chapters of the nation's history weaken the power of every other Chinese text in the shop.
Ma Jian also appears in a Guardian "where are they now" rundown of Tiananmen activists. Those who read Mandate Of Heaven(see below) will a encounter familiar names.
To some Chinese, my choice of English is a kind of betrayal. But loyalty is a two-way street. I feel I have been betrayed by China, which has suppressed its people and made artistic freedom unavailable. I have tried to write honestly about China and preserve its real history. As a result, most of my work cannot be published in China.
Three other Chinese writers, Yu Hua, Yi Yunli and Lijia Zhang (certainly all are on the short list for future Rights Reads) are worth checking out as well.
At the Council for Foreign Relations, Orville Schell (Mandate Of Heaven) contributes to a collection of retrospectives, pointing to the recent release of Zhao Ziyang's memoirs to conclude that no amount of economic success can bury the past. The other views are worth a look too (Michael Anti: the internet is the new Tiananmen square...) For Schell's eyewitness account of the events of spring 1989, see this PBS Frontlineinterview (and watch the full Tank Man documentary online).
A little added context for our discussion of Ma Jian's, The Noodle Maker:
The excellent site on the history of the Cultural Revolution, Morning Sun, offers some background on the propaganda hero Lei Feng. Check out the video snippets of the film, Lei Feng, which reference some familiar imagery from the book here and here. And here is a series of articles about various efforts to resuscitate the propganda hero, beginning in 1987, so our fictional writer's quest to find the new Lei Feng is well-grounded in fact. (Note also the more recent attempt to use Lei Feng to counter the Falun Gong!) Additional Lei Feng background and memorabilia can be explored at Stefan Landsberger's Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages.
Morning Sun also features a complete version of the lovely subversive bestiary, part of which I shared at our recent non-virtual meeting.
A few links to help us get to know our June author, Ma Jian (The Noodle Maker). Here's a short Guardian profile and a longer reflection from the New Zealand Listener. Beat references come up a lot with this author,
References to the Beat Generation’s favourite roaming forefathers, particularly Walt Whitman, pop up constantly in Red Dust. When Ma read through the first proof of the first Chinese translation of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in the 1980s, with its lengthy Whitmanesque breaths, he sighed then, as he does now: “Howling out loud in anguish? Now that would be heaven.
Here's a CNN piece that contrasts two generations of Chinese authors. Finally, here's a first-person reflection from the homesick exile.
We have selected the short story collection, The Noodle Maker, by Ma Jian for June. Please note that the paperback edition of this book will be released in April 4.
From the highly acclaimed Ma Jian comes a satirical and powerfully written novel--excerpted in The New Yorker--about the absurdities and cruelties of life in post-Tianamen China. Two men, a writer of political propaganda and a professional blood donor, meet for dinner every week. During the course of one drunken evening, the writer recounts the stories he would write, had he the courage: a young man buys an old kiln from an art school and opens a private crematorium, delighting in his ability to harass the corpses of police officers and Party secretaries while swooning to banned Western music; a heartbroken actress performs a public suicide by stepping into the jaws of a wild tiger, watched nonchalantly by her ex-lover. He is inspired by extraordinary characters, their lives pulled and pummeled by fate and politics, as if they were balls of dough in the hands of an all-powerful noodle maker.
Philip Gourevitch laments that the dragnet has prevented writer Liao Yiwu (The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up) from attending the PEN World Voices Festival in New York later this month. If we weren't reading Gao Zhisheng's A China More Just
in July, I would be recommending that we read The Corpse Walker. I hope to get to it on my own. It's the least I can do.
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Now that we've 
