Stick Out Your Tongue Read online

  It was too late now. She opened her eyes and saw Labrang Chantso remove his robes and walk towards her. She looked up at him pleadingly then, shaking with fear, let him push her down onto the hard cushions. Very soon, she felt a sharp pain between her legs and the suffocating weight of a body pressing down on her. She sensed that the woman who had woken inside her just a few hours ago was slowly being ripped to shreds.

  Soon the pain subsided, and she became aware of the sweat on her back and neck. She let herself roll and shake as Labrang Chantso moved back and forth on top of her. She felt as though she were floating into a black hole. From time to time, an itching sensation spread through her thighs. Inside the black hole, however, she knew that she was alone, and this allowed her a moment of calm.

  Then suddenly she remembered that she was performing the Union of the Two Bodies Ritual. She remembered that she must awaken her chakras if she and Labrang Chantso were to achieve a union of wisdom and compassion. But just as her psychic energy was about to reach her Wisdom Chakra, Labrang Chantso dragged her up onto her feet, hitched her right leg to his waist, and shook her so hard that her mind went blank.

  She felt herself wither and wilt as Labrang Chantso clung to her like a magnet, sucking the energy from her bones. At last, she collapsed on the floor. She was helpless. She had no choice but to let Labrang Chantso do with her as he wished. When he sat down again in the lotus position and tugged her towards him, she slumped onto his lap and, like the dakinis on the murals, hooked her legs around his back. The breasts that had grown on her chest at dawn were now as shrivelled as an old woman’s. Sangsang Tashi gasped for breath as the pain below her pubic bone rose through her pelvis and spine.

  She opened her eyes. The entire hall was flooded with sunlight. Above the dark clouds of incense smoke that shimmered around her, she saw a golden smile appear on the face of Buddha Sakyamuni. She turned her head from Labrang Chantso’s foul-smelling mouth and, among the sea of shaven heads, caught sight of Geleg Paljor. She quickly closed her eyes again, dug her head into Labrang Chantso’s chest and clenched her jaw.

  It was noon before the Ritual of Empowerment came to an end.

  When Sangsang Tashi woke from her sleep, she found herself on the hard cushions, kneeling on all fours like a dog. She was still trembling and soaked in sweat. Her thoughts suddenly turned to her dying mother.

  Two nuns walked over, hoisted her up and with water from a golden bowl wiped the blood and sweat from her body. She was paralysed. Her legs were completely numb.

  When she finally made it to her feet, the horns blasted in unison and the air filled with incense smoke and the sound of sacred chanting. The golden bowl was placed on the mandala as an offering to the deities. Labrang Chantso had wrapped himself in his robes again and returned to his woven mat. His cheeks were flushed and glowing. Sangsang Tashi’s legs shook as she waited for the ceremony to end. She was surprised that in just a few hours she had lost all the yogic skills that had taken her so many years to acquire. But the thought that she was a woman, that in every cell of her body she was a woman, no longer astonished her.

  It was on her second night in the frozen river that Sangsang Tashi died. According to the rites, she was meant to meditate in the ice river for three days before manifesting her Buddha Nature. Three lamas had taken it in turns to watch over her and crack the ice that formed around her neck. She had tried to recite an invocation to summon fire into her body, which had proved so effective in the past, but it failed to protect her from the freezing temperatures.

  On the third day, just before dawn, Lama Tsungma, master of rites, left the campfire, trod through the snow to the edge of the river and saw Sangsang Tashi’s body sinking below the surface. When he pulled her out, he discovered that she had become as transparent as the ice. Where the fish had bitten into her knees, there was not a trace of blood. Her eyes were half-open, as they were when she used to meditate on a flame of light.

  At daybreak, a group of lamas arrived to greet the manifested Living Buddha. They were dressed in elaborate ceremonial robes and rode horses draped in coloured silk. It was not important to them whether the Living Buddha was alive or not. Nevertheless, when they saw Sangsang Tashi’s body they couldn’t help but gather round in amazement. She was lying on her back, frozen to the ice. Cool rays of sun bathed her in a soft light. Everyone stared at the organs floating in her transparent body. A fish that had somehow gnawed its way into her corpse was swimming back and forth through her intestines.

  The cup carved from Sangsang Tashi’s skull is now sitting on my desk. The man who sold it to me said that he’d inherited it from his great-grandfather who had studied sorcery at Manrinba Medical College. The skull cup used to be Tenpa Monastery’s most prized ritual object. It was displayed in the main temple and used only during the most important empowerment ceremonies. The bone has yellowed with age. It must have been dropped at some point in the past as there’s a crack down the left side that’s crammed with dirt. The fine line running down the dome of the skull zigzags like an electrocardiogram. According to a doctor friend of mine, this indicates that the cranium belonged to a pubescent girl. The exterior of the skull is decorated with ornate brass medallions and the interior is lined with gold.

  The seller wanted five hundred yuan for it, but I managed to beat him down to a hundred. If anyone would like to buy it from me, just get in touch. I’ll accept any offer, as long as it covers the cost of my travels to the north-east.

  Also by Ma Jian

  Red Dust

  The Noodle Maker

  AFTERWORD

  A hunted animal will always try to run as far away as possible. The further it runs, the safer it feels. In 1985, after three years of running from the authorities in China, I finally headed for Tibet. At the time, the Tibetan Plateau was the most distant and remote place that I could imagine. As my bus left the crowded plains of China and ascended to the clear heights of Tibet, I felt a sense of relief. I hoped that here at last I’d find a refuge from the soulless society that China had become. I wanted to escape into a different landscape and culture, and gain a deeper insight into my Buddhist faith.

  But when I reached Lhasa, I found a city that was under siege. The Chinese government, which had ‘liberated’ Tibet in 1950, was launching celebrations for the twentieth anniversary of the Tibet Autonomous Region. Although the air was filled with the sound of jubilant music, the atmosphere was tense. One could sense the hostility the Tibetans felt towards their Chinese occupiers. No one was allowed out on the streets apart from a select group of people who’d been chosen by the government either to take part in the parades or to stand on the pavement waving flags. On the second night, I couldn’t bear being cooped up any longer, and slipped out for a midnight stroll, but was promptly arrested by the local police.

  When the siege was lifted, I picked up a job painting propaganda murals outside the local radio station. Once I’d earned enough money, I set off into the countryside. What I encountered both fascinated and bewildered me.

  From a distance, the wastes of the high plateau had a hypnotic beauty. But after I had trudged across them for days on end, the emptiness became stupefying. I lost all sense of reality and travelled as though in a trance. In the thin mountain air, it was hard to distinguish fact from fantasy. My mind was tormented by visions of Buddhist deities and memories of home.

  In the grasslands I slept under the stars or shared tents with nomads; in the villages I slept on dirt floors. The poverty I saw was worse than anything I’d witnessed in China. My idyll of a simple life lived close to nature was broken when I realised how dehumanising extreme hardship can be. The Tibetans treated me with either indifference or disdain. Sometimes they even threw stones at me. But the more I saw of Tibet and the damage that Chinese rule had inflicted on the country, the more I understood their anger. For the first time in my life I felt that I was walking through a part of the world where I had no right to be.

  My hope of gaining some religious revela
tion also came to nothing. Tibet was a land whose spiritual heart had been ripped out. Thousands of temples lay in ruins, and the few monasteries that had survived were damaged and defaced. Most of the monks who’d returned to the monasteries seemed to have done so for economic rather than spiritual reasons. The temple gates were guarded by armed policemen, and the walls were daubed with slogans instructing the monks to ‘Love the Motherland, love the Communist Party and study Marxist-Leninism’. In this sacred land, it seemed that the Buddha couldn’t even save himself, so how could I expect him to save me? As my faith crumbled, a void opened inside me. I felt empty and helpless, as pathetic as a patient who sticks out his tongue and begs his doctor to diagnose what’s wrong with him.

  I returned to Beijing in a state of nervous exhaustion. I locked myself up in my one-room shack and started writing feverishly. Through the stories that took shape, I wanted to express my confusion and bewilderment, my sympathy for the marginalised and dispossessed, my frustration with blind faith, and my distress at the losses we incur on the march to so-called ‘civilisation’. I wanted to write about Tibet as I had experienced it, as both a reality and a state of mind. I let my guard down and wrote without thought of what the repercussions might be.

  When the book was finished, I submitted it to Liu Xinwu, the liberal-minded editor of the journal People’s Literature. Two months later, in February 1987, it appeared in a double issue of the journal. I didn’t give the publication much thought because by then I’d moved to Hong Kong and my mind was on other things. One evening, however, I turned on the television and saw a newsclip from Mainland China. The officious announcer cleared her throat and said, ‘Stick Out Your Tongue is a vulgar, obscene book that defames the image of our Tibetan compatriots. Ma Jian fails to depict the great strides the Tibetan people have made in building a united, prosperous and civilised Socialist Tibet. The image of Tibet in this filthy and shameful work has nothing to do with reality, but is instead the product of the author’s imagination and his obsessive desire for sex and money … No one must be allowed to read this book. All copies of People’s Literature must be confiscated and destroyed immediately.’

  I telephoned my friends in China at once to find out what was going on. Many of them had already been summoned to the police station to be interrogated about me. The editor Liu Xinwu had been sacked from his job, and the official press was filled with articles denouncing my work. A government campaign against the evils of ‘bourgeois liberalism’ had recently been launched, and I had become its first literary target. The stories’ raw descriptions of life went beyond anything that had been published before in China. But by branding it a work of ‘pornography’, the government had created an interest in the book that they hadn’t intended. Soon everyone from college students to taxi drivers became desperate to get their hands on a copy. The journal was sold on the black market for ten times its issue price. Some entrepreneurs even went to the trouble of making handwritten copies of the book. A month later, the journal Special Economic Zone Literature featured another story of mine, and it too was denounced.

  I longed to return to Beijing to defend myself against the government’s allegations, but my friends told me that I would be thrown into prison and advised me to stay where I was. So I lay low in Hong Kong and worked on my next novel. The life of an exiled writer didn’t agree with me, though. Although I was free to read and write what I wished, I felt isolated and marooned. So when news filtered out the following year that the campaign against ‘bourgeois liberalisation’ had come to an end, I jumped on the next train to Beijing. I was interrogated at the Chinese border, and then followed to the capital by plainclothes policemen, but no one tried to arrest me. When I approached literary editors with my completed novel, however, I was told that a blanket ban had been placed on all future publication of my work in Mainland China.

  In the eighteen years since Stick Out Your Tongue was first published, I have returned to China countless times. Sometimes I stay just a few days, sometimes several months. The Tiananmen Massacre of 1989 convinced me that I could never make China my permanent home. Nevertheless, something still keeps pulling me back. I am no longer stopped at the border, or followed by the police. The government doesn’t need to keep tabs on me any more, because by denying me a voice they have made me disappear. In China, I have become a moment in history. Whenever I return, I feel like a ghost from the past. On my last visit, I hopped into a taxi near Tiananmen Square. The driver glanced at me through his rear-view mirror and said, ‘With hair like that, I guess you work in the arts.’ When I told him my name, he said, ‘Ma Jian? You wrote that book Show Me Your Tongue, didn’t you? Yes, yes, I mean Stick Out Your Tongue. So what have you been doing since then? Are you still writing books? I thought you were dead!’

  I am still writing books, although the only ones that have come out in China have been published under pseudonyms and extensively rewritten by the censors. I am living in London now and, on the surface, my life has changed dramatically. But when I look back at the angry young man who wandered the wilds of Tibet, I realise that I haven’t changed that much. I’m still asking myself the same questions, and still searching for a place where I can feel at home.

  On the surface, Tibet too has changed greatly, or at least the towns have. Lhasa has become a dirty, polluted city like any other you might find in China, with karaoke bars and massage parlours and gaudy neon signs. The Chinese government has discovered that economic prosperity is more effective than machine-guns and army tanks in silencing demands for democracy or regional autonomy. But the Tibetans who dare question Chinese rule are still treated with the same brutality. Today, over one hundred Tibetans are languishing in Chinese jails because of their political views.

  In the West, I have met many people who share the same romantic vision of Tibet that I held before I visited the country. The need to believe in an earthly paradise, a hidden utopia where men live in peace and harmony, seems to run deep among those who are discontented with the modern world. Westerners idealise Tibetans as gentle, godly people untainted by base desires and greed. But in my experience, Tibetans can be as corrupt and brutal as the rest of us. To idealise them is to deny them their humanity.

  The Chinese people have retained a very different view of Tibet. For them, it is not a mystical Shangrila, but a barren outpost of the great Chinese empire. They have swallowed the Communist Party’s nationalist propaganda concerning China’s ‘liberation’ of the country, and would fiercely oppose any moves to break up the ‘integrity of the Motherland’. They know nothing of the destruction the Chinese have wreaked in Tibet, or of the fact that since 1949, an estimated 1.2 million Tibetans have died due to political persecution, imprisonment, torture and famine.

  In China, however, there is a saying: ‘That which is united will eventually separate, and that which is separated will eventually reunite.’ If one holds this belief, Tibet’s eventual separation from China is inevitable. But when and how will it take place? My hope is that the separation will be peaceful and that it will take place soon, before any more of Tibet’s unique language, culture and way of life are lost for ever. The Tibetan people, like the Chinese, have been denied control of their destinies, but they are forced to suffer the added torment of being outsiders in their own home.

  Ma Jian

  London 2005

  Copyright © 1987 by Ma Jian

  Translation copyright © 2006 by Flora Drew

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in 1998 by Qingwen Shuwu, Hong Kong, as

  Liangchu nide shetai huo kongkong dangdang, in Ni la gou shi

  English translation originally published in 2006 by

  Chatto & Windus, Great Britain

  Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  19 Union Square West, New York 10003

  www.fsgbooks.com

  eISBN 9781429931250

  First eBook Edition : April 2011
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br />   First American edition, 2006

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ma, Jian, 1953-

  Stick out your tongue / Ma Jian ; translated from the Chinese by Flora Drew.— 1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: London : Chatto & Windus, 2006.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-374-26988-3 (hbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-374-26988-2 (hbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Ma, Jian, 1953— —Translations into English. I. Drew, Flora. II. Title.

  PL2948.3.J53S75 2006

  895.1’352—dc22 2006004282