Stick Out Your Tongue: Stories [Paperback]

Ma Jian (Author), Flora Drew (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 24, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0312426909 | ISBN-13: 978-0312426903 | Edition: 1st

When Stick Out Your Tongue was published in Chinese in 1997, a blanket ban was placed on Ma Jian's future work. With its publication in English, readers get a rare glimpse of Tibet through Chinese eyes. In this profound work of fiction, a Chinese writer whose marriage has fallen apart travels to Tibet. As he wanders through the countryside, he witnesses the sky burial of a Tibetan woman who died during childbirth, shares a tent with a nomad who is walking to a sacred mountain to seek forgiveness for sleeping with his daughter, and hears the story of a young female lama who died during a Buddhist initiation rite. In stories both enchanting and horrifying, beautiful and macabre, seductive and perverse, Stick Out Your Tongue offers a startlingly vivid portrait of Tibet.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ma's five evocative stories concern a young Chinese journalist's travels to the wild plateaus of occupied Tibet in the late 1980s. In the first story, "The Woman and the Blue Sky," the spiritually curious journalist, whose marriage has collapsed, hopes to witness a sky burial, in which a corpse is hacked up and fed to vultures; he meets a Sichuan soldier who invites him to the imminent burial of a 17-year-old pregnant woman, the soldier's lover as well as the wife of two local brothers. Incest and sexual violence figure in some of the stories, such as "The Eight-Fanged Roach," in which the journalist, seeking shelter in a tent at the edge of the Changtang Plateau, hears the awful confession of a nomad obsessed with the daughter he has sired by his mother and drunkenly raped. "The Final Initiation" is the account of a chosen Living Buddha, a 15-year-old girl whose yogic skills desert her after the monastery's sanctioned ritual rape and who dies during her last ceremony—immersion for three days in an icy river. Ma (The Noodle Maker) has a keen sense for both the feral and the deeply spiritual in his characters. The book was published in China in 1997; all of Ma's subsequent work has been banned there. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Extraordinary . . . Ma Jian has burned through the fog of fantasy that clouds our vision of Tibet: He has shown us how poverty and political repression have deformed its once rich and vibrant culture."--Francine Prose, People
 
"These powerful pages . . . are hard to shake from one's memory and remain . . . testimony to the storytelling artistry of Ma Jian."--The Washington Post
 
"The people Ma Jian transfigures, the images of a Tibet where the living and the dead seem to mingle with beauty and unease, all this becomes quite a striking souvenir of our own high altitude pilgrimage through these exotic pages."--NPR's All Things Considered

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Product Details

• Paperback: 104 pages
• Publisher: Picador; 1st edition (July 24, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312426909
• ISBN-13: 978-0312426903
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #881,196 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dark, Lurid, and Engrossing, April 15, 2007

By 

Spyral "Its All Just A Ride" (Michigan United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stick Out Your Tongue: Stories (Hardcover)

Ma Jian's "Stick Out Your Tongue" is a collection of short stories that center around a couple central themes; the harshness of life in rural Tibet, and often times "non-traditional" sexual practices. I doubt the stories in the book are meant to be at all expository, or shed much real knowledge about what life is like for real Tibetans, but it does provide a picture of Tibet that is very alive, and very hostile. I'm still not certain what the original intent of the work was. In some ways it merely seems to offer another stereotype of Tibetan society (an anti-romanticized one), and in other ways it seems simply like an attempt to bring the reader into a world that is just surreal, with Tibet being presented simply as a vehicle for that vision.

The Afterword confused me as well. In it, Ma Jian briefly outlines the controversy surrounding the work, and also comments on his sadness in regard to the plight of Tibetans as outsiders in their own homeland. The last commentary is the most confusing, since it seems to suggest that this is somehow tied into the work. In actuality it is quite absent. There are no politics in this work, unless you draw the conclusion that the darker side that you witness in the book is there due to Chinese influence. This is a loose connection however, since there are no cues that point in that direction. Only the narrator is Han Chinese, and is mostly a peripheral character. The stories themselves center wholly on Tibetans engaging in relationships with other Tibetans.

I think some other reviewers had it spot-on when they said these stories do more to humanize Tibetans than anything else. The idea that a monk would have to hire a guard to keep lusty monks away from his wife, or that a Tibetan would beat his cheating wife and steal the monestery's gold won't find much place in most Western visions of Tibet. Those are typically the actions of Chinese intruders, with Tibetans almost always playing the role of passive, saintly protagonist.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Worth Reading., March 27, 2009

By 

Chan Wai Man "Raymond Chan" (Hong Kong) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Stick Out Your Tongue: Stories (Hardcover)

English translation, a very short book (<100 pg) with only 5 short stories, it has some most queer stories you do not expected from Tibet (quoted: stories with multi-generational incest, sexual abuse and ritual rape). And no wonder it is censored by the Chinese government (because it is queer and it is about Tibet). Feel really bad about Chinese censorship, and sooner or later China will have an army of ignorant people... (and yes, who give a damn about Tibet people's suffering and their want of independency, right? No we don't, because we don't even know who the hell Tibet people are.)

4.0 out of 5 stars Read "Red Dust" first to sift that fact from this fiction, May 21, 2011

By 

John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Stick Out Your Tongue: Stories (Paperback)

After "Red Dust," immediately I read this. I found that the section "The Woman and the Blue Sky" shows up nearly verbatim, if with subtle shifts of emphasis or description, as the first story with the same title in this short collection of five disturbing, detached tales from Tibet, "Stick Out Your Tongue." (The title refers to the natives' traditional greeting!)

His afterword to that follow-up to "Red Dust" (also reviewed by me) in this 1998 edition (written in 1987, in English 2006 also via another seamless translation far as I can tell by Flora Drew) admits this small volume of stories roused tremendous controversy in China. It can be existential and it can be hopeful, in the Beat spirit. The religious temperament pervades as God and man, myth and legend tangle: in an eerie tale of initiation, the narrator confides: "I am writing down this story in the hope that I can start to forget it." (66) Revelation does not descend for Ma Jian either in his travelogue or his storytelling from Tibet. Monks live amidst Maoist slogans; Ma Jian himself gains pocket money by "painting propaganda murals outside the local radio station." (86) He does not comment on this apparent irony.

Graphic as these spare stories can be, if for me rather than the PRC censors they seemed far from "pornographic," a demystified and deromanticized version of life on the plateau. They may benefit from a prior reading of "Red Dust," at least the Tibetan chapter; without some grounding in dharma Tibetan-style, the concentrated allusions and contexts may elude readers.

"Stick" dismantles the natives as "gentle, godly people untainted by base desires and greed." Ma Jian notes that "in my experience, Tibetans can be as corrupt and brutal as the rest of us. To idealise them is to deny them their humanity." (92)

Certainly, in "Red Dust" and "Stick Out Your Tongue," the steady, direct account of a very young woman, dying after a botched childbirth, in her sky burial--when a corpse is left for the vultures after the bones have been pounded down and mixed with dough to be fed to birds, and after the skin has been separated and the viscera and flesh dismembered after blessings have been recited--seems determined to get rid of any lingering attachment to delicacy. I found Ma Jian's account, reading it twice echoed in two versions, sensitive and dignified, although other readers were predictably revolted. For a sympathetic explanation in a book that I reviewed, compare Colin Thubron's trek around sacred Mount Kailash, "To a Mountain in Tibet (2011)."

Ma Jian doubts, even as a budding Buddhist, that his faith or that of his fellow adherents can save Tibet. Communists import greed: "As soon as a road is built, kindness vanishes." Values of one collective, perhaps communal and somewhat refined, civilization cannot withstand those of individualism masked as communism. As he says in "Red Dust": "I came here hoping to see man saved by the Buddha's compassion, but in Tibet the Buddha cannot even save himself." (297) Ma Jian winds up distrusting Buddhism, and dismissing capitalism as well as Communism. No wonder that he left for Hong Kong the year he wrote these stories, fearing prison. He moved to Germany and he now lives in London.

He sees a pert woman's bosom jiggling as she shakes on a bus ride, with a "bent paper clip" holding her shirt in place instead of a button. This image reappears in "Stick," as does a character Sonam, in "Red Dust" half-Chinese, half-Tibetan and torn in loyalty; a skull-bowl's vividly imagined origins inspire another bold story; a third ends with a forlorn, supplicating young woman exposing her breast from under a market table, a scene first seen in "Red Dust." The oddness inherent to the fiction and the fact combines into an afterword on Tibet's uncertain future, and that of Ma Jian and his homeland from which, for such candor, he has had to flee.