Free Stick Out Your Tongue by Ma Jian Page A

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
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    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 revelation 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