Free Stick Out Your Tongue by Ma Jian Page B

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