Ma Jian (writer)
| Ma Jian | |
|---|---|
| Born |
18 August 1953 Qingdao, Shandong, East China |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | Chinese |
| Genre | Memoir, novel, short story |
| Notable works |
Red Dust: A Path Through China Beijing Coma |
| Notable awards |
Thomas Cook Travel Book Award 2002 |
| Ma Jian | |||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 馬建 | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | 马建 | ||||||||
|
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| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Mǎ Jiàn |
| Wade–Giles | Ma Chien |
Ma Jian (born 18 August 1953) is a Chinese writer.
Ma was born in Qingdao, Shandong Province of east China, on 18 August 1953. As a child, he was the pupil of a painter who had been persecuted as a Rightist. After his school education was cut short by the Cultural Revolution, he studied by himself, copying out a Chinese dictionary word by word. At fifteen, he joined a propaganda arts troupe, and was later assigned a job as a watchmender's apprentice. For a few years he worked in a petrochemical plant near Beijing, then in 1979, moved to the capital and became a photojournalist for a magazine published by the All China Federation of Trade Unions. During this time, he joined the 'underground' No Name art group, the Yuanmingyuan poetry group, and the April photographers' group. He held clandestine exhibitions of his paintings in his one-room shack in Nanxiao Lane, which became a meeting point for dissident artists and writers of Beijing.
In 1983, his paintings were denounced during the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign, and he was placed in detention. After his release, he resigned from his job and set off on a three-year journey through China, selling his paintings and stories as he went. When he returned to Beijing in 1986, he wrote Stick Out Your Tongue, a novella inspired by his travels through Tibet. Its publication in the official journal People's Literature in February 1987 coincided with a nationwide crackdown on the arts, and the government publicly denounced the work as an example of Bourgeois liberalism. All copies of the journal were confiscated and destroyed, and a blanket ban was placed on the future publications of Ma Jian's books.
Fortunately, just before this event, Ma Jian had moved to Hong Kong. He wrote Bardo, a novel about two doomed lovers who are reincarnated through Chinese history, and The Nine Crossroads, about a group of sent-down youth who are sent to a remote mountain inhabited by a primitive tribe.
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