Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers: An Anthology - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ALANE SALIERNO MASON is a senior editor at W. W. Norton & Company. She lives in New York City.

DEDI FELMAN is a writer, editor, and story developer at Book Doctor West. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

SAMANTHA SCHNEE is the former senior editor of Zoetrope: All-Story. She lives in Houston, Texas.

All three are editors at WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS (WWB), the online magazine for international literature (www.wordswithoutborders.org). A partner of PEN American Center, WWB is hosted by Columbia University and Bard College and funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

MA JIAN

A sign painted on the wall of the hospital cafeteria reads: PRACTICE

REVOLUTIONARY HUMANISM. But the hospital won't care for those who can't pay for care; it leaves them begging at its gates. The crowds gawk, but don't intervene. Parents of those in need of help are helpless. What's left?

Ma Jian is impossible to classify. He writes politically, but he isn't a political writer. He employs surrealism without being a surrealist. Is he a comic nihilist? A tragic comedian? Ferocious? Generous? All and none, he explodes any title you might try to apply to him.

Except, perhaps, for "revolutionary humanist."

This story about a hospital is a hospital. A good, humane hospital, a revolutionary hospital that doesn't look like anything that came before it. But its characters aren't its patients. Its readers are.

Where are you running to? Characters in this story are running to different places--some to their pasts, some to their futures. Some are running to ideas of themselves, some to ideas that don't include people.

Readers are always running toward the same place when they open a book. We're trying to get to a greater understanding of ourselves. Books have no burden to entertain. Television and film and music are entertaining enough. Books don't need to be political or surreal or comic or tragic. They need to help us understand ourselves. Everything else a book does is incidental to that.

Writers are all running, too. They're running to meet their readers.

--JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER



WHERE ARE YOU RUNNING TO?

"Where are you running to?" shouts Zhao Chunyu, chairwoman of the local neighborhood committee, as she stands in the entrance to the staff accommodation block.

She's wearing cotton trousers and a tracksuit top that's faded to the color of old bricks. Her freshly washed hair, which was cut by her husband, Old Liu, and that's just been washed, is fluffing out in all directions, making her round face look even larger and her narrow eyes even smaller. At the moment, however, these small eyes are popping with rage; her arms are tightly folded across her chest, and a smell of raw celery is escaping from her mouth. A few minutes ago, she was chopping up vegetables for dinner. Old Liu walked in and, without washing his hands, broke off a stick of celery to have with his beer. Chunyu popped a piece into her mouth as well, and as they munched away, their son, Kai, leaped from his stool and rushed out of the door. Chunyu moved the bowl of celery onto the piano, out of Old Liu's reach, then followed her son downstairs.

"Where are you running to?" she shouts again.

"I don't want to play 'Pleading Child.' I hate slow pieces!"

"Well you can play 'Perfectly Contented' instead!"

"No, I won't play anything by Schumann! I refuse!"

"All right then. Tonight you can practice Chopin's Revolutionary Etude for a couple of hours. It's very fast, and it has that passage you like so much where the left hand plays in octaves."

"No, I won't play it! I won't!" Kai is shouting so loudly everyone in the block can hear. One wouldn't expect a ten-year-old child to be capable of producing such a noise.

"Come back here!" As Chunyu jumps down the two concrete steps below the entrance, Kai grabs on to a small willow tree that's just been planted, swings around in a half circle, then shoots off like a bullet down a small alleyway.

Chunyu hesitates for a while. Above her, she can hear her neighbor Old Jia saying to Old Zun, who lives on the third floor, "If Kai doesn't get into music school this time, he's had it. Next year he'll be too old."

"He's always playing the same pieces," Old Zun replies. "I know them by heart." Then he shouts down to Chunyu, "Your piano's sounding terrible these days! You should pay someone to come and tune it."

Chunyu ignores the men's remarks. She and her husband spent every last yuan they owned to buy that piano. Chunyu hasn't always been so poor--she was born into a wealthy family. When the Communists liberated China in 1949, she cut herself off from her parents and took active steps to join the party. As a result, she was able to secure a place at Beijing's Central Academy of Music. Unfortunately, just before she was due to graduate, an officer discovered an old photograph she'd been hiding that showed her playing the piano to a group of her parents' bourgeois friends. She was consequently labeled a rightist, and as Old Liu, who was her boyfriend at the time, refused to denounce her, they were both sent to a labor camp in the remote northwest where they remained for twenty-four years.

Chunyu scrapes back her hair and runs down the alleyway in pursuit of her son, shouting, "Come back, you little beast!"

In the light of the setting sun, she sees Kai swooping down the alley like a cockerel in flight. She steps up her speed. Since she isn't wearing socks, her feet grip well to her rubber-soled shoes. She feels as though she has the wind under her feet.

When she was eighteen, after a year of running more than ten kilometers a day from her Beijing lodgings to the Academy of Music and back, she became champion of the academy's annual long-distance race. Although she's now fifty-three years old, her legs are still strong. Last month she managed to chase after and catch a thief who'd stolen a tape recorder while wandering around her block pretending to deliver leaflets on a new brand of lipstick.

"Come back. If you don't stop, I'll kill you!"

Her son is wearing his school uniform: a white cotton suit with blue piping along the seams. His red necktie is as bright as a cockscomb. He pumps his arms as he runs. Chunyu is convinced that as long as she maintains her speed, she'll be able to catch him in less than twenty seconds. But she soon realizes that she can't match his pace, just as a duck can never match the pace of a chicken. She suspects that she's put on weight again. She's been concerned about her weight for the last ten years, ever since she and Old Liu were rehabilitated in 1981, and released from the labor camp. As soon as had she returned home, and arranged for a family portrait to be taken in a photographer's studio to celebrate the event, than her body started to balloon. As an adolescent, Chunyu was one of the prettiest girls in the town. Whenever she walked down the street, men would stop and gawk. But when she returned from the camp, her face looked so old that no one recognized her.

The little rascal who's running in front of her now was just three months old when the family portrait was taken. Chunyu was just forty-three, and still had a lot of life left to devote to the party and to herself. Within a few months, Old Liu's party membership was reinstated and he was assigned a post in the political office of a coal processing plant. Chunyu was appointed cultural officer of the Municipal Music Association, a post she held for nine years, until last year when she was promoted to chairwoman of the local neighborhood committee.

Back in 1981, her daughter, Xin, who was twelve years old, was preparing to take the entrance exam to the local music school. Chunyu had the key to the Music Association's piano room. During the day, she used the piano for teaching purposes, and let Xin practice on it in the evening. Chunyu bought all the sheet music that her daughter needed, and charged it to the Music Association. The family was now well provided for, and had a goal to work toward. Everything seemed to be going well. In 1983, Chunyu and Old Liu received eight thousand yuan in compensation for the years they spent in the labor camp. After Liu paid the 260-yuan party membership fee, they had just enough left...