Book Review THE DARK ROAD by MA JIAN

The Dark Road by Ma Jian

Aristotle used ‘catharsis’ to mean cleaning ourselves of repressed emotions by experiencing unpleasant emotions – by experiencing pity and fear in a fictional tragedy we can get rid of our own fears.

The Dark Road by Ma Jian, translated from Chinese to English by his wife Flora Drew, is a socio-political novel, one of fear and pain.

The author, a photographer and painter, was one of the early members of the Wuming Group of dissident artists and poets of 1979, and in 1983, he was placed under detention for his art and poems. In 2008 and 2009, he travelled extensively in the interior of China before writing this book, which was published in early 2013.

The Dark Road is not a novel one reads for entertainment, and it’s not for the squeamish. Ma Jian uses the same familiar crisp style of writing he used in Stick Out Your Tongue, his collection of short stories about the Han Chinese occupation of Tibet. And in The Dark Road the author has done an excellent job of writing from the point of view of Meili, the book’s hero who is a country girl of great strength and hope.

The novel is a long dark road of unending misery that revolves around hardships caused by China’s one-child policy and its violent and atrocious punishments meted out to parents and parents-to-be and their families that break the law.

One keeps going until one reaches a cliff where one has to decide to jump or not, knowing there is no turning back. It is raw and distressing but generously spiced with humour.

Meili observes: “A Chinese sturgeon is part of a protected species and Chinese citizen is not protected.
If a Panda gets pregnant the entire national celebrates. But if a woman she gets pregnant she’s treated like a criminal.”

It is the story of Kongzi, his wife Meili and their three-year-old daughter Nannan. Kongzi, as the 76th-generation descendant of Confucius, has a desperate need to produce a son to carry on his line.

The family, fearing the wife will be forcibly sterilized or made to abort her foetus by toxic injection, leave their home and relatives. Escaping the tyrannical laws, they take to the backwaters, literally the toxic sludge of Yangtze tributaries, and live in leaky boats and on filthy mudflats. The schoolteacher husband and his wife eke out a living and manage to educate their daughter while moving from town to town, not staying anywhere too long to avoid being found by the family planning authorities.

Kongzi is ready to accept the fate of a second child born illegally. The child will have no residence permit, no school, no university, no citizenship and no job. In short, the child and later the adult will not exist.

Besides stressing the cultural problems of not having a son, Ma Jian skilfully deals with the various concerns of modern China: polluted waterways, toxic air and food. He brings to prominence corruption, kidnapping, prostitution and pornography – and China’s culture of pirating designer goods. And he touches on some of the side effects created by the Three Gorges Dam.

Reading this book is like travelling on a road parallel to your own. A road of horror, of grisly and graphic happenings with no chance of leaping back into your own sane and comfortable life. For me it was a compulsive read, a poignant, disagreeable one, but one that I wanted to experience.

There is a touch of magical realism, too. The spirit of Meili’s unborn child sometimes takes over the narration as an onlooker.

The Dark Road left me exhausted but thinking deeply about life, about fate, and how fortunate most of us are to live in free countries.