Qin

The day before I met Ma Jian, at a Sichuanese restaurant in London’s Soho, he had flown in from his native China. The day after, I flew in the other direction, to Shanghai. He speaks no English, I speak no Chinese and we spent barely 24 hours in the same city. Yet, in that time, we crammed in two-and-a-half hours of riveting conversation over a chilli-drenched lunch.

Ma, 55, is best known as the author of Beijing Coma, an extraordinary novel published this year, which is set against the backdrop of the Tiananmen Square massacre. His books, harshly critical of China’s one-party state, are banned at home, obliging him to ply his trade abroad. The title of his latest work, already acclaimed as the novel of the 1989 massacre, refers literally to the physical state of the protagonist, a former student protester trapped in a coma after being shot by soldiers storming the square. Metaphorically, the comatose state is Ma’s judgment on the Chinese people who – dulled by fear and lulled by growing prosperity – have stopped questioning authority and wiped the past clean.

Ma, who has lived in London since 1999, arrives at Bar Shu in Frith Street with his partner Flora Drew, the mother of his two children. A fluent Chinese speaker, she has translated several of his books and has agreed to interpret. The restaurant is decorated with red lanterns and empty birdcages – a lilting Chinese soundtrack provides the birdsong – and the wooden tables are set with modern white dishes offset by black lacquered chopsticks.

Dressed in a grey tweed jacket and collarless shirt, Ma has a clipped beard and looks a little sullen. His patter to the waitress also suggests cantankerousness, though I sense humour and goodwill beneath it. “Last time I came here, your cold dishes were inedible,” he is saying. Surveying the menu, he adds: “We’ll have the ear fungus. Whatever you do, you can’t mess that up.”

Drew, who is the charming foil to his grumpiness, is giving a running commentary. “He’s ordered too much.” As he selects a seventh item, waving away her protestations, she says: “OK, he’s going for one more dish than I would advise.” Ma sends the waitress off with a passing shot: “Make sure you get the cook to make it extra tasty.”

I order a Tsingtao beer and am surprised to learn he doesn’t drink alcohol, hardly in keeping with the bad-man image he has retained from a hedonistic phase in the late 1970s. Later on, he says of that period: “At that time, anything foreign, any piece of news a foreign journalist might pass on, or a pair of foreign sunglasses, or a translation of an American poem, had almost Biblical importance. There was such a thirst for other ways of living.”

Book extract
‘Red Dust: a Path Through China’ by Ma Jian
I turn up for another day at work under the crowd’s watchful gaze. As I step into my office the secretary walks in and says, “Ma Jian, Deputy Qian would like a talk with you.”

I enter the conference room and am joined shortly by Chairman Liu, the office supervisor, and Deputy Qian, the section head. As we sit down, Director Zhang walks in holding copies of Workers of China and Chinese Trade Unions: Questions and Answers. When I see where he sits, I know it is serious. The last time he sat there he accused me of being “dangerously irresponsible”. I had photographed Yangzi Bridge in Nanjing and failed to notice a patch of flaking paint in the foreground.

Now he says, “Young Ma, we have called you here today for a very important reason. Deputy Qian always keeps a keen eye on our work, as you know. The propaganda we produce for foreign countries has a great impact on the image of Chinese socialism abroad ... ” I notice Deputy Qian’s eyes darting impatiently, so I say, “What is the problem, Director Zhang?”

Deputy Qian coughs loudly. He always gives the impression of being in imminent need of resuscitation. He clears his throat and says, “Today we have called you in to discuss your work. It is probably my fault for not noticing before ... Let’s ask Director Zhang to talk us through this matter, shall we?”

“There are some problems, and Deputy Qian brought them to my attention some time ago, problems concerning Young Ma’s way of thinking. In the past, I always thought we could differentiate between the lax way he conducts himself in his leisure time, and his behaviour at work. But now it seems it is not as simple as that, really not as simple as that.”

“Just tell me which aspect of my work you are not happy with.” I stare at Director Zhang’s whitening face.

“You have some artistic talent, otherwise the authorities would not have transferred you to the capital. But you must separate your personal creative work from your political duties to party propaganda.”

“Director Zhang, let Young Ma work out the problem for himself,” says Deputy Qian.

Mock-ups of the magazines and book covers I’ve designed are spread over the wide table. I have to lean over to see them. The chairman points to the sample cover for Chinese Trade Unions: Questions and Answers.

“Why have you put a question mark on the front cover?”

“It seems to fit the title of the book. These lines are sound waves entering the ear. What is wrong with that?”

“You put a huge question mark on the cover and then say there’s nothing wrong! We all know what you’re trying to do. You are trying to imply that socialism doesn’t know where it’s going!”

‘Red Dust’ (2001) is published by Vintage
Ma spent several weeks in China this summer during the Olympics. What sort of reception does a famous dissident writer get from the authorities, I wonder, surprised he is allowed back at all.

“When I went through immigration my name came up on the computer and I was questioned for two or three hours,” he says. Books and documents were confiscated. When he arrived at his apartment, the phone rang. It was the police.

“On the surface, everything seemed relaxed and open. There was this veneer. They were in plain clothes and very cordial,” he says of a subsequent meeting. “But it was clear I was being constantly monitored. It’s a cat-and-mouse game.”

Water spinach in a hot chilli sauce arrives with some slippery, but delicious, black fungus, followed by a cold dish of pork roll with garlic. The chef, informed of Ma’s putdown, has sent the latter out on the house. “This is possibly the most authentic Sichuanese restaurant in London,” Ma says, his criticisms forgotten as he spoons the deep-green spinach on to our plates. The dish, as the others prove to be, is excellent, with a controlled fiery quality that contrasts with much of the bland Chinese fare on offer in London.

I say that, in some authoritarian countries, Ma might have been locked up. What does the lighter touch in allowing him to come and go signify? “Now they are riding on the back of the tiger and the tiger is the people,” he says of the Communist party. “And if they fall off the tiger’s back, they will be eaten.”

For the moment, I say, the tiger appears to be pretty satiated, fed on a diet of improving living standards and growing national pride. “Belief and support for the party has become automatic and unquestioning. It’s a reflex,” he says. “I don’t believe there is any genuine sympathy for their tenets – it’s just that the party has become the state.”

The waitress brings another plate. “This is fish-flavoured aubergine, the poor man’s fish,” he explains. “When people are poor, they find ways of making things taste like fish. Magic.” As we savour the (remarkably authentic) fake fish, with its reminder of the poverty China is gradually escaping, he continues: “In many ways, people’s lives have improved and this can have a numbing effect. And these mass rally-type events, like the Olympics, can induce a trance-like euphoria.”

Even the heroic students of Beijing Coma are depicted as naive and lacking clear goals: “While they were in the square singing and dancing with the joy of freedom, they didn’t realise that they were encircled by armed troops getting closer,” he says. “They were idealists, they wanted freedom and change. But because of this lack of political education, they were driven into a dead end.”

Severance from history is China’s tragedy, he says. “This instinctive fear of the past has created a volatile, fragile country that is very unpredictable. That’s why the Communist party has dragged out old philosophies – Daoism, Confucianism, capitalism – these past religions they said they had obliterated. And, of course, the largest weapon: nationalism. They hope these ideologies are somehow enough to keep this fragile structure together. But there is at the heart of it a deep schizophrenia.”

The mood brightens with the arrival of a huge bowl that takes up half the table. A Sichuanese standard, raw slices of sea bass plunged into hot oil bobbing with dozens of red chillies. Not as hot as it looks (although it still packs quite a wallop), it fills the mouth with competing flavours and we are soon dipping our chopsticks into the bowl for more. I ask for another beer and remember my surprise that Ma is a teetotaller.

“I am reformed since I came to England,” he says, using the Maoist term gaizao. Drew interjects: “He used to smoke one cigarette in the evening and I acknowledge that’s my influence, stopping that.” After a few minutes of banter, she turns to me and says: “OK. Here we go. It’s a mass denunciation. You’ve opened a can of worms here.”

Ma’s lack of English reminds me of a Chilean friend. An official in the government of Salvador Allende, tortured and exiled after the Pinochet coup, he has never embraced the English language. My theory is that, if he learnt English fluently, he would have acknowledged the finality of his exile.

I wonder whether Ma is going through something similar. “Not speaking the language is not a conscious rejection,” he says. “I have tried. It’s just a mental block. I am like a beggar who can eat every day. I can survive. But my thoughts are elsewhere. I have to live within my memories, within my private universe, and continually return to China, the land where my thoughts are locked. This is a very painful kind of existence, this feeling of nowhereness.”

He senses many of London’s qualities but can’t engage, he says, holding up his cup for more hot tea. “I am very aware of this rich diversity, this great atmosphere that I can absorb in London and, most importantly, this glorification of individuality and the idea that everyone walks around with their individual universe. But if you exile a writer, however free the country he is sent to, there will always be a sense of internal constraint. This is why I am in limbo.”

Is he in a London coma, I suggest. I don’t want to push the parallel too far but, a bit like the protagonist of Beijing Coma, one consequence of being trapped is that his mind can wander. “I absolutely agree with you. Psychologically, there is a big price to pay. But for my writing, being cut off linguistically does force me to take the same journey into my self and my past and into an appreciation for language that the protagonist of my book takes,” he says. “This has been the most fertile state of being for an author, because I too have been in an enlightened coma, an enlightened trance.”

I have to go soon. We have been talking, and feasting, for more than two hours, and by now we are slurping noodles. I ask what his childhood was like. “In the Olympics, when the little girl got up and sang ‘Ode to the Motherland’, it took me back,” he recalls. “I too was a member of an art troop, which went around performing that song. ‘Follow the Communist party. Follow Chairman Mao. We will exterminate all our enemies.’ At that time, I felt this sense of blind joy. I witnessed my classmates beat up our teacher. I myself took part in removing books from the library and burning them.”

Many of his countrymen accuse him of living in the past. “People like me want to encourage a re-evaluation of where China is going. But my contemporaries say, ‘You have spent too long abroad. Why are you worrying about these things? China is the centre of the world. Foreigners come with begging bowls in hand. This is the future. Stop harping on about the past’.”

He cannot accept their reasoning. “They don’t understand that history contains pain but also a sense of oneself. Without this connection to the past there is no genuine inner contentment.” With Beijing Coma, he says: “I wanted to commemorate a beautiful moment in Chinese history when, for a few months, the country came alive and people became reconnected with themselves.”

I ask if he supported the protesters, vilified in China, who tried to sabotage the Olympic torch relay. He says: “It was a march of revenge that had nothing to do with the true Olympic spirit. China had triumphed and washed off 100 years of humiliation at the hands of the west.”

Becoming angrier, he continues: “Those smiles of welcome filled me with disgust. On the face of it, China has won the Olympics. But it is not China that has won, but the Communist party. The Chinese people have lost.”

David Pilling is the FT’s Asia editor

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Bar Shu
28 Frith Street, Soho

1 x pork roll with garlic
1 x boiled sea bass with chilli
1 x aubergine with fish fragrance
1 x dan noodles
1 x water spinach with chilli
1 x wood ear fungus
1 x smacked cucumber
2 x boiled white rice
2 x Tsingtao beer
3 x Chinese tea

Total £86.10