Description

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When Stick Out Your Tongue was published in Chinese in 1997, a blanket ban was placed on Ma Jian's future work. With its publication in English, readers get a rare glimpse of Tibet through Chinese eyes. In this profound work of fiction, a Chinese writer whose marriage has fallen apart travels to Tibet. As he wanders through the countryside, he witnesses the sky burial of a Tibetan woman who died during childbirth, shares a tent with a nomad who is walking to a sacred mountain to seek forgiveness for sleeping with his daughter, and hears the story of a young female lama who died during a Buddhist initiation rite. In stories both enchanting and horrifying, beautiful and macabre, seductive and perverse, Stick Out Your Tongue offers a startlingly vivid portrait of Tibet.

About the Author

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Ma Jian was born in Qingdao, China, in 1953. He worked as a watch-mender’s apprentice, a painter of propaganda boards, and a photojournalist. At the age of thirty, he left his job and traveled for three years across China. In 1987 he completed Stick Out Your Tongue, which prompted the Chinese government to ban his future work. Ma Jian left Beijing for Hong Kong in 1987 as a dissident, but he continued to travel to China, and he supported the pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square in 1989. After the handover of Hong Kong he moved to Germany and then London, where he now lives.

Praise For…

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“Extraordinary . . . Ma Jian has burned through the fog of fantasy that clouds our vision of Tibet: He has shown us how poverty and political repression have deformed its once rich and vibrant culture.” —Francine Prose, People

“These powerful pages . . . are hard to shake from one's memory and remain . . . testimony to the storytelling artistry of Ma Jian.” —The Washington Post

“The people Ma Jian transfigures, the images of a Tibet where the living and the dead seem to mingle with beauty and unease, all this becomes quite a striking souvenir of our own high altitude pilgrimage through these exotic pages.” —NPR's All Things Considered