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China's new female writers captivate world
By Antoaneta Bezlova
January 16, 2003
Beijing - Two utterly different female voices of China have come to fascinate
worldwide publishers in recent months, giving rise to yet another round of
enchantment with the exoticism of China's multiple faces.
One - a barely mature voice of a 14-year-old girl from the wind-swept arid
plains of China's northwest, confesses the pains of growing and learning as a
woman belonging to an ethnic minority on the forgotten fringes of the country.
Ma Yan's Diary is the intimate journal of a young girl who wants to study but
whose family is too poor to help her escape the uniform destiny of many peasant
women - dropping out from school and getting married very early.
The diary was not conceived as a work to be published. But since its discovery
by a French journalist in Zhangjiashu village in Ningxia a year ago, it has
become the hot property of many publishing houses in Europe and Japan.
Another trendy voice - a confident and yet naive narrative of an 18-year-old
girl from Beijing - reveals volumes about solitude as an intense but groundless
young urban generation of China emerges, with contempt for study and hunger for
passion being the main characteristics of many.
Beijing Wawa ("Beijing Doll") is what skeptics may say is the Beijing rendition
of Shanghai Baby - the banned best-seller of steamy sex and decadent urban life
penned by Chinese female writer Wei Hui in 1999.
Yet what Beijing Wawa author Chun Shu writes is less self-conscious and strikes
a greater note of sincerity with its young readers. Her pen name - Chun Shu,
meaning Spring Tree - is not ostentatious and denotes just the writer's young
age.
Both Ma Yan's and Chun Shu's books are autobiographical. Chun Shu's narrative
lays claim to representing the voice of her generation - the urban type of
girls with no privileges or background born in the China of late 1980s,
fascinated with underground rock music and "punk spirit", searching for lasting
love and warmth in a circle of alienation and ephemeral pleasures.
Ma Yan's journal is personal but sheds light into the daily life of thousands
of girls from the Muslim Hui minority in Ningxia - one of China's poorest
western provinces.
Thousands of kilometers away from the booming coastal cities in the east and
forgotten by the market forces that nowadays rule this once egalitarian
country, these girls have to leave school and toil in the fields to support
their families before being made to marry at the age of 15 in exchange for a
dowry.
Ma Yan's diary landed in the hands of Pierre Haski, a correspondent for
France's newspaper Liberation, who was the first foreigner many of the
villagers in Zhangjiashu ever saw. Ma Yan's mother, Ma Juhua, shoved three
little notebooks with handwriting into Pierre's hands when he was passing
through the village during a trip in 2001.
"The expression on her face was such as if her life depended on this," says
Pierre, "and I could not refuse to take them although at the time I did not
know what it was."
A month later, Haski returned to give the family 1,000 yuan (US$120) - enough
to enable them to cover middle-school fees for two years. " When Ma's mother
saw me," he recalls, "she knew that her message in a bottle thrown in the big
sea had reached a shore. She cried."
What unites and separates both books are their protagonists' strong feelings
about academia. They could not be more different.
"I want to study," screams Ma Yan, when her mother tells her that there is no
money in the family for her to continue with schooling in the next term.
"If I come home, what would happen to my two brothers?" asks Ma Yan. "Your
brothers would continue at school," answers her mother. "But why boys can study
and girls cannot?" Ma Yan doesn't give up. "You are too young to understand.
When you grow up, you will learn why," comes the answer.
"I want to study, mother," writes the girl in her diary. "I don't want to
return home. It would be wonderful if I could stay at school forever."
With equal determination, Chun Shu declares in her novel that "she hates
schools". "I did not make it into the senior middle school," she continues,
"but even if I had what difference would it make? I would not be happier or
luckier."
Chun Shu is nothing but unaware of the provocative tone of her writing in
country that is obsessed with higher education after a whole generation lost
its chance for schooling in the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution
(1966-76).
But Chun Shu belongs to a generation of youth reaching their twenties with no
memory of hardship and political ravages. And she seems to give a little
thought to what preoccupied Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby - a search for personality
and moral grounding in a country of shifting values.
Chun Shu is absorbed in her own pursuit of pleasures and she is not ashamed of
laying bare the course of her days full of sex, rock music and gatherings of
"punk" friends. Still, despite the apparent lack of soul-searching in her book,
Chun Shu's writing appealed better to readers here because it seems less
self-conscious of the shortcuts to writer's fame than the deliberate writing in
Shanghai Baby.
"I think she is much more substantive and sincere than Wei Hui, author of
Shanghai Baby," remarks a Chinese reader about Chun Shu in an Internet
chatroom.
After appearing in China in May 2002, Beijing Wawa has quickly captured the
attention of foreign publishing houses in Britain and Germany that are bidding
for publishing rights. The hype surrounding the book has led some book lovers
here to speculate that it will not be long before the Chinese arbiters of taste
ban the book.
But while Beijing Wawa has had a chance to debut on the Chinese literary scene,
Ma Yan's Diary has premiered only abroad.
When Pierre Haski's article about Ma Yan appeared in France, the drama of the
young girl revealed in the simple records of her daily life caught the eye of
the publishers at the Editions Ramsay.
The diary - translated into French and with a foreword by Haski - appeared in
October. Publishing rights have already been sold to publishing houses
throughout Europe and also in Japan, and numbers of sales have quickly risen.
In China, however, the book remains a somewhat embarrassing testimony to the
failure of the Communist Party to fend for China's impoverished minorities.
"All this difficult life and described by the hand of a child - I doubt the
book will get published any time soon," muses one Chinese literature professor.
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