The Noodle Maker: A Novel

Paper color tuned to a little yellow.

If you are interested in the Chinese thought patterns engendered by generations of slavish followers of Mao then this is for you.Having lived two years in Beijing, this book rings true of the common persons life and thinking. Not all the Party would like to hear but human.Don't dwell too much on the reality but in the images painted.

Ma Jian, Noodle Maker. 1991. New York: FSG, 2004. The English translation of this wonderful book only came out 13 years after it was published (wisely) in Hong Kong. Its structure is a tapestry of interconnected fables ("noodles") emanating from the mind of an impoverished writer, the noodle maker. Between stories the reader is treated to hilarious colloquies between the noodle maker and his permanent weekly guest, a professional blood donor. The tales are wild and original, and reach quite deeply. They include a benign version of Animal Farm, The Lady and the Tiger, and a generous helping of anti-Communist commentary aimed at the stupid bureaucracy and forced rote memorization of patriotic songs with ridiculous lyrics, such as "Our beloved Party, you have been like a mother to me," played over loudspeakers in an attempt to break up a mob engaging in gang rape outside West Friendship Park. "Chairman Mao's Brilliance Lights Up the World" was also played. Five very large stars.

It never jumped off the page and engaged me fully.

This is one of the funniest books I have ever read -- and it should be of particular interest to any one who has spent time in the new China. I believe the author is still in England.

This book was published in Hong Kong in 1991 and translated into English in 2004 by the author's partner, Flora Drew. It took place in an unnamed provincial town somewhere in coastal China during the period of economic liberalization. It comprised seven stories framed by a conversation between two friends, a poor writer and a wealthy but shady blood donor. These two characters stood in for two paths open in the new China: the life of the mind or the drive for material pleasure. The quest for truth or the race to get ahead, guided by the profit motive. Except for the writer, everyone was following the second path. Most of the stories were imagined by the writer, one was recounted to him by someone else.The tales showed people behaving badly in the new era, like beasts in human form. For most of the book, it seemed that author Ma Jian's satire and despair were focused on people's drive to better themselves, which he showed was done in the worst way. In crudely economic terms, with no concern for others or for consequences. In a society where sincerity, compassion and respect for life had disappeared. For the men, the main drive besides money was sex. The woman sought love, but were often deceived.The satire came together in ways that were sometimes blackly hilarious, sometimes heart-breaking. For example, in scenes involving a funeral director who robbed the dead without a thought and tossed their ashes. Who also cremated his living mother, while she shouted out a reminder about bills to be paid. A philanderer who tried to bribe his pregnant girlfriend to get an abortion, and a father who kept trying to abandon his mentally handicapped daughter. A woman who killed herself as part of a floorshow, which was accepted by all because the concept was thought to be imported from abroad. Toward the end of the novel, a talking canine was brought in, apparently to contrast the horrific humans unfavorably with dogs.The satire came together also in descriptions of places that symbolized the bleak, rudderless new society. For example, the crematorium, converted from an art school kiln. An Open Door Club for liberals centered on a basketball court, with markets where everything was for sale. A beauty contest where women paraded their bodies, but were also quizzed on the content of memos from a Communist Party conference. Or a writer's office that had been turned into a black market, using powerful family connections. All of this contrasted with an abandoned factory from the old days, with a crumbling wall bearing a faded slogan, "We march forward, fired by our common revolutionary goal." Most of the stories at some point mentioned Lei Feng, a selfless model citizen from Maoist times, to whom everyone paid lip service but no one emulated.In the first few chapters, this satire was powerful and enjoyable. In the later chapters, for this reader, the book started running out of ideas and things began to slow and repeat. Stories tailed off with weak endings, as in a piece on a woman bullied for having large breasts.For all its humor, the author's satire could be called heavy-handed and suffocating at times, as if he couldn't stand to see a source of hope anywhere. As in the anthology by multiple Chinese authors, Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused (1995), the reader gets the impression that the nation is doomed.Another issue was the time sense. References to the open door policy of Deng Xiaoping and the start of economic growth appeared to locate the novel in the 1980s. Except in the last chapter, which attempted, it seemed, to set things in the early 1990s. This jarred. The book was published after Tiananmen, but it'd be hard to know this from the content, except possibly in the last chapter. That crisis wasn't referred to directly, except maybe toward the end. Otherwise, all the scorn was directed toward people's behavior after economic liberalization, not the state's 1989 crackdown on dissent.By the novel's end, the question left with this reader was where the author put the blame for what he targeted: liberalization, state oppression, or something deeper in the nation's culture.Readers who liked this book might also enjoy another novel written around the same time, Please Don't Call Me Human (1989), by Wang Shuo. It covered similar themes with similar dark humor, but was focused on one person and used language in even more compelling ways.***Excerpts from The Noodle Maker:"Perhaps other animals are equally indifferent to the suffering of their own kind, but I doubt any of them could find as many ways to inflict pain as men have. It seems to me that man is the lowest beast of the lot.""When the country started to open up, we were the first to fall. Foreign culture is the only religion now, but we have no means to understand it, or appreciate its worth. Half a century has gone by, and suddenly we find ourselves in the forest of modern life without a map or a compass. How can a society numbed by dictatorship ever find its way in the modern world? We are unable to think things through for ourselves, we have no reference points, we feel lost and out of our depth. We put on a show of superficial arrogance to hide our low self-esteem.""We have to conceal our true natures if we want to survive.""If everyone were like you . . . this country would be ruined."

Sardonic... insightful... hilarious... satirical... curious... elliptical... Gogolesque... playful... surreal... bitingly sarcastic... cosmic... bizarre... magical... Kafkaesque... touching... disturbing... profound... hugely entertaining.How many ways can a marvelous work of fiction be praised? Ma Jian's THE NOODLE MAKER deserves all these accolades, and more. This is a dead-on depiction of life's vagaries and absurdities in the earliest years of Communist China, yet it transcends both time and place to describe the human condition.Set just after Deng Xiaoping's pronunciation of the Open Door Policy to modernize and open China to Western ideas and business, THE NOODLE MAKER tells the story of two friends, a professional writer named Sheng and a professional blood donor nicknamed Vlazerim. Sheng has been charged by his Writer's Association to pen a short novel about a modern-day Lei Feng, an actual Red Army soldier who died in his country's service and was effectively canonized by Mao for his supposed good deeds while alive. Not only can Sheng not think of anyone to write about, he can only think of stories drawn from his own acquaintances, people whose actions illustrate the most unconventional responses to Deng's vision of a "new China."Most of the book consists of stories Sheng would have written had he been granted the artistic freedom. He begins with undoubtedly his best piece, the story of a young man who buys a used kiln from an art school and turns it into an upscale crematorium, complete with corpse pick-up service and a wide range of legal and illicit music for the deceased to swoon to as he or she enters the furnace. The young man and his mother become wealthy from his business, enough so that the mother decides her time has come to move on to the next life. Other stories deal with a failed actress who arranges her own, very public suicide in the jaws of a tiger, a middle-aged editor who embarks on a series of love trysts until he encounters a textile worker who won't let go, a writer of love (and rejection) letters who comes to realize that he himself can love someone, a woman whose large breasts ruin her life and career, and a painter who lives with a philosophical talking dog.Ma Jian tells each story with panache and a wonderful sense of comic timing. His characters are absurd and their actions grotesque, yet they lovably empathetic, each in his or her own peculiar way. The characters' lives and stories are cleverly interconnected, so that as the novel unfolds, we begin to see a community, not just a random collection of individuals. At the same time, each story offers sharply satirical and wonderfully funny commentary on life in a socialist state bent on control of every detail of peoples' lives. The result is a society so full of rules, all rules are meaningless.Some readers will be reminded by this book of DEAD SOULS, or perhaps Kafka's THE TRIAL or THE CASTLE. For me, THE NOODLE MAKER was most reminiscent of Italo Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER, a collection of short tales exchanged between Marco Polo and Genghis Khan. This is a wonderful short novel, one of the best I've read in recent years. Sadly, it may well pass largely unnoticed by the public, lacking the advertising and name recognition of far less deserving works by Grisham, Clancy, or King. That such should be the case is undoubtedly another one of life's ironies that Ma Jian's characters would have duly noted with a sigh.

A remarkable voice, brings a unique insight into the humanity and inhumanity of the cultural revolution. Readers familiar with Chinese culture will especially benefit from their existing understanding of the Chinese character, and the interwoven personal stories paint a vivid picture just slightly removed from reality yet deeply grounded in the human experience. Thoroughly recommend it.

Very good reading a bit dark in places,but that's ma Jians style I've read all his books now ,exellent if you are realy interested in china thanks I would recomend this book.

Enjoying reading this book, have several more of Ma Jian’s books to read too.

As soon as I read Ma Jian's Red Dust it soon became my favourite book about China. I have loved his other works too, a brilliant writer, harsh existence he inhabits.

Such a funny book about the times after the Cultural Revolution