As dawn approaches, the writer’s thoughts come to a sudden halt, like a generator that has run out of fuel. All the images that have raced through his head disappear into a vague mist. He has experienced these moments of calm before, when his mind temporarily disconnects from reality. But the calm he feels now seems different somehow. When he closes his eyes, the characters who have lived inside him so long seem like a lump of dough being pulled by invisible hands into a thousand white threads. He sees the threads pulled tighter and tighter, until suddenly they break into a million pieces and scatter into the night sky.
‘I knew it would end like this,’ the writer mutters to himself. ‘Everything fades and dies. There’s nothing I can do about it …’
The blood donor stares at the writer’s shadow slanting on the wall behind. Now that the lights in the buildings outside have gone out, the lamps in the room seem brighter. The blood donor walks to the cassette player and turns the volume down. The writer rises to his feet, and ambles towards the toilet like a sleepwalker. As he listens to his urine splash into the bowl, he catches the smell of fish-head soup again. This time, the smell isn’t wafting from his neighbour’s kitchen, it’s coming from inside his own body. Slowly he returns to his chair. Now that the alcohol has left their organs and evaporated through their orifices and pores, the two men look as dry as shrivelled oat flakes or lumps of burnt charcoal.
‘My greatest achievement has been my ability to produce unending streams of AB blood,’ the donor croaks, pulling his vest up and pointing to his heart. ‘My blood has changed the course of my life. It has given it meaning.’
The writer’s voice is now as soft as the Requiem Mass playing on the cassette player. Through the floating melody of the aria, the blood donor hears his friend say, ‘Those people’s lives were doomed from the start. Whatever ending I choose to give their stories won’t change anything. I was just an onlooker, like that three-legged dog, hiding in the margins. You’re the only one who’ll ever hear these stories, but I’m the only one who can understand them. Only I know the pain that lies behind them.’
‘My spirit may be weak, but my flesh is strong. That’s why I fit into this town so well. But you will always be an outsider, lost in your illusions,’ the blood donor says, in a condescending tone he has rarely used these past seven years.
‘But those characters are real, they live in the same town as you and me. I may not know them very well, and they probably know even less about me. But I’m sure they exist. Or perhaps I’ve been dead for years, and those characters are just scraps of manuscript paper floating in some distant sewer.’ The writer prods his skull. Then his eyes light up for a moment and he adds, ‘I guarantee that my unwritten novel will have far more lasting value than any published book.’
‘I too have many stories to tell,’ the blood donor says. ‘They’re trapped inside me like water in a kettle. Maybe it’s time I tried pouring them out …’
The writer stands up, rests his hands on his hips and says, ‘My blood is worth nothing compared to that novel of mine.’ Then he glances around the room and starts sniffmg the air again. ‘That fish-head soup must have been excellent,’ he mumbles. ‘I can smell it even now …’
The blood donor’s cigarette is still alight. He now seems as deep in thought as a professional writer. He appears to be eager to set to work on some intellectual task. ‘When we’ve no energy left to fight against this brutal world, we turn inwards and start harming ourselves,’ he says, taking a last puff from his cigarette. He flings the stub to the ground, crushes it under the sole of his shoe, then walks next door to the writer’s study, sits down on the chair and stares at the blank page on the desk.
In the last few minutes before dawn, the writer darts about his room like a maimed, wingless ladybird. Then, without saying a word, he opens his front door, shuts it quietly behind him, and disappears down the dark stairwell.
International Praise for The Noodle Maker
“The Noodle Maker is beautifully translated from the Chinese …. These are surrealistic and often bawdy, with a frankness that veers from clinical to crude.”
— The Independent (U.K.)
“Clever and humorous … Constructed with a good deal of artfulness … Fans of the absurdity and dark humor of Milan Kundera’s portraits of life behind the Iron Curtain will appreciate these same elements in Ma Jian’s work.”
— The Baltimore Sun
“Succinct and right on target … Blistering satire.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“In Red Dust, Ma Jian gave us a dazzling portrait of life for a dissident in China. The Noodle Maker is an even greater accomplishment. Playful and wonderfully dark, it confirms Jian as a Chinese Kundera or Mrozek or Gogol. The funniest book I’ve read in a long time.”
— Philip Marsden, author of The Bronski House
“A brilliant and disturbing novel, portraying cruel, heartless deeds and a frustrated and angry people stamped down by rigid state control. In lesser hands this would all be too much, but Jian is a born storyteller, spinning tales with an almost fablelike quality. It is a most compelling read — a book I shall not forget in a hurry.”
— Publishing News (London)
“These stories reflect the changing repressive conditions of modern China …. Two friends tell each other absurd stories in which a strange cast of characters negotiate the narrow space between party rules and criminal ‘bourgeois liberalism.”
— The Boston Globe
“Mordantly satirical fiction to capture the grim paradoxes of late-twentieth-century China … Ma Jian mixes in sections of the writer’s fragmented yet utterly involving novel …. Echoing Gogol and offering an urban variation on the themes of Nobel Prize-winner Gao Xingjian, Ma Jian presents a bleak yet compelling vision of an aberrant society in which people are caught in the grip of a capricious and treacherous power and starved for kindness, beauty, and reason.”
— Booklist
“These stories, by turns surreal, disturbing, and humorous, form an eloquent portrait of that peculiar generation confused at having been nursemaided by the Cultural Revolution and then wrong footed by Deng Xiaoping’s reformist Open Door Policy.”
— The Times (London)
“Here, black comedy meets eviscerating social commentary …. Jian blends fact and fantasy with such beauty that China appears as potent a land for fiction as it is implausible for free speech.”
— V Magazine
“Entry into a different world … Humorous. Like Nikolai Gogol, Ma Jian illustrates his society’s problems by satirizing them …. The chance to hear a voice like this is a reason to love books.”