The Noodle Maker
(MA JIAN)
A professional blood donor, thriving on the rewards for his labors,
visits his friend the professional writer, who is unenthusiastically facing a
commission to write a short novel on the theme of Learning from Comrade
Lei Feng. They eat dinner and talk, and out come the stories the writer
would like to write.
These stories are both within the framing story and part of it, with the
writer and the blood donor making incidental appearances within them as well as
commenting on them. Ranging in length from eight pages to forty, they are dark,
visceral tales of love and obsession, of violence and death, presented with a
sardonic, unsparing humor. Mixing surreal and absurd elements with more
straightforward storytelling, ma Jian documents some of the less happy
interactions of the Open Door policy with communist bureaucracy and morality.
A funeral crematorium operator finds a way to bring together his love for
his work and his intense relationship with his mother. An abandoned actress commits
public suicide to try to reach her lover. A literary editor, dominated by his
more successful novelist wife, discovers strength in having affairs with
hopeful writers, until he is found out and his life comes apart. A street writer who specializes in love letters becomes
involved with one of the addressees. A girl has a promising career in the
Cultural Propaganda Department cut short by her insecurity about her big
breasts. A father''s attempts to abandon his disabled daughter become a symbol
of his love for her. And a talking ? and subversive ? dog witnesses a public
rape.
The Noodle Maker is an effective collection: it is only loosely
held together, but the stories work well juxtaposed. Ma Jian''s material and
presentation seem overdone in places, but he is never clumsy and the effect may
be intentional.
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