My Jian

My Jian (马建) is a writer, poet, photographer, painter and Chinese novelist born with Qingdao the August 18th 1953. It begins its career as journalist with the service of the Propagande of the Chinese trade unions until 1983.

In 1986, it leaves Beijing for HongKong because its satirical works are very little appreciated Chinese government. In 1997 it leaves China for Germany then as from 1999 it is established in London where it always lives. According to Gao Xingjian, Nobel Prize of literature, My Jian is “one of the most courageous and important voices of the current Chinese literature”.

the collection the beggar of Shigatze is held with the Tibet. My Jian does not idealize the culture Tibetan in this cruel news and sometimes shocking, it evokes there in particular the inceste. The book is interdict in China, officially because of its vulgarity and the image which it gives of the people Tibetan.

In Chinese Noodles , novel whose action is at Beijing in the years 1990, My Jian tells the dialog between a writer with the pay of the Party and a professional blood donor who dine together. Their friendship is however improbable, the writer has only one dream: to enter the Large Dictionary of the Chinese Authors, whereas the other grows rich thanks to its work: to help the Chinese companies to provide their quotas of blood. During a dinner, the writer informs his friend of the last ordering of the party: to tell the history of an ordinary soldier sacrificing his life to the revolutionary cause, but it hardly wants to write it because it thinks of very an other delivers which would speak about people that it crosses the every day, and of which the life seems much more representative to him of China than it knows.

the action of Chemins of red dust occurs to the beginning of the year 1980, when My Jian fled the risks of imprisonments related to the fight campaign against “spiritual pollution” (i.e. against “the middle-class liberalization” of Deng Xiao Ping). My Jian tells its own 3 years odyssey through the Tibet, the deserts or the southern parts of the China, country intolerant in its eyes where the authority is " repressive and hypocrite". During this long tour in cart, in the bus, and often with foot, with only one backpack, it continues an interior search, related to its relation with the Bouddhisme. He writes a poem in the town of Golmud. Account of an Chinese become foreign with his own country, of a picturesque and rich voyage of culture, the book also makes it possible to plunge in deep China, to discover its populations and its minorities.

Works

1987 : the beggar of Shigatze , news (亮出你的舌苔或空空荡荡, in French: Actes Sud 1993)
1990: Chinese Noodles (拉面者, in French: Flammarion 2005)
Bitch of life! French (: Actes Sud 1993)
1999: Ways of red dust (红尘, in French Editions of Paddle 2005, ISBN 2-87678-978-7)

External bonds

the interview of My Jian by new Obs at the time of the exit of its book: Chinese Noodles .
Article of the Swiss newspaper Time on Chinese Noodles .
Article in English of Washington Post on the beggar of Shigatze .
Site proposing some Chinese texts of My Jian

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