Stick out your tongue

I had never heard of Ma Jian until I read his story, “The Woman and the Blue Sky,” in the Paris Review in 2005. As soon as I finishedit, I ordered the book it came from, Stick Out Your Tongue.But, for some reason, I didn’t get around to reading it until now.

Stick Out Your Tongue is a slim volume of five spare stories about Tibet. Originally published in Chinese in 1987, state censors denounced the collection as “a vulgar, obscene bookthat defames the image of our Tibetan compatriots.” They ac...