The Noodle Maker: A Novel

by Ma Jian

‘My thoughts seem to arrive in unconnected paragraphs. They never connect. They set up home in my mind and pour their hearts out. They couldn’t care less about me, but I depend on them for my livelihood.

The youngest fatality was a one-year-old baby who had fallen from the top of a building. She was a sweet little corpse, and only needed a third of the usual electricity requirement.

Wow.

Besides, if life became too easy, the skills she had developed over the years would be of no use to her any longer, and there would be nothing left for her to do but die.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE THIS CHARMING LADY TAKE HER OWN LIFE, HURRY UP AND BUY A TICKET!

We grew up in a spiritual vacuum, cut off from the rest of the world. A wasted generation. 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.

‘Sex is a good thing. It turns love into an action.’

In a book that’s completely devoid of love…

For a moment, the professional writer feels like a plastic bag caught in the high wind. It occurs to him that although the plastic bag is worthless, it is able to rise above the mundane world and change directions. When the wind blows against it, it fills with air and glides through space – things the earth-bound can never do.

Drifting through the wind, wanting to start again…

You convince yourself that his search of your body is a search for love. But love cannot be groped or fondled …

‘Only through suffering can man gain wisdom. People who have never suffered are incapable of growing up. Happiness is a wooden cabin one finds after a long and difficult journey; people who take the easy path never get to see it. The unhappiness I’ve suffered in the past has been other people’s unhappiness. It has left no mark on me.’

‘But whom shall I love?’ he asked himself.

The other day, I borrowed a guitar from an old classmate, and played a mournful tune on the spot beside the kennel where I used to sit and chat with the dog. I thrummed the strings and the tinkling melody drifted into the air. I thrummed again, but this time the strings produced no sound. In the evening, the head of the museum’s security department came up and told me not to play my guitar on the terrace again. He said the State Security Department had confiscated the noise from my instrument, and from now on I’d have to content myself with listening to the radio. He took the guitar from me, but to my great relief, didn’t ask me to write a self-criticism letter.

When Premier Zhou Enlai announced that smoking was patriotic, I smoked ten cigarettes in one day, although in the afternoon I felt so ill I had to be carried to the sickbay. That show of patriotism was almost sufficient to secure my Party membership. But unfortunately, I never succeeded in acquiring an addiction to tobacco.

Just before she died, her eyes were full of kindness and goodwill. I wondered whether she was hoping I would rush to her rescue. ‘Then why didn’t you try?’ the survivor asked. ‘I did jump to my feet at one point. But I had skived off a political meeting at work that day, and if news had got out that I wasn’t ill at all, but had come to watch the performance, I would have got into terrible trouble. She knew very well that the higher organs were in the process of considering my application to join the Party.’ ‘You should be held responsible for her death.’ ‘No, my only responsibility is towards the Party,’ I said, refusing to give in to him.

‘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.’

‘When we’ve no energy left to fight against this brutal world, we turn inwards and start harming ourselves,’