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|summary=Caught up against China's one -child policy Meili and her husband teacher Kong decide to go on the run rather than lose their second offspring. A damning indictment not only of China's human rights abuses, but also of the West's blind eye to how we're exploiting their willing labour and helping them poison their country. It's also a complicated tale of ordinary people with loves, ambitions, traditions, virtues and sins.
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One of my many lovable traits, according to my beloved, is my ability to absolutely insist I haven't read a book before (when he catches me reading it again). This has the huge benefit of my getting to discover it all over again – and the massive downside that I will never get to the end of my reading list, which must exist in some kind of Möbius loop.
The reason I mention this, is because I chose ''The Dark Road'' by dint of experiencing the exact opposite. I would have sworn blind that I had read and enjoyed the previous offering ''Red Dust''. It was only when I went to check what I'd said about that one prior to writing up this later offering, that I find no evidence in any of the usual quarters that I've done any such thing.
I can only guess that the reviews were good! And go make good on the lapse.
China.
China worries me. I desperately want to go and see it for myself and have a very long list of reasons not to do so. I condemn their human rights record, but am part of the system that facilitates everything they do. It's interesting that we intervene in nation -states where there is objection to the current regime, but no real ground roots desire to replace it with actual democracy, yet in China , there is that desire, people die for it, and we stand back.
So ''China'' worries me. The concept of it and its place in the world and its concept of itself and our attitude to it, at both state and personal level, all unsettle me. They do so, not least, because I have nowhere to start constructing answers. It is, as the ultimate cop-out says, ''complicated''.
So begins a life on the run. Largely on the River.
For the next nine years , we follow a couple trying to make a life for themselves in a modern China that won't allow them the simple freedom of being who they are. While we in the west fought long and hard to have the right to choose NOT to have children, the opposite battle is still going on in China. For some women, at least.
The apparent complexity of the argument is neatly encapsulated in Meili. The debate about whether to have more children or not, about whose choice it is, about the pressures that force us to make the choices we make. What always gets lost in these debates is that the argument is about 'the right to choose'.
China's population growth causes concerns in the West (rightly or wrongly) and on the basis of world population growth, I'd be prepared to admit that reducing it would be no bad thing… but giving women options – education, equal business rights, property rights, choice over methods of contraception that work for them, the right to be protected from male pressure and tradition to have children they don't actually want, access to healthcare, economic independence all of the things I take for granted, might go some long way to slowing that growth without draconian policies.
Or are these policies genuinely aimed at reducing population growth. ? Much of what Meili experiences through her subsequent pregnancies and encounters with authority, and her life with her husband, who proves not to be all she had thought, while they spend a decade evading the law, much of it suggests that the policies , or at least the implementation of them, is actually aimed at levying as much revenue as possible. It's never clear whether these funds go into the public purse, or into the pockets of the public officials. Which actually doesn't matter, it's heinous either way.
If this is sounding like something of an anti-China polemic, that's my fault, not Ma Jian's. ''The Dark Road'' is a simple tale of a peasant family's wanderings. You can't dissociate it from the politics, because the harsher happenings are a direct result of those and let's face it Ma Jian is a political person – look him up – he intends this to be a political work. But it isn't anti-China. It's more of plea to look at the bits that really aren't working.
At the same time , it is also a book that makes you care about the characters. For me: I wanted Meili to succeed. I wanted Kong to have a change of heart, after his darkest deeds. I wanted Nannan to learn to be less selfish. I wanted a happy ending. I even wanted some of the passing characters to return to the stage and become part of that.
It is a book that showcases some of the best of what I (in my western ignorance) perceive as the Chinese character. Can there even be such a thing, given the size of the country? Who knows. But the adaptability of the family to their life on the river, and then again on the riverbank; their make-do-and-mend-or-make-new creativity with found objects; their ability to 'create' a family of the people they wash up against to replace those they've had to abandon; their eons aeons-old traditions rooted in wisdom (albeit not always acceptable in detail); their stoicism and their ambition: all of these shine through.
And it's a book that showcases the worst in action. Anything you have ever read about state control and abuse of power in any civilisation at any time, it is all here.
Which led to the second: an overwhelming questioning of ''How real is this? How true is this? Is this really happening?''
Ma Jian was born in Qindao Qingdao in 1953. His books have been permanently banned in China. He currently lives in London with Flora Drew (who deserves much credit for what feels like an empathetic translation) and their four children, but in researching this novel, he ''travelled through the backwaters of central and southern China. Posing as an official reporter, he visited family planning offices and hospitals where forced abortions and sterilisations are carried out. He later adopted the guise of an itinerant worker and lived among fugitives of the One -Child Policy who scrape a living on the Yangtze River and the vast waste sites of Guangdong.''
The credentials seem genuine. We know we're shipping our defunct or unfashionable electronics to China and India to be dismantled by hand by people risking their health and barely scraping a living doing it. It seems in a broad sense very 'true'.
Even so, I urge you to read this book. And to think about what we're all doing to this planet and to each other and to ourselves.
It might be a story bookstorybook. Or it might just be a call to – not arms, maybe – but certainly action.
So the final question I'm left with is: what do I do now?
For a gentler take on modern China try [[Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-sour Memoir of Eating in China by Fuchsia Dunlop]] or for the political backdrop you could start with [[The Death of Mao: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Birth of the New China by James Palmer]]. You will also find a great deal of interest in [[Buy Me The Sky by Xinran]].
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