An Appetizing Absurd

...Others pursue philosophical coherence, only to find themselves psychotic and suicidal, lost in a world where Mao's dictates are of decreasing relevance and the visible hand of the state has slipped into the drawing room for rapprochement with imperialism...

...The book was written in 1990 in Hong Kong, where Ma had fled in 1986 after his first novel was banned for "spiritual pollution...

...The two sides uncomfortably coexist, and both, Ma asserts, merit mockery...

...In the book's final scene, the professional writer considers them: "When he closes his eyes, the characters who have lived inside him so long seem like a lump of dough being pulled by invisible hands into a thousand white threads...

...The blood donor's sociological explanation of the actress' impulse concedes its legitimacy: "When we've no energy left to fight against this brutal world, we turn inwards and start harming ourselves...

...And his interlocutor hits the streets, apparently to make a buck: "In the last few minutes before dawn, the writer darts about his room like a maimed, wingless ladybird...

...Formidable as the brutality of the world is, her horns imply that the solipsism of the alienated is partially accountable for an untenable system's survival...

...In 1978, Deng announced a shift from the exclusive promotion of the Maoist agenda to a policy of opening Chinese markets to foreign trade and encouraging free enterprise...

...Now it's the older you are, the more reformist you are...

...She decides to undertake a performative suicide at a progressive social club, where she will be eaten by a tiger before a live audience...

...While the Party-sponsored writer starves in a government apartment, the professional blood donor has learned, after years in a re-education camp, how to make a fortune...

...I NDEED, the fates of most of Ma's characters, warped by their shared experience of political oppression, signal despair for the decrepit society's recovery...

...Farce really does occur in this world, and, sometimes, farce altogether without an element of probability," Nikolai Gogol wrote in "The Nose...

...Each story, imagined by the writer over the course of a meal shared with the blood donor, dramatizes the intrinsic hypocrisy of Chinese Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping's reformist Open Door Policy in a vortex of inversions and embellishments...

...Ma's disturbingly entertaining parodies owe their power to the same conflation...

...In the opening chapter of The Noodle Maker, the professional writer has been reprimanded by Party apparatchiks for representing senior members as reactionaries...

...Some sink into perverse and lucrative physicality, selling blood, burning corpses, relishing abusive infidelities...

...The author cautions that cosmetic liberalization in China has not made its institutions any more dependable...

...Purchasing a ceramics kiln from a local school, he uses it to create a private crematorium into which he is paid to pipe classical music and forbidden ballads while clients "swoon" into ashes...

...With the perfumed novelist, who is sanguine compared to those who opt to kill themselves rather than be debauched by the availability of nail lacquer, Ma ridicules the absolute greed that has emerged as the only viable alternative to the failed Communist project...

...Early in the 1980s, urged on by Party hardliners, Deng implemented a crackdown on what was perceived as cultural freedom run amok...

...The club manager's "affection for all things foreign," we are told, "had turned the hairs of his beard blond...

...Surprisingly, however, a satire so reliant on its archetypal characters—the writer, the painter, the candlestick maker—and their hopeless token destinies, ends with a hopeful reversal...

...The actress is eaten before a crowd of thousands, and Ma punishes their complicity by literally diminishing them: "Everyone squeezing out from the ticket booth emerged half their previous thickness...

...He outsmarts the command economy by selling his own blood and skimming from the earnings of willing recruits...

...progressed to wearing stilettos, smoking foreign cigarettes, discussing Hemingway, drinking beer, spraying perfume on her neck, and celebrating her birthdays with a cake and candles...

...Although she "tried to keep up with the changing times and relax her moral views...

...his small blue-black eyes were a harmonious fusion of East and West...

...The actress, for her part, grows horns as she is being eaten...

...Thus two decades of murderously restrictive Communist dogma were turned on their head...

...she slowly lost her grip on reality and retreated inside herself...

...Here a "professional writer" plies his occasional benefactor, a "professional blood donor," with seven internal narratives...

...In The Noodle Maker Ma similarly erases the boundaries of the plausible, abandoning his characters to a liminal zone...

...A female novelist has "bought herself a pair of shoes with kitten heels, and started wearing her hair loose...

...The Noodle Maker persistently suggests that the nascent open-market system may prove as damaging to China's torn social fabric as the one it is poised to replace...

...In a chapter entitled "The Possessor or the Possessed," Ma caricatures a convinced convert to Mammonism...

...The "winds brought in by the Open Door Policy" and the dissolution of revolutionary myths deeply disorient an actress who began her career at the "height of the Cultural Revolution...

...The loosening of economic restrictions in an attempt to bolster the country's failing economy, though, did little for freedom of expression...

...To a baffled citizenry wrought into philosophical uniformity by punitive socioeconomic experiments, Deng announced: "To get rich is glorious...

...After taking the last puff from his cigarette, the blood donor "flings the stub to the ground, crushes it under the sole of his shoe, then walks next door to the writer's study, sits down on the chair, and stares at the blank page on the desk...

...He sees the threads pulled tighter and tighter, until suddenly they break into a million pieces and scatter into the night sky...

...Reviewed by Tamar Adler Contributor, "Harper's," Bangkok "Post" Faced daily with the traumas of oppression, totalitarian societies often develop a sense that, as a character in Chinese dissident Ma lian's newly translated The Noodle Maker comments, "the Absurd is more real than life itself...

...If these two men—one stifled in his creative urges and compelled by the government to sublimate his talent into propaganda, the other physically enthralled by the almighty dollar—can trade places, Ma seems to say, maybe China can resolve its intractable realities after all...

...The book's most successful chapter echoes Salman Rushdie and Milan Kundera...

...The apparatchiks reply, "Well, this year it's changed, hasn't it...

...His point is that resemblance of the farcical to the probable in the society he satirized gave his work its resonance beyond the bounds of burlesque...

...Back and forth the satire swings, between those who reject the social contract entirely—for instance, a painter spends his evenings debating philosophy with a literate, three-legged dog—and those who frantically submit to the transforming world...

...Suicides never bring down regimes...

...Then, without saying a word, he opens his front door, shuts it quietly behind him, and disappears down the dark stairwell...

...He complains, "Last year the newspapers reported that the senior cadre were too conservative, and that the Party wanted them to loosen their reins...

...Materialists are not let off the hook either...

...The novel's other entrepreneur trades in equally unglamorous matter...

...To illustrate the alienation produced by the individual's struggle against state control, Franz Kafka devised monstrous farces populated by rational humans robbed of the ability to interpret them...