Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Ma Jian was born in Qingdao, China, in 1953. He worked as a watch-mender’s apprentice, a painter of propaganda boards, and a photojournalist. At the age of thirty, he left his job and traveled for three years across China. In 1987 he completed Stick Out Your Tongue, which prompted the Chinese government to ban his future work.
He left Beijing for Hong Kong in 1987 as a dissident, but he continued to travel to China, and he supported the pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square in 1989. After the handover of Hong Kong he moved to Germany and then London, where he now lives with his partner and
translator, Flora Drew. He's free to travel to China, but his books are banned
or censored, and he's forbidden from publishing or making public statements.
Note: In traditional Chinese fashion, Ma Jian places his family name (Ma) first and his given name (Jian) last.
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Ma Jian on Beijing Coma
In April 1989, I left Hong Kong, where I'd been living in self-imposed exile
for two years, and caught a train back home to Beijing. Photographs of crowds
marching through the dusty streets of the capital had been plastered across the
world's newspapers. Chinese students had launched a movement for freedom and
democracy. I wanted to be part of it. At last, it seemed as though Communist
China was changing.
For six weeks, I joined the students on their marches, crashed out in their
cramped dormitories, shared their makeshift tents during their occupation of
Tiananmen Square. I watched them stage a mass hunger strike, dance to Simon and
Garfunkel, fall in love, engage in futile power struggles. I was ten years older
than most of them. Their passion and idealism impressed but also worried me.
Denied knowledge of their own history, they didn't know that in China political
protests always end in a bloodbath.
When the government quelled the protests with the Tiananmen Massacre on June
4th, I was 1000 kms away, in the coastal town where I was born. My brother had
run into a washing line while attempting to cross a road, smashed his head on a
concrete pavement and fallen into a...
Jung Chang was born in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. She was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen and then worked as a peasant, a "barefoot doctor," a steelworker, and an electrician before becoming an ... (more)
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Beijing Coma
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Barbara Demick has been interviewing North Koreans about their lives since 2001, when she moved to Seoul for the Los Angeles Times. Her reporting on North Korea won the Overseas Press Club award for human rights reporting, ... (more)
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Beijing Coma
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