Stick Out Your Tongue: Stories Review

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Stick Out Your Tongue: Stories ReviewMa Jian's "Stick Out Your Tongue" is a collection of short stories that center around a couple central themes; the harshness of life in rural Tibet, and often times "non-traditional" sexual practices. I doubt the stories in the book are meant to be at all expository, or shed much real knowledge about what life is like for real Tibetans, but it does provide a picture of Tibet that is very alive, and very hostile. I'm still not certain what the original intent of the work was. In some ways it merely seems to offer another stereotype of Tibetan society (an anti-romanticized one), and in other ways it seems simply like an attempt to bring the reader into a world that is just surreal, with Tibet being presented simply as a vehicle for that vision.
The Afterword confused me as well. In it, Ma Jian briefly outlines the controversy surrounding the work, and also comments on his sadness in regard to the plight of Tibetans as outsiders in their own homeland. The last commentary is the most confusing, since it seems to suggest that this is somehow tied into the work. In actuality it is quite absent. There are no politics in this work, unless you draw the conclusion that the darker side that you witness in the book is there due to Chinese influence. This is a loose connection however, since there are no cues that point in that direction. Only the narrator is Han Chinese, and is mostly a peripheral character. The stories themselves center wholly on Tibetans engaging in relationships with other Tibetans.
I think some other reviewers had it spot-on when they said these stories do more to humanize Tibetans than anything else. The idea that a monk would have to hire a guard to keep lusty monks away from his wife, or that a Tibetan would beat his cheating wife and steal the monestery's gold won't find much place in most Western visions of Tibet. Those are typically the actions of Chinese intruders, with Tibetans almost always playing the role of passive, saintly protagonist.Stick Out Your Tongue: Stories Overview

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