The Noodle Maker

The Noodle Maker (2004) is set during the early 90s, in a China supposedly transformed by Deng's reform politics; everything is for sale now, you can go to McDonald's, you can start your own business feeding, clothing or burying your fellow comrades, women are learning to wear western makeup and men to expect them to. Of course, deep down, not much has changed; communism falling in Albania and Romania and the Tiananmen square massacre pretty much go unreported in favour of renewed efforts by the Party to find new ways of maintaining control. As long as you can control what people read and watch, you control what they want to spend their newfound wealth on, and so you can sit back and let capitalism serve the greater goal.

The novel finds two friends sharing dinner: a writer, who never does anything but write what he's told, and a blood donor. That's his profession: he sells his own blood, is paid in cash, and spends his money on western goods and eastern women. The writer is complaining that he's been commissioned to write yet another book praising a revolutionary hero. You're the one who chose to be a writer, says his friend; what the hell did you expect? You can't change anything. And so the writer starts telling him what he wants to write but isn't allowed to. Cue a series of interwoven short stories about men and women he knows (or knows of, or just made up) and their attempts to find their way out of a situation where three seemingly opposing systems - old traditions, Maoist dogma and cutthroat capitalism - work beautifully together to keep everything as it was.

OK, it's not perfect; Ma is a little too fond of epithets (necessary in-story, of course, since the narrator can't name any names), and I'm honestly not sure if some of the views on women presented are supposed to be the characters', the narrator's, or Ma's. But what impresses me about The Noodle Maker isn't just how vivid the stories are, ranging from gallows humour (the way one character can't see a naked woman without praising Mao, for instance) to soul-hurtingly depressing, but also the way the narratives keep getting sneakily hijacked - by the narrator, by the propaganda that inevitably pops up everywhere whether it says "Praise the Party" or "Buy Coke". He does his best to subvert it, but he can never escape it; he can take control of the story as long as he doesn't say it out loud, but language itself has been politicized to the degree that writers can only write in slogans, and characters can only act by either serving something or heroically sacrificing themselves. Orwellian in the best and worst sense.