China’s new female writers captivate world.

www.asiatimes.com, Jan. 16, 2003

By Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING - Two utterly different female voices of China have come to fascinate worldwide publishers in recent months, giving rise to yet another round of enchantment with the exoticism of China’s multiple faces.
One - a barely mature voice of a 14-year-old girl from the wind-swept arid plains of China’s northwest, confesses the pains of growing and learning as a woman belonging to an ethnic minority on the forgotten fringes of the country.
Ma Yan’s Diary is the intimate journal of a young girl who wants to study but whose family is too poor to help her escape the uniform destiny of many peasant women - dropping out from school and getting married very early.
The diary was not conceived as a work to be published. But since its discovery by a French journalist in Zhangjiashu village in Ningxia a year ago, it has become the hot property of many publishing houses in Europe and Japan.
Another trendy voice - a confident and yet naive narrative of an 18-year-old girl from Beijing - reveals volumes about solitude as an intense but groundless young urban generation of China emerges, with contempt for study and hunger for passion being the main characteristics of many.
Beijing Wawa ("Beijing Doll") is what skeptics may say is the Beijing rendition of Shanghai Baby - the banned best-seller of steamy sex and decadent urban life penned by Chinese female writer Wei Hui in 1999.
Yet what Beijing Wawa author Chun Shu writes is less self-conscious and strikes a greater note of sincerity with its young readers. Her pen name - Chun Shu, meaning Spring Tree - is not ostentatious and denotes just the writer’s young age.
Both Ma Yan’s and Chun Shu’s books are autobiographical. Chun Shu’s narrative lays claim to representing the voice of her generation - the urban type of girls with no privileges or background born in the China of late 1980s, fascinated with underground rock music and "punk spirit", searching for lasting love and warmth in a circle of alienation and ephemeral pleasures.
Ma Yan’s journal is personal but sheds light into the daily life of thousands of girls from the Muslim Hui minority in Ningxia - one of China’s poorest western provinces.
Thousands of kilometers away from the booming coastal cities in the east and forgotten by the market forces that nowadays rule this once egalitarian country, these girls have to leave school and toil in the fields to support their families before being made to marry at the age of 15 in exchange for a dowry.
Ma Yan’s diary landed in the hands of Pierre Haski, a correspondent for France’s newspaper Liberation, who was the first foreigner many of the villagers in Zhangjiashu ever saw. Ma Yan’s mother, Ma Juhua, shoved three little notebooks with handwriting into Pierre’s hands when he was passing through the village during a trip in 2001.
"The expression on her face was such as if her life depended on this," says Pierre, "and I could not refuse to take them although at the time I did not know what it was."
A month later, Haski returned to give the family 1,000 yuan (US$120) - enough to enable them to cover middle-school fees for two years. " When Ma’s mother saw me," he recalls, "she knew that her message in a bottle thrown in the big sea had reached a shore. She cried."
What unites and separates both books are their protagonists’ strong feelings about academia. They could not be more different.
"I want to study," screams Ma Yan, when her mother tells her that there is no money in the family for her to continue with schooling in the next term.
"If I come home, what would happen to my two brothers ?" asks Ma Yan. "Your brothers would continue at school," answers her mother. "But why boys can study and girls cannot ?" Ma Yan doesn’t give up. "You are too young to understand. When you grow up, you will learn why," comes the answer.
"I want to study, mother," writes the girl in her diary. "I don’t want to return home. It would be wonderful if I could stay at school forever."
With equal determination, Chun Shu declares in her novel that "she hates schools". "I did not make it into the senior middle school," she continues, "but even if I had what difference would it make ? I would not be happier or luckier."
Chun Shu is nothing but unaware of the provocative tone of her writing in country that is obsessed with higher education after a whole generation lost its chance for schooling in the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76).
But Chun Shu belongs to a generation of youth reaching their twenties with no memory of hardship and political ravages. And she seems to give a little thought to what preoccupied Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby - a search for personality and moral grounding in a country of shifting values.
Chun Shu is absorbed in her own pursuit of pleasures and she is not ashamed of laying bare the course of her days full of sex, rock music and gatherings of "punk" friends. Still, despite the apparent lack of soul-searching in her book, Chun Shu’s writing appealed better to readers here because it seems less self-conscious of the shortcuts to writer’s fame than the deliberate writing in Shanghai Baby.
"I think she is much more substantive and sincere than Wei Hui, author of Shanghai Baby," remarks a Chinese reader about Chun Shu in an Internet chatroom.
After appearing in China in May 2002, Beijing Wawa has quickly captured the attention of foreign publishing houses in Britain and Germany that are bidding for publishing rights. The hype surrounding the book has led some book lovers here to speculate that it will not be long before the Chinese arbiters of taste ban the book.
But while Beijing Wawa has had a chance to debut on the Chinese literary scene, Ma Yan’s Diary has premiered only abroad.
When Pierre Haski’s article about Ma Yan appeared in France, the drama of the young girl revealed in the simple records of her daily life caught the eye of the publishers at the Editions Ramsay.
The diary - translated into French and with a foreword by Haski - appeared in October. Publishing rights have already been sold to publishing houses throughout Europe and also in Japan, and numbers of sales have quickly risen.
In China, however, the book remains a somewhat embarrassing testimony to the failure of the Communist Party to fend for China’s impoverished minorities. "All this difficult life and described by the hand of a child - I doubt the book will get published any time soon," muses one Chinese literature professor.

 

 

 

CHINA EDUCATION

(Commonground radio, USA, 23/03/2004)

« MCHUGH : A little known fact of life in China came to light when the diary of a 14-year-old peasant girl made it from a remote town in rural China made it to the bestseller lists in France. The book, which has now been published in 16 countries around the world, tells the story of a young girl who is desperate to stay in school, despite the problem of sky-high school fees, which her parents can’t afford. As Celia Hatton reports from Beijing, the book highlights a much larger problem in China, where rural schoolchildren cannot afford to complete even the most basic levels of education.
[The sound of people speaking Chinese in a busy room]
CELLIA HATTON : Excitement was in the air at a recent book launch in Beijing, as the long-awaited diaries of a 14-year-old girl were released in China. The diary of Ma Yan details the daily life of a schoolgirl from a remote, impoverished part of China who longs to stay in school, despite the fact that her school fees are crippling her parents.
[The sound of Ma Yan crying as she relates her story to the crowd at her book opening]
HATTON : At the launch, Ma Yan wept as she told the audience about a friend who was forced to leave school in the fifth grade and is now married with a baby. Often, parents are forced to choose which of their children will be allowed to continue studying, usually allowing boys to stay in school while girls are forced to marry into other families. Just before Ma Yan’s book fell into the hands of Pierre Haski, a French journalist traveling through her village, she had been told that she would not be allowed to continue with her education. Haski included excerpts of Ma Yan’s diary in the French newspaper Liberation and soon returned to the girl’s village to convince Ma Yan’s family to allow him to publish the entire diary in France.
Although Ma Yan’s story has a happy ending, she is just one of millions of children in rural China who must fight to remain in school, even in the first nine years of China’s supposedly compulsory education system. One Ministry of Education study last year found that five out of seven children in a region of China’s poor Anhui province had dropped out of school because their parents could not afford to pay tuition fees. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education, Katarina Tomasevski, was invited by the Chinese government to rate China’s compliance with its agreed international human rights obligations in education. She explained that the financial obstacles to basic education were her principle concern and criticized the Chinese government.
UNITED NATIONS SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR KATARINA TOMASEVSKI : The government of China is in a fairly comfortable position relying on the fact that most parents will do whatever they can to provide the best possible education for their children, which makes the life of the government very easy. It can mismanage budgetary allocations because parents will step in and provide as much as they can.
HATTON : Education funding was a casualty when China began to liberalize in the 1980s. As the economy began to open up, shrinking government budgets shifted the responsibility for education funding from the central to local governments. Bankrupt townships in rural areas eventually forced parents to cover most school expenses. French journalist Pierre Haski, who discovered Ma Yan’s diaries in rural Ningxia, says that in Ma Yan’s case, the tax-strapped government paid to build the school structure and now, only pays the meager salaries of the teachers who work there.
PIERRE HASKI : Everything else has to be provided by the parents. That means to pay for the electricity, to pay for the maintenance, to pay for the books, to pay for everything, they rely on the fees. And these fees are equal in that case to one year’s income of a villager.
HATTON : Katarina Tomasevski argued to the UN that the Chinese government needed to increase the allocation of funding from just over three percent of its gross domestic product to the internationally recommended minimum amount of six percent. Most developing countries are able to contribute four percent, Tomasevski says. In response to the UN report, the Chinese government issued its own statement highlighting strides that the education system has made in the past few years, including decreased illiteracy rates for women and higher enrollment rates for girls stretching from primary school to university. There are also signs, however, that the Chinese government is beginning to take note of the problem of rural school fees. In September, China’s Education Minister, Zhou Ji, promised to tackle the school fee problem by ensuring teacher’s salaries and eliminating random charges at primary and middle schools.
It will be difficult to improve education much, however, without committing more money. According to China’s state-run newspaper, The China Daily, China uses 1.4 percent of the world’s educational funds to support 22.9 percent of the world’s students. Back in Beijing, the success of Ma Yan’s book continues to grow. A charity, the Children of Ningxia, has been started in France to provide free education to all primary school children in Ma Yan’s village, and full scholarships to 50 middle school students in May Yan’s school, most of them girls. As more publishing houses around the world sign up to print Ma Yan’s book, the hope is that more children in rural China will be able to overcome the problem of sky-high school fees. For Common Ground, I’m Celia Hatton in Beijing.
MORT : For Common Ground, I’m Steve Mort at the United Nations in New York.
PORTER : That’s our show for this week. If you have questions or comments about today’s program, visit our Web site at commongroundradio.org or e-mail us at commonground@commongroundradio.org.
MCHUGH : Transcripts and information on how to order copies of this and other Common Ground programs are also available on our Web site : commongroundradio.org. I’m Kristin McHugh.
PORTER : And I’m Keith Porter. Cliff Brockman is our Associate Producer. Creative Director is Amy Bakke. Andy Burnette is our Webmasters. Jim Yoon is Senior Webmaster. Susan Roggendorf provides administrative assistance. B.J. Liederman created our theme music. Additional compositions by Wink Music.
ANNOUNCER : Common Ground is a Stanley Foundation production. The Stanley Foundation : promoting public understanding, constructive dialogue, and cooperative action on critical international issues. On the Web at stanleyfoundation.org.

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Giving voice to the voiceless.

China Daily, Beijing, Oct. 23, 2003.

By Jin Bo.

"Ma Yan’s Diary," in which 14-year-old Ma Yan expresses her strong desire for education, has fascinated international publishers and been described as "legendary" by the Chinese media.
Yet what is far more significant than simply changing the author’s life is that the ordinary girl from China’s impoverished Northwest is giving a voice to tens of thousands of children from the country’s underdeveloped rural regions.
’I want to study’
Ma Yan’s diaries, which were not intended for publication, accidentally found their way into bookstores.
In May 2001, several journalists from the French daily Liberation paid a visit to Zhangjiashu Village in Xihaigu in Northwest China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. It was the first time that many villagers saw foreigners.
The village is described in Edgar Snow’s "Red Star Over China," but since then, it has been visited by few outsiders.
Xihaigu, consisting of three counties - Xiji, Haiyuan and Guyuan - is one of the poorest areas in China.
Owing to the extremely poor natural conditions, it was described by the United Nations as a region unfit for human habitation.
While it takes less than two hours to travel thousands of kilometres from Beijing to Yinchuan, the capital city of Ningxia, an entire day is required to get from Yinchuan to Zhangjiashu, which are only seperated by a distance of several hundred kilometres.
When the journalists were about to leave, a local woman in her late 30s thrust three notebooks with handwriting and a letter into the hands of a photographer, who later gave the items to his colleague Pierre Haski.
Back in Beijing, the articles in the notebooks and the letter were translated into French. They turned out to be written by a 14-year-old girl named Ma Yan, the daughter of the woman who passed them to the photographer.
In the letter which the girl wrote to her mother, Ma complained angrily about having to leave school in the next term because her family could no longer afford her education.
Her family was too poor to help her escape the miserable and predictable destiny of many peasant women - dropping out from school and getting married at an early age.
"I want to study," Ma Yan writes in the letter.
Such a heartfelt plea was frequently found in the diaries.
"I want to study, mother," she writes. "I don’t want to return home. It would be wonderful if I could stay at school forever."
"If I had knowledge, I could choose the life I want. I do not want to live a life the same as that of my parents. It was too tough," Ma Yan later explained.
Deeply moved, Haski decided to interview Ma Yan. He returned one month later and gave the family 1,000 yuan (US$120) - enough to enable them to afford Ma’s middle-school fees for two years.
"When Ma’s mother saw me she cried, as she knew that her message in a bottle thrown into the sea had reached the shore," he recalled.
In January 2002 Pierre Haski published a feature about Ma Yan in the French newspaper Liberation, revealing the drama of the young girl revealed in the simple records of her daily life.
This article caught the eye of the publishers at Editions Ramsay, a French publishing company.
The book immediately became a best-seller. The girl’s strong desire for an education won the hearts of many French readers, who then offered their helping hands.
The publishing rights were soon sold in many other European countries and Japan. So far "Ma Yan’s Diary" has been published in five languages and many foreign readers have written letters to Ma Yan offering their support.
Ma Yan’s life has been greatly changed as a result, meaning that she will no longer need to worry about her tuition fees.
Now she is even starting to hope that she will be able to attend university, something which is normally considered almost impossible for girls from Zhangjiashu.
Ma Yan, now 16, earns monthly royalties of 500 yuan (US$60) from sales of the book, enough to pay for her education as well as improving her entire family’s standard of living.
Ma Yan’s parents have also purchased a donkey and a new TV set and redecorated their house with the money.
"It’s like a dream," says Ma Yan.
Her story has provoked a wave of solidarity from readers in several countries who formed an association to keep Ma Yan and other children like her in Ningxia in school.
Today, the Children of Ningxia Association, has more than 300 members.
Last month when the new semester began, the association funded the education of 60 children, mainly at Yuwang Middle School and Zhangjiashu Primary School.
The Chinese edition of the book was recently published in Beijing by the Huaxia Publishing House.
In order to retain its original feel, all of Ma Yan’s wrongly written characters remained unchanged.
The first print runs 100,000 copies, and the publisher optimistically estimated that it would also become a best-seller in China, with total sales of more than three times that.
The Chinese media have also shown a keen interest in Ma Yan. Her name frequently appears in the headlines and she is regularly a guest on national TV talk shows.
Lucky young woman
But Ma Yan’s story was by no means unique in China’s poverty-striken regions.
Ma Yan was only one of the most lucky among those children from poor families.
According to statistics released by the Ministry of Education, despite the fact that illiteracy rates among adults have been reduced to 8.72 per cent from 22.23 per cent 10 years ago, seven out of 100 Chinese are illiterate or over 85.07 million Chinese can only read and write a little.
The Ministry of Education has vowed to wipe out illiteracy among young people between 15 and 24 years old by the end of 2005.
That is a big challenge.
Although most rural parents have realized the importance of knowledge in changing their lives, many are reluctant to allocate their limited budgets to girls’ education, as the result of the traditional view that men are superior to women - an idea still widely advocated in many impoverished regions.
In Zhangjiashu, most girls used to withdraw from primary school at the third or fourth grade, although the country offers nine-year compulsory education.
Many girls had to leave school and toil in the fields to support their families before being made to marry at the age of 16, or earlier, in exchange for a dowry.
When Ma Yan’s mother told her that the family could not afford to send her to school, she asked her mother what would happen to her two brothers and was told that they would continue at school.
Ma Yan kept asking her mother "why boys can study and girls cannot."
The answer was perfunctory. "You are too young to understand. When you grow up, you will learn why," her mother said.
Nowadays many villagers in Zhangjiashu have changed their attitudes. The number of girls at primary school has increased.
Even Ma Yan’s mother has begun to learn how to write.
Now the former illiterate can write the entire sentence :
"Ke’ai de nu’er, nihaoma (How are you, my dear daughter) ?"