Where Are You Running To?

I stumbled upon the anthology Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers at a library book sale a few months ago.  This chance encounter has proven to be a positive one because it's a fabulous book that has helped remind me of the importance of exploring international as well as domestic fiction.

I haven't finished the anthology yet, but I want to write a little about the first story, Where Are You Running To? by Ma Jian.  Ma Jian is a Chinese author whose work has been banned in China and who now lives in London.  He has had several novels published in English.

Where Are You Running To? is a melancholy story in which running serves as a metaphor for searching.  All of the characters in the book are running -- searching for themselves, their pasts and their futures, and the truth.

The protagonist is Zhao Chunyu, a chairwoman of the neighborhood committee who was sent to a labor camp with her husband when she was young and "rehabilitated" in 1981.  These character traits are so casually a part of the story that it forces the reader from outside China to acknowledge the differences in their own personal and cultural history and that of China and many Chinese people.  This is not a story that could be set in another place.  It is definitively Chinese, and the characters in it have experiences that may be mirrored elsewhere but are specifically Chinese.

Chunyu's daughter, Xin, suffered from bone cancer and died because in their poverty, they could not afford expensive medical treatment, and no one would help them.  This, despite the slogan painted on the hospital's cafeteria wall: Cure the Sick and Heal the Wounded; Practice Revolutionary Humanism.

Chunyu's son is running away from her, and she is chasing after him.  She is trying to turn him into the star pianist that Xin was, but he does not enjoy playing the piano, nor is he as good at it.

Most of the story recalls memories of Xin's last days, when the family pushed her around in a cart and begged for money.  They were criticized for "creating such a commotion," and are told by the police that the paper they are using to tell Xin's story is the size of a poster, and it is forbidden that members of the public write things on a sheet of paper that size.

Again and again, the presence of this family is tolerated -- first by the hospital and then by a luxury hotel -- but then they are pushed aside by those who have money and power.  There is a sense that these are average people and that others do not want to be bothered by problems and sadness.  People want to pretend that everything is okay, and so they ignore and push aside this family and their sad story.

Late in the story, Chunyu is mistaken for a prostitute when she tries to hide behind a tall man during the chase of her son, and "she feels so humiliated, she wishes she could bury herself beneath the ground."  Yet again, she suffers a disgrace and affront to her sense of self, yet she keeps going because she has no other choice.

In the end, it is Chunyu who is taken away by running, and her son begins to chase her: "A sense of freedom that she's never experienced before courses through her body.  At least she feels that she has caught up with herself."  The world becomes clearer to her as she runs faster and faster, and "she wants to catch up with her past."

There is a sense, in the end, that the world was more ordered, understandable, and empathetic in the past, before the changes that sent them to the labor camps and turned the country on its head.  Chunyu seems to be flying away to a future she wished for when she was a child, not the life she ended up having, and her son finishes the story by trying to figure out where it is she is racing to.  A child of this new world, he would not understand her dreams of the future any more than she could understand his.