Quotes from Ma Jian

I am trying to persuade my family to spend more time in China. It's no fun to be in exile. I can't even figure out the basic 26 letters, let alone operate, in English. I often feel that although I've found the sky of freedom above my head, I've lost the soil I stand on. I need to be back in my motherland, where I can find inspirations.

'Three Kingdoms' gives you a panoply of different routes; everyone can find their own path. It shows that sometimes the route to fulfilment or success is not the obvious one. You must take twists and turns to achieve a goal.

After the Tiananmen Massacre, I felt compelled not only to continue writing but to actively resist the restrictions placed on freedom of speech. I set up the publishing company in Hong Kong, with offices in Shenzhen in mainland China, and managed to publish works of fiction, philosophy, and politics by unapproved authors.

In my 20s, when I was a photojournalist in Beijing. I joined an underground art group and put on clandestine exhibitions of my paintings.

While I was writing 'Stick Out Your Tongue' in Beijing, the police began knocking on my door again. As soon as I finished the book, I moved to Hong Kong so that I could work undisturbed on my next novel.

Only when you are aware of the uniqueness of everyone's individual body will you begin to have a sense of your own self-worth.

China is completely lacking in self-awareness and as someone who has stepped outside that society, I have a responsibility to write about it as I see it.

When the written and spoken word is censored, the urban landscape becomes a nation's only physical link to the past.

On the face of it, China has won the Olympics. But it is not China that has won, but the Communist party. The Chinese people have lost.

When history is erased, people's moral values are also erased.

When history is erased, people's moral values are also erased.

My hope is that the Chinese government will come to realise that it is futile to repress free speech, and that contrary to what they believe a regime's strength rests not its suppression of a plurality of opinions and ideas, but in its capacity and willingness to encourage them.

To become self-aware, people must be allowed to hear a plurality of opinions and then make up their own minds. They must be allowed to say, write and publish whatever they want. Freedom of expression is the most basic, but fundamental, right. Without it, human beings are reduced to automatons.

I meant that the Chinese people are not aware of their own entrapment. They believe they live in a free society, but don't realize how much they are being monitored and controlled, how much the information they receive is restricted and warped, until they step out of line, that is, and feel the heavy hand of the state fall on them.

When people have no sense of self, relationships are just temporary distractions from the inner emptiness and fall apart at the first obstacle. My

It's easy to be kind when you are poor. I've met a lot of kind people in my travels, but the cost of their kindness is exclusion from the outside world. As soon as a road is built, the kindness vanishes.

The law is powerless against a crowd.

Never rely on a husband for your happiness. The government persecute men, then men persecute their wives in return. And what do the wives do? If they have a child, they slap it to let off steam. If not, they drown themselves or swallow bottles of pesticide.

If they see a woman they suspect of being illegally pregnant, they pounce on her and drag her to a clinic for an abortion. They are paid fifty yuan for each woman they bring in.

When our parents are alive, they stand in front of us, blocking our view of death. But once they've gone, we find ourselves at the cliff edge.

If you're unlucky enough to have been born with a cunt, you'll be monitored wherever you go. Men control our vaginas; the state controls our wombs. You can try to lock up your body, but the government still owns the key. That's just women's fate.

You have to inhale a lot of those chemicals before they can take effect. They're called dioxins, apparently. The family planning officers there are very relaxed, because they know that however hard a man tries, he's unlikely to get his wife pregnant. What a wonderful place it sounds!

Meili pitchers herself in Heaven Township again, sitting in a safe and peaceful yard, knitting quietly while inhaling deep breaths of the chemicals that prevent women conceiving. She doesn't know how long it will take to travel from the fertile mountains of Nuwa to the sterile fields of Heaven Township, but at least she now has a sense of where happiness lies.

This baby will never get a residence permit. It will be one of those 'Black Children' who are born without permission and banned from getting free schooling and medical treatment. When it grows up, it won't even be able to marry and it'll curse us for condemning it to a life s an outcast.