From: Ma Jian - Five Books.Com Interview
Do you write principally for a Chinese or English audience?
The main reader I write for is still Chinese. I’m constantly thinking how my books could be published in China [where they are mostly banned], even if they were censored or changed. Red Dust and The Noodle Maker were both published in China, but under a different name and heavily censored.
I write all of my books in Chinese, and they are then translated into English. I think that if a foreigner reads a Chinese novel, he or she can gain an entirely new experience of life from his or her own. To understand a different culture is like to understand a different language – you gain a lot of new wisdom.
What advantage is there to writing about China from the outside?
It’s precisely because I have left China that I understand China better. I see more facets of China, and have better information about it. I don’t know if writers inside China can climb the great firewall [of internet censorship], for instance – and their information influences the way in which they think. In China, your understanding of history and of the wider world is very different. So I think I understand China better from England, because I see more than one side to the story and know how unfree it is.
