As the recipient of a charmed life, my dreams generally bring me glad tidings (normal stuff like a time lapse of cinnamon rolls baking or a dog pushing a stroller filled with kittens, etc.). Like most folk, I have the occasional nightmare (again, typical dream content: dogs and cats aggressively defending their territory from each other or an endless void suffused with the howls of the damned, etc). Add it up, and I’m enthusiastically pro-dream, but I can understand why one wouldn’t be if their slumber was consistently corrupted by visions of atrocities in which they participated. What I cannot understand, and what I will not abide, is the desire to replace everyone’s dreams with propaganda designed to advance the agenda of the state. This is one of many ways in which I am at odds with the protagonist of “China Dream” by Ma Jian (translated by Flora Drew).
Ma Daode has earned his terrible dreams by spending portions of his youth killing people while they tried to kill him, denouncing his parents as traitors (shortly before they killed themselves), and abandoning his home for the spoils of corrupt power before eventually participating in its destruction. As the head of China Dream Bureau, he is leading the effort to insert a chip into people’s brains that will regulate their dreams. His attic is overflowing with bribes, and his phones are constantly chiming with messages from an array of mistresses. One understands why he might find himself pelted with trash now and again.
After being suspended from his job for buffoonery, aiming to erase his past, he seeks out a notable guru type and obtains the recipe for what sounds like a truly disgusting beverage. This drink, famous for being what’s imbibed shortly before reincarnation so that one doesn’t bring too much of their past into the future, has ingredients such as ginger that’s been sucked by a corpse and a wolf heart. He drinks this foul concoction, and tries to sell others on it’s benefits. They are not convinced, and food is thrown at him. The book ends with a satisfying crescendo before an afterword that elaborates on the author’s anger at the Chinese government.
Ma Jian lives in exile, and his books are banned in China, but good satire is universal, and reading banned books makes you cool, is what I hear.
