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Tim Cribb

The Diary of Ma Yan: The life of a Chinese Schoolgirl - Transformed

Edited and introduced by Pierre Haski.

Translated by Lisa Appignanesi

Virago $105

Snowflakes flutter in the air outside her classroom window in the commune  of Yuwang, Ningxia, a four-hour walk from her one-room home. Ma Yan writes in her diary: 'It takes me back  to my childhood.'

For the 13-year-old daughter of a Muslim peasant family in a drought-ravaged region at the tip of Inner Mongolia classified by Beijing as 'uninhabitable', that childhood  must have been brief.

Ma Yan writes that she wants nothing more than to go to school  and study hard so she can get a job that will let her bring some happiness to the lives of her parents. Her diaries tell an anguished story that is all the more powerful for its simplicity.

French journalist Pierre Haski  came across Ma Yan almost by accident,  in May 2001, when a woman in the village of Zhangjiangshu thrust a small packet of notebooks into the hands of a member of his group.

The notebooks turned out to be the diaries of a young girl whose parents were losing the struggle to keep her in school, and whose hopes of a different future to the life of hardship endured by her mother was precarious at best.

Haski reported on the diaries in  the French daily Liberation and set in train a course of events that helped keep Ma Yan and hundreds of other young girls in school, while lifting just a little the shroud of bureaucratic indifference that has settled over the fate of China's peasantry - two-thirds of the 1.3 billion people - in the country's drive for modernisation.

The French response to Ma Yan has elevated the teenager to heroic status in China. She has told her story on national television, and newspapers have been prompted to look more closely at the plight of peasants.

Students from the French schools in Hong Kong, and Beijing helped to raise money for the Yuwang school, which Haski says was used to buy 22 computers in September last year.

Haski notes in one of his pieces accompanying the diary text that the average annual income of Ma Yan's village is 400 yuan, compared with the Chinese average of 6,000 yuan, and Shanghai's of 33,000 yuan. With each child costing at least 400 yuan a year to educate, Ma Yan's parents - and many like them - face a daily struggle to keep her and her 11-year-old brother, Ma Yichao, in school, with a younger son Ma Yiting, approaching school age.

The farm, virtually barren after four years of drought, can't support the family. The father, Ma Dongji, works on construction sites in cities such as Yinchuan, the capital of Ningxia, but  is more often than not cheated of his wages because he's illiterate.

The mother, Bai Juhua, stricken with  stomach ulcers, joins  groups going to Inner Mongolia for weeks on end to illegally harvest fa cai, a hairy grass that grows on the steppes of northwest China and fetches high prices in Hong Kong.

The Diary of Ma Yan struck a chord of sympathy in France when it was  published in 2002, and its translation into a dozen languages has triggered similar responses.

Education is a relatively cheap development tool. Hong Kong's Chi Heng Foundation knows this. It raises money to sponsor the education of children orphaned by Aids. The HK$500 it costs each year to educate a child is considered a good investment. The alternative is quite likely a life of crime for these stigmatised children.

The Diary of Ma Yan isn't great literature. The translation of Haski's earnest French is at times stilted  and the diary entries seem too polished, the vocabulary sometimes too advanced. But the message is strong and the book would serve the classrooms in Hong Kong well - as a reminder that education should not be taken for granted.

See Post Magazine for an excerpt from The Diary of Ma Yan



The Diary of Ma Yan