For a Chinese author, looking for the real country involves real risk. Finding that place, and then writing about it, can prove no less hazardous. To get at the authentic nation, its dynamism and diversity, not to mention its billion stories of individual experience, is to issue an implicit challenge to the sanctioned narrative of the collective character of the society and its people. In the authoritarian mind, that is why there are censors, and prisons.

Where, then, is the living, enduring Chinese soul in its literature? Three books translated into English in the last decade propose different ways of framing the question, and seeking the answer. Two of the three insist on the individual conscience as the necessary guide, and the defiant personal journey as the method. The other, born of another medium, assembles a choir out of lonely phone calls in the dead of the Chinese night.

Whether it is aware of this or not, contemporary Chinese literature dwells in the shadow of Gao Xinjiang's Soul Mountain. First published in Taiwan in 1989, and in English in 1999 on the eve of the author being awarded the Nobel Prize, Gao's monumental paean to his country's hidden spirit has yet to officially appear in China itself. Regardless, its influence has been widespread and its model imitated, especially by restless young people.

Soul Mountain, a sui generis blend of memoir and fiction, narrates an epic 1983 walkabout by the author, then a leading playwright whose work had already brought him grief. For five months Gao wandered western Sichuan province, often on foot, meeting – in reality, or in his imagination – everyone from Daoist monks to shamans, mythical 'Wild Men' to sexually liberated women.

His route followed the fringes of Han China. In his encounters with the Miao and Yi minority cultures Gao was exposed to not only other notions of purity and innocence, reality and imagination, but other countries, in effect. China contained multitudes, it turned out, and its 'soul' wouldn't be found in modernized cities and industrialized landscapes. Instead, in folklore and legend, wild places and wild people, lay the deep national character.

China contained multitudes, and so did Gao – so does anyone willing to drop-out and go searching for soul mountain.

If Gao Xinjiang is the Walt Whitman of Chinese self-discovery, then Ma Jian, author of Red Dust: A Path Through China (2001), is closer to its Woody Guthrie or Jack Kerouac. Ma, who published his own monumental work – the Tiananmen Square novel Beijing Dust – earlier this year, embarked on a similar journey at an earlier stage in his life. Among the items the young man packed for his 1980s walkabout was a change of clothes, two bars of soap, and Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

For three years Ma was a vagabond, sleeping rough and working odd jobs, being chased by sheepdogs and drinking foul lake water. His route was far more encompassing, and included a spell in Tibet. At various points he found himself at large inside forbidden zones "populated by political prisoners, descendents of Turkic migrants, and the ghosts of buried cities."

If, too, Gao's search is spiritual, Ma's is rooted in the body, in the senses and appetites of the solid self. The value placed on self-disclosure in Red Dust is its own statement. Without saying so, Ma Jian intends his journey to serve as simulacrum for the longing among Chinese to uncover their authentic selves. He declares it a voyage that will need be painfully honest and quietly annihilating. There is no going back from freedom.

Xinran's search for the real China involved less personal dislocation. In fact, all she had to do was sit in a studio and read and listen. A radio host in central Hunan province, in 1989 she pioneered Chinese talk-radio with a late evening program for women. Encouraged by the host to share their stories and yearnings, listeners responded with letters and calls in the thousands – each and every night.

The Good Women of China, published in 2002, tells some of these stories, changing names and cloaking identities. The range of choir voices includes the privileged companions of senior Party officials and the wives who share the burden of running farms with her husbands.

Many of the tales are harrowing – forced marriages, gang rapes, permanent separation from loved ones during the Cultural Revolution – but others are affirming. In freeing their thoughts about sex and love and parenting the women experience brief liberations, perhaps, of spirit and body alike.

Xinran's book is less intrepid and iconoclastic. Still, when the author went into voluntary exile in England in the 1997 she sited her own conflicted self as the cause. "In China I was working in the gap between two walls," she told a journalist. "One side was the Communist Party and the other side was my own soul. I began to find the burden overwhelming." The Good Women of China has appeared in her homeland.

The same can't be said for the work of Ma Jian or Gao Xingjian. After an earlier book was banned, Ma also departed for London. Neither Red Dust, nor the incendiary Beijing Coma is likely to ever satisfy authoritarian aesthetics. As for Gao, resident of France since the late 1980s, and whose Nobel should have brought China pride, officials dismissed the prize as being politically-motivated. They also insulted the author, called him "very, very average."