The South
Carolina Modern Language Review
Volume 1,
Number 1
Red Dust: A Path Through China
324 pages
Reviewed
by Peter Whelan
Francis
Marion University
Red Dust is a distinguished addition to the
recent spate of excellent creative non-fiction books about China by Chinese and
Western authors. This account of a
three-year journey around China deserves to be set with Jung Chang’s Wild Swans for its artistic vision and
the attractiveness of its writing. Like
Jung and Nobel prizewinner, Gao Xingjian, author Ma Jian is a writer in exile
who left his Beijing home shortly after finishing his three-year journey in
1986. He now lives in London.
Ma Jian covers
thousands of miles of his native China in a search for the soul of his
country. Painter, photographer, poet,
malcontent, he cadges rides, hops trains and buses, pedals a borrowed bicycle,
and simply walks hundreds of miles through desert, mountain and jungle. It is the Party’s new “Campaign Against
Spiritual Pollution” that finally sets him on the move, for his quest is also a
flight from repressive authority.
Estranged from his wife, in bad odor with the police, who regard him,
not without justification according to their lights, as a subversive and
decadent character, he is persecuted with a puritanical hypocrisy worthy of
fundamentalists in any culture.
His only capital
is a few addresses of other artists, with whom he stops for a week or two, here
and there, so he has to resort to all sorts of schemes in order to live. He sets up as a market barber; he lectures
on modern poetry; he works in a sofa factory; he sells pot-scouring powder as
tooth-whitener; he pretends to be a Daoist geomancer, a feng shui adept, a
wandering sage. He’s as ready with a
scheme or a lie as Huck Finn, and like Huck he soon moves on—restless and tired
of the role he’s playing, or simply because the authorities are about to
discover his papers are forged.
His journey has
a decidedly Buddhist flavor. He took
lay vows shortly before he set out, and he hopes to find some kind of spiritual
fulfillment, so his wanderings, especially in Tibet, take on the nature of a
spiritual quest. His title, Red Dust, is a reference to
the fog of material illusion through which the aspiring Buddhist must find a
way. As far as possessions are
concerned, he comes close to the Buddhist ideal. His cheap rubber-soled shoes wear out, addresses are washed off
the paper when he falls in rivers, his only permanent possession is his camera,
and even from this he is briefly parted by a couple of thugs. He rescues it, however, in a most
un-Buddhist manner--cunningly, effectively, and with shocking violence. There is a steely trace of Odysseus in his
character, as well as of Huck Finn.
For Ma Jian,
China is, among other things, what it eats.
In eastern China he comments, “There is really nothing Guangzhou people
do not eat. Tonight I have tasted snake, cat, turtle, and raw fish,” but there
is stranger fare still, all over the country.
We hear of a victim of the Cultural Revolution whose liver was kicked
out of his living body to gratify the people’s taste for “fresh offal”; a
doctor friend takes home fresh human placenta from his abortion clinic to stuff
his steamed buns. Ma Jian shares an owl
preserved for years in formalin on a laboratory shelf (“after braising it in
ginger and soya sauce the taste was quite bearable”) or drinks a bowl of ox
blood purchased from the local slaughterhouse.
When he orders scrambled eggs they are served “riddled with flies. They crawl from my mouth as I chew. I ask the waitress when the eggs were
cooked. She says yesterday, so I tell
her to bloody well heat them up again.”
If a country can
really be said to have a soul, Ma Jian seems well qualified to find it without
shrinking from what he finds. But the
country is full of contradictions, as complex as it is vast. In Qinghai province in the northwest he
turns aside, lured by the blue beauty of Sugan lake “dangling in the desert
like a jewel on a woman’s neck.” It is
much further away than he thinks: “what looked like a tiny blue spot is in fact
a huge lake. It is too late to turn
back now, though—my bottle is empty. I
have no choice but to keep walking towards the water. Where there is water there are people, and where there are people
there is life. There is no other path
that I can take.” But the azure lake
water turns out to be “foul and brackish,” and he comes within a hairsbreadth
of death. A Buddhist moment
indeed. At last a truck looms out of a
dust storm; “Want to fucking kill yourself, do you?” asks the driver. “He pushes on the accelerator and we drive
off. I look at the shaking desert and
the receding mountain range, and just as it did yesterday when I first saw
Sugan, my heart begins to soar.” The
artist’s vision, in which the spiritual and the sensual are inextricably mixed,
has not been damaged by the physical or the metaphysical ordeal.
“Where there are
people there is life,” but people are generally disappointing. It’s not just that they personally
stink. They do stink--their breath,
their clothing, their food, their housing, their jobs, their outlook on life .
. . and Ma Jian himself has to be told to take a shower. But whereas Ma’s vision is almost always
humane and compassionate, Chinese society appears to be largely venal,
cowardly, corrupt, treacherous, callous, cruel and deeply misogynistic. By no means always, but largely. Though Ma Jian comes across glowing
instances of kindness and disinterested love, as well as women who want to make
love with him, his verdict as he stands at the tomb of the terracotta warriors
is that China has a “cruel, ugly soul.”
By the end of the tale, it is difficult to disagree. The hideous second-hand accounts of the
Cultural Revolution of the sixties and seventies are matched in the eighties by
Ma’s first-hand observations of judicial and individual cruelties and
ubiquitous petty nastiness. It seems
that the atrocities could recur any time the government again cared to whip up
the immense vindictive mob that China once became. Even Lhasa, one of the great spiritual centers of the world and
the farthest point of Ma Jian’s quest, has been spiritually castrated by the
Han (ethnic Chinese): “The communists did not just drive the spiritual leader
from Tibet, they removed the soul from its religion.” Even in Tibet a young man
takes out his frustration against the Han by frenziedly beating a puppy, and a
monk defends the code that prescribes mutilations and burial alive for monks
who offend against the Buddhist law.
The work’s
richness is a reflection of the complex texture of Chinese life, mirrored with
a superb eye for beauty and for the grotesquely human. Ma Jian is well aware
that the world is a forest of symbols, yet we never feel that the symbolism is
forced on us, nor can we feel that every symbol is available to us in the form
of a paraphrase. What, for example, is
the meaning of the “vulture droppings dotted with human fingernails” that Ma
sees at the site of a Tibetan sky burial?
Ma offers no editorial comment on this or many other unforgettable
images.
For the artist
as a young man, the meaning of life is indeterminate. Disillusioned by
Buddhism, he writes in his notebook, “I can only strive to save myself.” But when he boards the bus out of Lhasa,
heading back to Beijing, he finds himself sitting next to a young Tibetan on
his way to university in the capital.
“That’s wonderful!” Ma Jian enthuses, “Beijing is a huge city. You will see many new things. Your life will change. I live there myself, in a small house on Nanxiao
Lane. Number 53.” Earlier he assured us that he would rather
bash his own head in than be taken back.
And of course,
Ma Jian no longer lives at number 53, but in London, where he has been most
fortunate in his translator, Flora Drew.
Her lively, colloquial English suits the work perfectly; it seems
entirely in keeping if, as has been reported, Ma Jian is currently living with
Ms. Drew.