Red Dust: A Path Through China

Continuing my interest in books about China since a trip there last November, I picked up "Red Dust" by Ma Jian, a memoir by a young Chinese man who -- finding his life disrupted by a divorce from his wife and separation from his young daughter, and under suspicion from the government agency where he works as a writer and photographer-- embarks upon a three-year road trip to discover the heart of the country he has called home for thirty years. His journey takes him from Beijing, traveling by foot and rickety bus and river raft westward through Mongolia, crisscrossing the country, turning south and east and west again, over mountains and through deserts, along the Yangzi River, and touching nearly every major and minor province and city in the sprawling Asian nation, finally reaching the heights of Lhasa in Tibet. With little more than a change of clothes and a couple of bars of soap, Ma immerses himself in the lives of his countrymen in the remotest parts of China. He visits friends and is taken in by strangers, forges travel documents, dodges policemen, and finds work when he needs money. Wearing jeans and sneakers and letting his hair grow, he is seen as a beatnik, and to this reader, that is surely an accurate description. A lovable vagabond, he charms men and women alike, and for inspiration reads Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." Much changed by his experiences, Ma left China for Hong Kong soon after his journey ended, but when Hong Kong was handed over to China, he left and now lives in London. His story is both fascinating and illuminating about a country even a native son has a difficult time understanding.

An unusual, and extremely interesting trip through the backwoods (and deserts) of China. Ma Jian's RED DUST is one of the more intriguing of the recent boom of personal accounts of living in or travel in China. Jian is, in this book at least, primarily a slacker, something of an artist, coming off of a divorce and a disastrous subsequent relationship. He falls under suspicion in the China of the early 1980s - a very different era from now - less for anything political, and more for a certain lack of attentiveness to certain details in his personal life. In any case, he feels compelled to get out of Beijing for an indefinite amount of time, and sets upon a semi-improvised, quasi-beatnik trek back and forth across China, spending 3 years drifting, crashing on floors, evading the authorities, posing as a journalist, scamming when needed, and writing it all down. Jian comes across as an intersting individual, not necessarily anything wise or admirable (he's about halfway between Dickens urchin and post-Kerouac hipster through most of the book), but a very restless individual in an authoritarian world who takes it upon himself to do what untold numbers of Westerners do - go out and find yourself, and in this instance, the results are compelling. Along the way, his improvisational instincts do fail him on a few occasions - the trip does heat up a bit towards the end, and there are a few instances of getting hit by unanticipated forces of nature which betray his general lack of planning (and the fact that he's constitutionally more of a city boy than he'd occasionally like to be). And in the meantime, he paints vivid, memorable portraits of China's varied landscape and people; not filtered through any official (or Western) sensibilities, and always a fine mix of erudition, affection and directness. An excellent, memorable book. -David Alston

this book is full of sadness, pathos and humor all at once. for the generation of Chinese who felt like the future was going to be freedom and laughter but found out the hard way, at Tiananmen in 1989 that China's future might be prosperous and rich but it would not be liberal and free, there was nothing left to do but wander the Chinese hinterlands and wasteland, which ma jian did, like a modern day , Chinese Lewis, or Clark, he visits every province and pushes himself to the limit as he searches for himself, the soul of China and a reason for going on in a messed up society that ultimately doesn't value artists or freethinkers. this book is also a pretty great adventure yarn, sort of like an amazing surivival tale.

The author is a native Chinese artist, which makes it hard to understand his prose as he shifts from the present, past, and dreams with many people talking. But after you get through his own primal needs, back-pack and shoes, food & cigarettes, and sex, alcohol & drugs, then your mental filter is set to read the story. Just read every other paragraph and you won't dwell on the insignificant. This book is unusual in that it is written by a native 30 yr Chinese who is on an extended tour starting in 1982 (p17); quite the opposite of a tourist book written by a round-eye. His writing is really a rambling diary of his bumbling, dirt-cheap, 3-year vagabond tour around China, crashing on and bumming off of friends of other literary or journalist's friends. He is part writer / journalist, part photographer, part poet, part painter, but can't do anything very well (p42), other than shagging women in the same boat. Other women are quite wary of him. One laughs wryly, "The quickest way to commit suicide is to marry an artist (p215)."His travels start from Beijing, west via train to the deserts of Qinghai, south to Chendu and east via the Yangtze river, then north to Xi'an and further to the Genghis ruins on the desolate Shaanxi steppes along the Yellow river. South through Sichuan and east to Qingdao his birthplace, south along the coast to Shanghai, Canton, Hainan, inland to the Yunnan minority regions, Golden Triangle, and finally Tibet. Certainly a long trek, some with humanity and much in solitary. The situations that he gets himself into can be interesting otherwise it's daily page filler. Sort of a DIY manual on how to hitch for a ride, how to sleep with a roof overhead, and how to sponge a cup of tea or meal off of dolting peasants.Sometimes he tries amusing scams to earn some spending money, such as, becoming a street barber in Qinghai (p107), selling pot cleanser for tooth polish in Shaanxi (p199), and help setup a Yunnan minority peoples exhibition in Canton (p208) which of course is a desperate flop, as the Cantonese are much too busy making money to come.There is a map of his travels on the inside F & B covers (HC), and there are 8 detailed map / drawings heading the chapters. There are no pictures in his book, even though he carries a camera through his trip. He carries the camera mainly to impress his credentials as a journalist (p272) to the local authorities, at least enough to get a meal and an overnight bed.He spends some time in Chendu, to recharge, party with the local literati, and witness the new economy in western China. He talks to new graduate staffers that are slowly mutating into the cynics like himself (p141). Fleeing his shadow he continues his journey to sacred Buddhist sites (p156) and visits an infamous prison at Chongqing. He sees the posted executions list, which ironically reminds him of witnessing an execution who turns out to be of a former lover of his ex-wife (p160).Once more, yearning for cleansing deprivation, h

"In a flash, Bao Yu [a character in the Chinese classic A Dream of Red Mansions] saw through the red dust of illusion. He discarded his worldly ties and set off in search of enlightenment."In 1983, Ma Jian left Beijing to wander through China's rural countryside. For three years he drifted through the bleak Western provinces, the rich Southeastern part of China and through Tibet. He was 30 years old at the time. He intended "Red Dust" to be an account of his finding himself in the loneliness of the journey. It turned out to be the story of his disillusionment not only with Buddhism but also with the ideas he held about the advantages of the simple life. In the end he finds that he wants to give up his solitary wandering and needs "to live in big cities that have hospitals, bookshops and women.""Red Dust", published only in 2001, is a starkly realistic portrait of rural China at the beginning of the economic liberalization initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1979. No Westerner would have been able to describe the life of the common people in the impoverished inner provinces of China as precisely and straightforward as Ma Jian. It is a world that is invisible to Western visitors, even if they speak Mandarin. In that sense, "Red Dust" is not required reading for the average traveler in China. But I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the "hidden" life that the majority of the Chinese really live."Red Dust" stands out for its unflinching realism and its intimacy with everyday life in China, just as Mark Salzman's "Iron and Silk" (1986) stands out for its sense of humor, Simon Winchester's "The River at the Centre of the World" (1996) for its knowledge and entertaining anecdotes, and Peter Hessler's "River Town" (2001) for its lyrical descriptions of the landscape and its endearing sympathy with the Chinese people.