Red Dust: A Path Through China
by Ma Jian
translated by Flora Drew
Reviewed by Laura Lent
Red Dust is the vivid memoir and travelogue
of Chinese photographer, painter, writer, poet, and free spirit Ma
Jian. The story begins during the Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution
crackdown in the early 1980s, when the talented and hardworking photographer
finds himself increasingly harassed by the police and by his superiors
at work for his extracurricular activities and bohemian ways. He hosts
late-night parties of artists and dissidents at his Beijing cottage.
He wears jeans and dresses sloppily, while his paintings fail to convey
the joy and excitement of life under the Four Modernizations. At work,
at the Foreign Propaganda Unit of the All China Federation of Trade
Unions, Ma Jian is summoned to rectification meetings where criticism
reaches absurd proportions. Does his use of a question mark as part
of the cover illustration of "Chinese Trade Unions: Question and Answers" imply
that Chinese socialism doesn't know where it's going? He is given 30
days to write a sweeping self-criticism.
Things could also be going better in his personal life.
His ex-wife has remarried and prefers that he not see their daughter,
and his girlfriend has betrayed him with a scooter-riding hooligan.
His tight-knit social circles feel claustrophobic. The world is closing
in on Ma Jian. Armed with 200 yuan and a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves
of Grass, Ma Jian quits his job, drops off the radar screen of
official China, and embarks on a three-year quest, wandering the length
and breadth of China in search of his individual and collective destiny.
His account of his travels from the deserts of Inner
Mongolia to the tropical forests of the south is by turns poetic, hard-boiled,
and tinged with surrealism, as when a ball of fire appears in the night
sky to lead him to safety when he is lost on a mountain ridge near
the Burmese border. He dourly notes the degradation of human interactions
caused by oppressive political strictures crossed with the economic
insecurity of incubating capitalism, while retaining affection and
warmth for the humanity and idiosyncrasies of the people he meets on
his journey.
Ma Jian lives as a virtual mendicant at times, surviving by his wits,
odd jobs, and the occasional replenishment of funds from sales of his
short stories facilitated by his network of urban friends. He is not
above hawking scouring powder in foil packets as miracle tooth whitener.
Most of the time he journeys by foot. Occasionally he stays with friends
or family in cities, but most of the time he travels solo in the less
charted regions of China. At times he is on the lam from Chinese officialdom.
The final destination of his pilgrimage is Tibet, where
he hopes to solidify his recent conversion to Buddhism, but he finds
himself an outsider because he is Han Chinese. He questions his beliefs
and asks whether the communists have only allowed the practice of Buddhism
to revive because it lays the blame for the world's pain on karma and
absolves them from responsibility for the pain they have inflicted.
Ma Jian's quest recalls the striving to escape conformity
and rigidity in the Cold War era characterized by the American Beat
generation and memoir/travelogues such as Kerouac's On the Road. But Red
Dust is more externally focused and succeeds equally as a brilliant
insider portrayal, snapshot by snapshot, of life among the many social
strata in China during a time of rapid change and upheaval. Ma Jian's
gifts for dialogue, description, and storytelling are aided by Flora
Drew's excellent translation.
After three years of a vagrant life, Ma Jian feels
that he has become a stranger to himself, and decides that he is eager
to live again in big cities that have hospitals, bookshops, and women.
He has been changed by his journey, and he has broadened our perspectives
on China by relating his experience of his country as a modern wayfarer.
 |
 |
