red dust (ma jian)

In times of Covid it is doubly enthralling to read travellers’ tales. We have all become the old peasants that he meets in remote corners of an awakening China, never moving more than ten miles from where we live. Red Dust is an account of the author’s travels through that country in the eighties. It opens in Beijing, where he works as a state photographer, separated from his wife and his daughter. Long-haired, reading Whitman, he belongs to a bohemian set which is under attack by the forces of law and order. His love life is a disaster, his professional life is a dangerous farce, he fears arrest, and given all this he sets off on his travels.

One of the earliest famous journeys, that of Marco Polo, was to China. It’s exoticism and sense of apartness remained intact over centuries. Ma Jian’s account of his travels around the country, his fascination with the lost tribes of China, and those who live on the edges of greater China, feel like the report of someone venturing to corners of the globe which even now remain obscure. He travels through desert, jungle and mountains, visiting the Mongolian, Burmese and Tibetan frontiers, as well as travelling down the Yellow River and then the coast. The book, split into nine chapters, is woozy. Time slips and slides. Towards the end he says that he’s been on the road for three years, but place supersedes time as he floats through geography. This is true in another sense: China of the eighties is on the brink of change. The economic transformation has already begun on the coast, near Hong Kong. Meanwhile, deep inland, poverty is still extreme. Ma Jian’s account gives a vivid portrayal of these contrasts. One wonders how much has changed in deepest Tibet, for example, where the book concludes with the spectacle of a Buddhist funeral of a 17 year old girl. 

It’s of note that the book was published in 2001, nearly two decades after the journey. These are recollections in tranquility, the writer returning to his younger self. The book is a remarkable blend of acute observation and adventure. Run-ins with the police, near drownings, encounters with an exotic poetess, dovetail with observations of poverty and ways of life that are struggling for survival. The vast quantity of ruins the writer visits (and one of the pleasures of reading this book in a digital form is the ability to look up images of places he visits), are testament to the way in which China has always been a crucible for the birth and death of entire cultures. It also contextualises the issue of cruelty and rights, from the way entire workforces of thousands were buried alive by an Emperor’s command to keep a secret, to the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and finally even the cruelties of Buddhism itself, where a Lama can blandly explain that the reasons for a punishment like cutting off an arm might be attributed to sins committed in a former life. Ma Jian’s book succeeds in giving an overview of the multiple histories, religions and ways of thinking that make up the idea of the country called China. It is also, in these straightened times, a wonderful escape. We need the travellers of this world to remind us that there are other ways of thinking, other ways of seeing, other ways, even, of dying.