Customer Reviews

Red Dust : A Path Through China

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I finished "Red Dust" with mixed feelings: it is not a great book, but it is not bad either. It is interesting, but not profound. It is decently written, but carelessly organized.

What makes "Red Dust" valuable is that is a frank, laid-back portrait of "The Real China" (wince) in the early 1980s, a time (unlike now) when few people were writing down such basic observations as this book contains. These observations are not profound, and they ring hollow only when the try to be, but much that is profound can be gleaned from the mundane. A family's eating habits, how easily people can be duped because it is what they want to believe...these are the substance of life, and all the more so in a place where life is so tenuous as in China's interior.

But two aspects of "Red Dust", the account of Ma Jian's three years spent as a Chinese drifter, curdle the incisiveness of his insights. Despite having taken Buddhist vows, and considering himself on something of a pilgrimage for enlightenment, Ma is a rather self-important person, at least as a narrator. Many of the stories he encounters would have told better if he had been able to observe, sometimes, from the sidelines, rather than making it always about him him him. Understandable human trait, but dangerous in literature. A related flaw is the bitterness with which he filters all occurances. China never has - and probably never will be - a place to inspire bounding optimism, but persistant negativity makes a book just unpleasant to read.

The beginning chapters document Ma's life as an artist and bohemian type in Beijing, and are both tedious and hilarious. Tediously impressed with themselves for bucking convention, for viciously trying to out-artsy each other, and then praising their own genious, but hilariously true to the type of the Chinese avant-garde, especially in the words, not deeds, climate of Beijing. The crowd is eerily familiar.

It is no accident that "Red Dust's" cover bears a plug from "Soul Mountain" author Gao Xingjian, but Ma replicates the Nobel winner's formula so closely that I wonder whether Gao really meant it, or was pleased by the compliment of imitation. Both books are tales of fleeing Beijing for the romanticized countryside in the oppressively political environment of the 1980s. But Gao's book is so much more etherial and important, Ma fares badly in comparison. Ma Jian's writing is merely the Red Dust in the wind from Gao's Soul Mountain.

"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.

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, he hikes north to Xi'an and the Yellow river of Inner Mongolia to visit the ageless ruins of past civilizations. Once more penniless, he drops in with the local literati, including a film studio and dance troupe, all local closet dissidents, and earns money as a magazine illustrator for a spell. He sees a museum of 2,300 stone tablets that chronicles classical Chinese history and philosophy (p170) and interviews recovering opium addicts in a state sanitarium (p177).

He visiting his parents, siblings, and birthplace in Qingdao (p205) by the Yellow Sea and he remembers his childhood and how he was a selfless disciple of Chmn Mao. Somehow he has mutated into a rebellious ne'er-do-well with a 7 year itch, who divorced his wife, child, and leaves a mistress who jilted him, to travel throughout China before escaping to the West probably under the guise of political persecution. He keeps in contact with everybody by letters and asks respondents to send them to his next friend-in-the-trade.

Of the redeeming factors for this effort is that you visit areas that no round-eye tourist would ever see or visit, let alone talk about. At the start in order to purge his bad thoughts of Chinese socialism, he walks across the Gobi Desert to see the buried ruins the Grotto of 10K Buddhas (p76). He endures a 1 week long dust storm, then suicidally sets out again, and nearly dies from thirst, crawls into a swollen salt lake; he almost becomes a relic as a tenderfoot walking the desert. Much later, he takes a bus into the Yunnan minority region jungles and learns about reusable burial grounds. He crawls through the jungle, sleeps in trees, and passes by aboriginal huts whose inhabitants are just afraid of him as he of they (p266). When he needs to cross a river in the rain, he finds a raft and single-handedly makes it across within an inch of his life (p276), then he has to climb out of the river gorge before nightfall...makes it to a village and is interrogated and house-arrested. He escapes and continues his journey to Tibet.

In Tibet, he tries to get close to Buddhism, visits with a Han who has exiled himself there and who has learned Tibetan. Now his sidekick, he tries to learn the ways of the monk, attends a sky burial (warning: very gross p311), makes a preposterous attempt at Mt Everest, and finally he drops as a hospital case of diarrhea & dehydration. Denouncing his vagrant life and exhausted from his trek and misery, finally cleansed and survived the privations of his spiritual pilgrimage (p 105), he returns to civilization.

Definitely a modern Chinese Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Dissident Don, he finally finds himself and tells us after recovering for 15 yrs in Hong Kong and London. He says that having money is the key to freedom (p105), yet having money is a quick route to Spiritual Pollution (p223). If you are looking for an existential view of China, then this book is for you, which I read at a local library.

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.

If you are looking for a well written account of a Chinese national traveling through his own country (in a simultaneous attempt to disappear and discover himself) Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain is probably a better choice; it is more linear, more thoughtful, and more Western in its approach. Red Dust, on the other, employs a more workmanlike style of prose that at times can seem somewhat mechanical, not to mention disjointed. It's also a little too "arty" and attempts at profundidty often fizzle out. But it is the story, not the writing, that makes this an interesting read.

I doubted whether I would like Ma Jian if I met him. Despite his rebelliousness (something I do admire), he's a vagabond, he doesn't like to wash, and he is rather dishonest. Moreover, he's self-obsessed. But from his travels (he goes just about everywhere you can go in China, and does so over a span of three years) a series of sketches surface outlining early eighties China as seen by a plucky, obtuse, curmudgeonly, Beijing dissident. His portrayals are brutally honest, and in the end - despite his persistence - his homeland overwhelms him. I also liked the way this book was translated; various phrases and unnatural sounding similes, etc., were taken over directly from the Chinese, hence we can better get an idea of the thought process. This book is pretty weird at times. The Chinese version of it has been popular with young Chinese "coffee shop beatniks." Cool, man.

Troy Parfitt, author

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.

In 1983, this dissident left a failing marriage, his daughter, and Beijing to wander China three years. This travelogue compresses and distorts time; it's matter-of-fact and mundane. Not a lot happens a lot.

Similar to Kerouac's perigrinations, Ma Jian reads a lot of his predecessors who seek bohemian and countercultural lifestyles. He works as a holy man of sorts, a barber, a vendor of cleansing powder sold off as "French" dentifrice too strong for sensitive Chinese palates--so he tells one displeased customer the morning after! What he sees as his country changes from the Cultural Revolution's ravages to the beginnings of capitalism if not personal freedom (Democracy Wall he sees in an earlier, pre-Tiananmen Square period of expression followed by crackdown) is often grim.

On the Yangzi River, where the poet Li Bai wrote of clouds and monkeys, fertilizer plants and cement factories spew yellow waste. "Where the green slopes have been cut away, the earth shines like raw pigskin." (162) This river divides the bureaucratic north from the entrepreneurial south; neither seems to please him much. "The government has liberated the economy, the country is moving, and the south is moving faster than the north. The waters of the Yangzi look tired and abused. When man's spirit is in chains, he loses all respect for nature." (163-4) Like his counterpart Gao Xingjian who the same year started his own meandering, if more mystical, pilgrimage south that became the philosophical, Nobel Prize-winning, novel "Soul Mountain" (see my review), Ma Jian seeks to flee an urban China that wearies him with oppression, conformity, and inertia. (Compare my review of Colin Thubron's 1987 travelogue on his 1985 tour, "Behind the Wall.")

Yet, Ma Jian finds surprises beneath the surface. He talks to a complicated, deceptively ordinary-seeming girl he'd met earlier a few months ago when he runs into her (what are the odds?) in Shenzhen."You would never guess she has a child in nursery, a husband in prison, a married boyfriend, a girlfriend, a Canadian lover and an opium addiction." (225)

Flora Drew's translation reads well to convey such straightforward observations. Here, the colloquial, often unadorned style of Ma Jian's reports makes this narrative flow smoothly, if often without much excitement. It feels honest, for that. I found more interest as he made his way south, and, by 1985, into Tibet. The chapter "A Land with No Home" conveys a lot in a little, and much of it, I found from the section "The Woman and the Blue Sky," shows up nearly verbatim, if with subtle shifts of emphasis or description, as the first story with the same title in his short collection of five disturbing, detached tales from Tibet, "Stick Out Your Tongue." (See my review; the title refers to the natives' traditional greeting!)

Certainly, in "Red Dust" and "Stick Out Your Tongue," the steady, direct account of a very young woman, dying after a botched childbirth, in her sky burial--when a corpse is left for the vultures after the bones have been pounded down and mixed with dough to be fed to birds, and after the skin has been separated and the viscera and flesh dismembered after blessings have been recited--seems determined to get rid of any lingering attachment to delicacy. I found Ma Jian's account, reading it twice echoed in two versions, sensitive and dignified, although other readers were predictably revolted. For a sympathetic explanation in a book that I reviewed, compare Colin Thubron's trek around sacred Mount Kailash, "To a Mountain in Tibet (2011)."

Ma Jian doubts, even as a budding Buddhist, that his faith or that of his fellow adherents can save Tibet. Communists import greed: "As soon as a road is built, kindness vanishes." Values of one collective, perhaps communal and somewhat refined, civilization cannot withstand those of individualism masked as communism. "I came here hoping to see man saved by the Buddha's compassion, but in Tibet the Buddha cannot even save himself." (297) Ma Jian winds up distrusting Buddhism, and dismissing capitalism as well as Communism. No wonder that he left for Hong Kong the year he wrote these stories, fearing prison. He moved to Germany and he now lives in London.

He concludes his "Red Dust" travels by going back to Beijing. "People are changing with the times. Everyone can see their paths. But society travels along an invisible road and no one can tell where it is going." (323)

A daring, utterly honest work that is at the same time NOT self-important as other aspiring travel literature authors are (Yu Qiuyu comes to mind). This work was penned while the author was "in exile" (self-imposed?) in Germany. Maybe that's one reason why this is yet another dream about China; or shall we say nightmare. It's about a China the writer left behind but has always been unable to leave. Paradox sometimes makes beautiful artwork.

I read this book because it is listed at the back of Peter Hessler's wonderful book, Oracle Bones, as recommended reading. Ma Jian seems like an ornery character who would probably have trouble living anywhere for long. Unfortunately, in China that type of personality was (and probably still is) dangerous. The pressures of his life in Beijing proved too much for Ma so he packed-up a very few possessions and took off for the China borders. He spent three years looking for something he never found. His adventures were often uncomfortable, dangerous, and unsatisfactory. He said that his most difficult problem was finding a place to stay for the night. Every so often he would get a packet of letters from his friends from Beijing. I liked hearing what they were doing. The list of people at the front of the book was very helpful for knowing who was who.

I found the book a little jarring and disjointed. Perhaps that's because it was translated from Chinese. But maybe it's more likely that I felt that Ma Jian was missing some sensitivity for people that I would expect most artists and poets to have. I didn't find his self-centeredness appealing.

The book ends with his decision to return to his little house in Beijing. I would like to know what happened when he returned and how he made it to Hong Kong. What was his life like in Hong Kong and how and why he later went to London? I understand that he thought his life would be in danger when Hong Kong was turned over to China in 1997. But why England?

As far as I know he doesn't have a later biography--which is too bad. He has written some fiction. I'm curious so I have ordered one of his novels. The reviews for those books are better than the reviews for this one.