This is book No. 21 in Paul French’s Ultimate China Bookshelf.
Blurbs:
“It is a wonderful book — part Matsuo Basho, part Jung Chang, part allegory — one of those rare travelogues that manages to transcend its subject and evoke the leaf-blown qualities of a peripatetic life.”
—The Guardian
“Ma Jian offers a revealing, riveting portrait of a Chinese citizen who seeks truth and honesty in a society in which such a quest can be grounds for punishment.”
—Publishers Weekly
“An extraordinary — and offbeat — insider’s account of life in post-Mao, pre-Tiananmen China.”
—Kirkus
“Ma Jian’s travels are picaresque. His narrative is blessed with a prose style that compresses meaning as succinctly as Chinese calligraphy. It opens windows on landscapes small and vast, all still largely unobserved and unknown to westerners.”
—The Times (London)
About the author:
Born in 1953 in Qingdao, Mǎ Jiàn 马建 was taught painting by a persecuted “Rightist” and had his own education disrupted by the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. Factory jobs and a stint with a propaganda arts troupe followed before he moved to Beijing and became involved in the avant-garde and often underground arts scene as a painter and photojournalist. In 1983, his paintings were denounced as “spiritual pollution” and he was briefly detained. Upon his release, he set off on a three-year journey that eventually became Red Dust. He moved briefly to Hong Kong but returned for the Tiananmen Square protests in June 1989, around which time he wrote his satirical novel The Noodle Maker.
In 1997 Ma moved to Germany and in 1999 to London, where he wrote Red Dust. His novel Beijing Coma was published in 2008. He currently resides in London and is a vocal critic of the Chinese Communist Party.
The book in 150 words:
The term red dust in Chinese can be used to refer to the everyday mundane life of ordinary people — their passions, hopes, vanities, sacrifices, and tribulations. In 1983, at the age of 30, dissident artist Ma Jian found himself divorced by his wife, separated from his daughter, betrayed by a girlfriend, bored in Beijing, and facing arrest during a “spiritual pollution” crackdown. Ma decided to effectively “tramp” (his hair uncut, no luggage, etc.) through remote China for three years — smog-choked tier-eight cities, mountain villages the Party might have forgotten. The aim was to experience the red dust of China.
Your free takeaways:
Old Bao and Auntie Wang are sitting by the door knitting television covers. They glance at me through the corners of their eyes. Director Zhang told me that today’s meeting will focus on my self-criticism. “It will affect your entire political future,” he said blankly.
I board the steam train to Urumqi and watch the red walls of Beijing slip away. This time I am not traveling as a Party journalist on assignment to the provinces. I have left my job and lacked a change of clothes, a notebook, two bars of soap, a water bottle, a torch, a compass, two hundred yuan, a wad of rice coupons, my camera and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. My old life recedes into the distance and my heart races with the train as we rattle towards China’s far west.
A few days ago I read up on the drug situation in China and discovered that drug abuse is more commonplace than I thought. The addicts come from ordinary backgrounds, and buy their supplies on the black market. Opium is still the most popular drug. Yang Qing is taking me to the detoxification centre this afternoon. I am visiting in the guise of a Shaanxi Press reporter.
It is nine years since I last visited my parents’ house. The yard seems to have shrunk. The red characters LONG LIVE CHAIRMAN MAO ZEDONG THOUGHT I painted on the wall at thirteen have almost flaked away. The sky looks a familiar blue above the red-tiled roof. I open the wooden door…The inside is as shabby as ever.
Why this book should be on your China bookshelf:
It’s tempting to think of Ma Jian’s Red Dust (translated by Flora Drew) as being in the same vein as George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, or perhaps the wandering observational journalism of Joseph Roth or Albert Londres. But they were in search of the experiences that would elucidate some great theory — socialism, or the extent of antisemitism — while Ma Jian is dealing with something slightly different. His problem is being both an insider and an outsider within his own country, of being appreciated by some and despised to the point of repression by others. While writers like Lín Yǔtáng 林语堂 (book No. 20) sought to explain their contemporary China to the outside world, Ma Jian is primarily concerned with discovering his own country: its vastness, but also how it became the nation it had by the early 1980s, and how he had been formed by that process as an individual.
It’s a warts-and-all voyage of discovery — like Orwell before him, Ma is mostly interested in those living on the edges, if not completely outside the system, as well as forbidden subjects — drug addicts, willing dropouts, embracers of various forms of counterculture deemed non-productive at best, and “spiritual pollution” that requires political exorcism and punishment at worst. He is keen to contrast the edges of China — remote, depopulated, poor — with the increasingly crowded and rapidly expanding cities of the period. Red Dust is both a snapshot of China in the 1980s — before Tiananmen, before the big boom go-go years of the 1990s, before perhaps a certain comfortable sense of aspiration and manifest destiny set in. As Ma Jian concentrates on the underbelly of the emergent reform-era society, his experiences in Red Dust are almost unique in being recorded in so detailed and unemotional a fashion.
Red Dust avoids polemic, lecture, any sense of the author having “told-you-so.” It is a journey of genuine curiosity. As far as possible, Ma arrives and departs various locations with little sense of pre-judgment or final conclusion. That his final chapter is entitled “A Land With No Home” may indicate that after traveling from Tianjin to Lhasa, mostly by bus, the old slow, hard-seat trains, and thumbing lifts, he has nowhere left to go but either back to a Beijing where he faces political repression and family strife or away — out of China — to start anew somewhere else.
Ma’s travelogue has sometimes been described as the best work by China’s “Lost Generation,” that social generational cohort in the Western world that was in early adulthood during World War I (and particularly applied to the American writers and artists who sojourned in Paris). It’s a useful appellation for thus looking at China’s recent history — if not perhaps a term much, if ever, used in the country itself. Of course, it applies to those, like Ma, caught between the Cultural Revolution and the later reform era — denied formal education and many freedoms, yet perhaps too old to really take advantage of the new economic opportunities of the later 1990s. It’s a generation that often doesn’t easily speak — that indeed prefers to remain quiet, to support the next generations, to “eat their bitterness.” Fortunately, we have some writing from this generational cohort that looked at the smaller things, the idiosyncrasies and manners of life — as did Eileen Chang (张爱玲 Zhāng Àilíng), as did Lin Yutang — from their perspectives for their periods. Ma Jian’s Red Dust — along with perhaps the novel of Wáng Shuò 王朔 (book No. 12) and others — stands as one of the major voices of that generation.
Next time:
Next, a change of direction: We will look at scholars who have studied myth, magic, and superstition in China, and ask how these elements can be such a fundamental aspect of life for so many Chinese. So let’s start with an early study of China’s myths and legends that still remains a set text on the subject…
Check out the other titles on Paul French’s Ultimate China Bookshelf.
