Red Dust: A Path Through China - Hardcover

Jian, Ma

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375420592 ISBN 13: 9780375420597

Publisher: Pantheon, 2001

Synopsis

1983 Ma Jian, a photographer, painter, poet, and writer, set out for the most remote and roughest parts of China. Dispirited and fearful, accused at work of having “a sluggish mentality,” confronted with a failed marriage, an estranged young daughter, and a girlfriend involved with another man, he abandons Beijing and a life he can no longer endure. Red Dust is the account of his travels, a remarkably written and subtly moving journey toward understanding.

A dropout, a fugitive from the police, a Buddhist in search of enlightenment, Ma Jian embarks on a three-year trek that takes him from the deepest south to the western provinces and Tibet, journeying across deserts, over mountains, through icy rivers. And as he travels to increasingly remote areas, his circumstances become increasingly straitened: He stays in filthy inns, sleeping four to a plank bed, learning to wait until his companions fall asleep and then lying on top of them. To support himself, he buys a pair of scissors and becomes a roadside barber, sells scouring powder as tooth whitener, lives by his wits posing as an enlightened religious man.

His sense of humor and sanity keep him intact—”Danger is not exciting,” he tells a friend, “it’s just proof of your incompetence.” The greatest hardship he faces is disappointment—or perhaps his own honesty. Tibet offers no enlightenment (“Is Buddha saving man or is man saving Buddha?” he asks); his own restlessness undermines his yearning for love. Ma Jian’s portrait of his country provides no understanding of its enigmas, no neat generalizations, no sweeping predictions. It simply reminds us of China’s scale, its shadows, and, ultimately, its otherness.

About this title

Review:

Chinese dissident and sometimes vagabond Ma Jian offers a sharp-edged, often surprising portrait of his native land, one that takes his readers into corners that few non-Chinese travelers have seen.

In 1983, Ma, tired of life in a China that, he writes, "feels like an old tin of beans that, having lain in the dark for forty years, is beginning to burst at the seams," grew his hair, quit his job, and took to the road. As he recounts in his able--and, at times, very strange--memoir, over the next three years he wandered into the western desert, through the mountains of Shaanxi, down the steamy southern coast, and, eventually, to Tibet. Along the way he slipped by inquisitive police agents, ate dodgy meals, fell in love a time or two, and learned much about his country--more than he bargained on, for, as he writes, "I am exhausted. China is too old, its roots too deep. I feel dirty from the delving."

Ma's travelogue, alternately humorous and sober, offers a constantly illuminating view of life behind the Great Wall. --Gregory McNamee

From the Back Cover:

"In this skillfully constructed, picaresque memoir, Ma Jian takes us on an absorbing tour of the emotional, intellectual, and sexual
travails of China's Beat Generation in the early 1980s. Red Dust is full of surprising insights into the China that emerged, for better or
worse, after the death of Mao."
-Jonathan Spence, author of The Search for Modern China

“Ma Jian’s writing is a revelation, an insider’s account of a country permeated in every paragraph by a rebel’s sensitivity. His writing has a picaresque quality, unforgettably conjuring images of a continually changing landscape where the only constant is hardship, struggle, and ideological confusion.”
—The Big Issue (London)

“In this skillfully constructed, picaresque memoir, Ma Jian takes us on an absorbing tour of the emotional, intellectual, and sexual travails of China’s Beat Generation in the early 1980s. Red Dust is full of surprising insights into the China that emerged, for better or worse, after the death of Mao.”
—Jonathan D.Spence, author of The Search for Modern China

“This is a beautiful, disturbing read—a new Wild Swans. 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. Red Dust is at once a sustained poetic meditation and a portrait of a continent-sized nation in flux. From its pages China’s landscape emerges with filmic clarity. Ma Jian’s Chinese journey and his writing are an exhilarating combination.”
—The Observer (London)

“If you have time to read only one book on China this year, choose Red Dust.”
—Financial Times (London)

“Red Dust is a tour de force, a powerfully picaresque cross between the sort of travel book any Western author would give his eye-teeth to write and a disturbing confession. Ma’s dissidence is at once idiosyncratic and conservative. He does not want China propelled into an American future; he seeks greater freedoms but refuses to believe such freedoms add up to anything much in the material world.”
—The Independent (London)

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0375420592
• ISBN 13: 9780375420597
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336