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

About the Author

Ma Jian was born in 1953 in Qingdao, China. He currently lives in London.

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)

Reviews

In 1983, squirming under constant government scrutiny and mourning a failed marriage, writer and photographer Jian abandons his home in Beijing to journey to China's western border with little more than a change of clothes, two bars of soap, a notebook, a camera and Whitman's Leaves of Grass. It is the beginning of an arduous three-year voyage that takes him not only through little-traveled regions of China, Myanmar and Tibet, but through a careful examination of what it means to be a Buddhist, to live in post-Mao China and to exist in his own skin. A skilled storyteller, Jian narrates in prose that is spare and often beautiful his encounters with people who live in a region that "even today... is a place of banishment, populated by political prisoners, descendents of Turkic migrants, and the ghosts of buried cities." From the night he spends crammed under a bus seat next to a pile of dirty socks and clucking hens to his escape from Chinese militiamen who mistake him for a Burmese spy, Jian tells a powerful story that is no mere travelogue. Indeed, his journey exposes him to so many risks getting bitten by sheepdogs in the grasslands along the Yellow River, drinking foul lake water that knocks him unconscious that the sheer number of life-threatening incidents begins to dull their impact. Still, 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.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Although billed as a travelog, this perceptive memoir represents a spiritual as much as a geographical journey. In the early 1980s, Jian, a writer, poet, painter, and photographer, became dispirited with his work and personal life in Beijing and set out on a three-year voyage across some of China's most remote areas in an attempt to learn about himself by learning more about his homeland. On the journey through China to Tibet, he visited mountains, deserts, lakes, Buddhist monasteries, a leprosy camp, overpopulated cities, and small villages, encountering unusual as well as straightforward characters along the way. This book, which has not been published in China, is an attempt to portray post-Mao China as seen through the eyes of a wandering man. And the one-man viewpoint interwoven throughout is certainly an important part of its appeal. Clearly not a conventional travel book for tourists contemplating a trip to China, this insightful and heartfelt rendition of China's far-flung landscapes is recommended for all libraries, especially those with specialized collections on China and Asia. Melinda Stivers Leach, Precision Editorial Svcs., Wondervu, CO
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Chinese-born Ma, a journalist and novelist in China and now a resident of London, tells the saga of his elusive years in China as he attempted to maintain his own freedom of thought and expression amid an ambience of total state control. Faced with imprisonment, he fled to the countryside, eventually making his way to Tibet. His journey, undertaken during the first few post-Mao years, is presented as a combination travelogue and a narrative of sheer poetry and spirituality. Prior to his trek, he was constantly under surveillance and often called in for questioning. Ma was told, "Don't look so pleased with yourself. If we want to, we can make you slowly disappear." Instead, he disappeared before they could carry out their threat. Traveling through the large scale of China's geography, Ma girds himself for his return to Beijing. "There are still many white mountains to cross but I am on my way home. They cannot hurt me now. I have changed." So will the reader after encountering this brave new book. Allen Weakland
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

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