They sit down in a restaurant and he goes to the bar to buy the beers. There he tells the barman the youths are dangerous hoodlums, then walks back and knocks them unconscious with the beer bottles. After retrieving his camera, he makes for the train station, leaving the apprentice thieves to pay for the beers when they recover.
Another time, high on a mountain pass, he spies a lake shining blue in the distance. He decides to walk towards it, only to find at nightfall it's a marshy bed of reeds. He makes for some lights, discovers it's a road, and gets a lift at dawn into a desert town.
He frequently runs out of money. He tries to barter his old socks for some tangerines. On another occasion he sells kitchen scouring powder on the street as a concoction specially designed to clean nicotine-stained teeth.
The story, like so many other would-be spiritual journeys, ends in Tibet. Earlier in the book the author has cursed the Communist Party on many occasions. Here he sees that, having destroyed the traditional culture, it is now corrupting the monks spiritually by paying them at the same rate as cadres.
After being asked by a lama for a fee to photograph him, and then meeting a beggar who has given a thousand renminbi to a buddha already covered in gold, he inscribes the following in his diary.
"From now on I will hold to no faith. I can only strive to save myself. Man is beyond salvation." There is wisdom elsewhere, too. "People waste time fighting each other," he writes at one point, "when the real enemy is time itself."
Shortly after the journey described here, Ma moved from Beijing to Hong Kong. He now lives in London. "The first freedom is freedom," he rightly insists.
Red Dust could well turn out to be one of the great books about modern China. Flora Drew's translation is exceptionally readable, catching both the comedy and the sadness with apparent ease. This is in every way an excellent book.
Publication Notes:
Red Dust
By Ma Jian
324 Pages
Pantheon Books, New York
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