It is the early 1980s, and Ma Jian is a disaffected poet and painter in Beijing. The authorities are always hauling him in for questioning about his unconventional lifestyle -- sleeping late, drinking, staying overnight in the rooms of unmarried women, listening to tapes of the Taiwan singer Deng Li-jun (鄧麗君), and painting canvases that appear not to reflect the achievements of Chinese-style socialism.
One day he decides he has had enough. His current girlfriend has left him, and his last session with the police saw him bruised both physically and psychologically. So, though nominally employed on a newspaper, he buys a train ticket for Xinjiang province, and is halfway across China before anyone realizes that he has disappeared.
Red Dust is a record of his journey. It lasts three years and takes him in a figure eight through some remote and little-explored districts. He hitches rides on trucks, crosses deserts, writes poems about nature, meets down-and-outs of every kind, and mails the occasional short story to a magazine editor who admires his work.
Earlier, while still in Beijing, he has, despite his Bohemian lifestyle, taken Buddhist lay vows. And after reading a few chapters of this book you suddenly realize who it is that Ma Jian reminds you of; he's Jack Kerouac. If anyone is a "dharma bum," as Kerouac dubbed himself and his fellow Beats back in the 1950s, it's the author of Red Dust.
Like Ma, Kerouac practiced a wandering existence, on the road for the best part of his writing life. He too was against authority, enjoyed the occasional roll in the hay with girls (it was the Beats who originated the creed of "free love"), and made books out of chance encounters with the kind of people never previously judged fit subjects for literature.
Kerouac was also a searcher after moments of vision, mostly derived from wild nature. Like Ma, he revered Walt Whitman, and saw such moments as epiphanies, essentially Buddhist in character. Ma has a similar approach. Down the side of one of this book's maps he inscribes the following. "Immerse yourself in nature. When you can't be outdoors, feel deep within you the cleansing breeze, the lake's calm, the bud's promise."
This is, of course, in a tradition that goes back to Buddhism's origins, and probably much further. Have no care for material possessions, take to the road, put yourself at the mercy of chance, and hope to encounter enlightenment. The Beats picked it up in 1950s California, and here it is again, emerging once more into the light of day in modern China.
The other notable thing about Red Dust is its marked similarity to Nobel Prize-winner Gao Xingjian's (高行健) Soul Mountain. Gao too presents himself there as a seeker after visions, is both a writer and a painter, leaves Beijing to travel the remote areas of western China after a brush with the authorities in the 1980s, and has an eye for female beauty encountered on his travels.
But whereas Soul Mountain was portentous and dull in the extreme -- in English and, according to some commentators, in Chinese as well -- Red Dust is cheerful, funny, unassuming, and utterly engaging. There are innumerable ways in which this book is superior to Gao's, and you certainly don't have to believe Ma Jian should win a Nobel Prize in order to say so.
Consider this example of Ma's impish spirit. A group of young toughs in a one-horse western town steal his camera. Looking as rough as they do, he tells them he's a thief as well, and stole the camera from a foreign tourist only the day before. He suggests they join forces, and cement their newfound brotherhood with a few drinks.
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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