“How often do you buy a book because of its simple heft in your hand and the clarity, the appeal, of its cover? On a whim last month, I picked up a little paperback book from Mollat. Ordinarily I read fiction, with the occasional non-fiction or memoir interrupting the flow. I couldn't resist the title of the book. Red Dust: A Path Through China, by Ma Jian, a writer I'd never heard of before. I'll confess to an abiding love, almost an obsession, for nice little paperbacks. I don't mean cheap, mass-market paperback romances with lurid covers; I don't even mean gripping thrillers dripping with blood and guts. No, I mean small, nicely bound, appealingly packaged little paperbacks. I can't say no! And it's even worse when their cover pages are matte cardboard instead of the more ordinary glossy stock. Red Dust was potent in its allure; its cover largely white with a primitive red woodcut print -- an Asian dwelling with a thatched roof in the upper right hand corner, Buddhist prayer flags stretching across the upper quadrant, the Great Wall of China straddling the bottom third. Everything else is white save the title, black lettering against the central white section of the cover, and the author's name printed, also in black, within the red woodcut pagoda-like structure in the upper right. Despite the random way I ended up with the book, the purchase proved to be a good one. I loved the book. Let me tell you a little bit about it.
Red Dust is a memoir about an extraordinary adventure that the author undertook in the early 80s. Ma Jian situates us in the middle of his world, totalitarian China, the working world of Beijing, where every move and every utterance is under surveillance, where every individual expression is suspect, and where freedom of any kind does not exist. He's a 30 year old photographer, tasked with taking Communist propaganda photographs of factories and their employees around China. In his spare time, he studies Buddhism, writes poetry, and paints. These activities have garnered him the watchful glare of his superiors. He's uncomfortable under their scrutiny and ultimately decides to walk away from his job and start a 3 year journey across China.
As Ma Jian travels, by train, by bus, by bicycle, and primarily by walking, through rural China, across mountain ranges and deserts, through snow and ice and searing heat, we see over and over the astonishing beauty of his nation. The breadth and diversity of the landscape are with him constantly; the vestiges of China's history, the ruins of cities and temples, provide the backdrop for his journey. He details a near death experience where he finds himself walking across the desert with no water, having misjudged the distance to Lake Sugan. He's saved by the taciturn kindness of a man fixing the wheel of his truck. The man doesn't offer to drive him back to civilization. Instead he places the lid of his thermos, filled with water, in Ma Jian's path. And then he tells Ma Jian to follow a set of wheel tracks and wait until dawn, when a truck will pass. We never find out whether the driver of the passing truck the following morning is, in fact, the same man who gave Ma Jian his water. All we discover is the harsh clarity of struggling to survive, first in the brutal daytime heat, and then in the unbearable cold night of the desert.
In a later chapter, Ma Jian stumbles accidentally upon a leper colony, underfunded and essentially forgotten by the government, which is kept intact by the kindness of a young doctor who refuses to leave because he's gotten attached to the patients. Receiving virtually no financial help from anyone, the members of the colony, in various stages of physical disintegration, work the land and manage to eke out a frugal life for themselves.
Throughout his travels, Ma Jian is confronted by the cruel absurdity of the totalitarian regime, the strange, petty behavior that such a regime engenders in its subjects, and the surprisingly frequent and even more sensational generosity which even a regime as heavy and forceful as the Chinese Communist party can't suppress.”
mamabrico wrote this review Saturday, September 8, 2007.
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