Travel Book Review ~ Red Dust A Path Through China by Ma Jian

RED DUST A Path Through China by Ma Jian. First published in English 2001, isbn 0701169125. 324 Pages. We often have this book in stock, click here to see if we have a copy in stock right now.

Many travel writing experiences are told through the eyes of the foreigner fish out of water. This story is about one man’s own country, and his trip over three years to explore a China where he hoped to discover some insight and find his place.

Written in the years just after Mao’s death, Ma travels through a country evolving once again where the cultural revolution has left strong marks and the new leadership brings changes to religion and a burgeoning capitalist spirit. As a photographer, painter and writer, he is forced to leave Beijing after he is denounced, asked to write a self criticism for his actions when accused of ‘Spiritual Pollution ‘ and detained and questioned.

The most fascinating parts of this book are his wanderings into small villages and his interaction with the locals, often struggling with dialects and local customs, bad food and poor living conditions. As a traveler he makes money through a number of odd jobs, including haircuts, selling cleaning powder as toothpaste to remove tobacco stains (but makes your mouth swell), selling chiffon scarves during a road block, making sofas and by selling poems and stories.

His experience with finding cheap accommodation is worse than any backpacker adventures:

‘I spend the night in a hostel attached to a petrol station outside the village of Redongba. The electricity is cut off at dusk. I fetch a basin of hot water and wash my feet and socks by candlelight. The bedcovers are filthy and full of fleas, so I douse myself with tiger lotion, lie on the bed fully clothed, and escape at the first light of dawn.’

One of the more confronting stories he tells is coming across an almost abandoned leper village. Not abandoned as in empty, but forgotten about by society and the government and struggling for food, medicine and supplies as well as acceptance.

“I open the next door and see an old woman crouched by the stove. Tufts of hair rise from her bald head like clumps of weed. Her eyes follow me as I enter the room, then return to the chillies behind the door. Another woman is asleep in the bed. All I can see is a patch of skin – a face or shoulder – peeping out between the blanket and the pillow. Her breathing is loud and chesty. An old flannel and a card printed with the words DOUBLE HAPPINESS hangs from the hook of a grey mosquito net. The smoke stained wall behind the stove is pasted with pill-bottle labels. It looks like fungus sprouting on rotten wood.”

Toward the end of the book, high in Tibet, the sky burial of a woman takes place. It is moving, gruesome and beautiful.

“ When I reach the sky burial the sun is already up. This site is not a large boulder jutting from a cliff like the one in Lhasa, it is a broad gravel terrace halfway up a mountain between the foothills and the higher slopes. Dirty ropes hang from a metal post that is rammed into a crack in the ground. Beside it lay rusty knives, two hammers and a hatchet with a broken handle. The surrounding gravel is scattered with fragments of bone, human hair, smashed plastic beads, scraps of cloth and vulture droppings dotted with human fingernails.”

Ma’s story is different to the usual China travelogue, as he discovers he is an outsider in his own country and ultimately, is driven home by a need for stability, family and knowledge of his own place.