Honest, raw, insightful. . . . The Chinese equivalent of On the Road.” –Time
“[Ma’s] powers of description make every page buzz with life. . . . Someone who could rank among the great travel writers.” –The New York Times Book Review
“A Sino-beatnik travelogue, [and] a fascinating search for self.” –Mother Jones
“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.” –The Independent (UK)
“Ma captures the feel of wandering off China’s beaten track, which is to say most of the country, far from the tour buses and souvenir stands.” –Los Angeles Times
With insight only a native could impart, Chinese artist Ma Jian has written a powerful travelogue chronicling his years on the road as he explores the furthest reaches of China. Inspired -- or perhaps driven -- to travel as a result of governmental repression, Ma Jian speaks out in a bold voice about art, freedom, and the hardships faced by China's inhabitants. After leaving his home in Beijing with forged papers and only a handful of money, Ma Jian begins a three-year journey of self-discovery that also brings him to a deeper understanding of his own country. Although he visits deserts, ancient Buddhist statues, and other historical sites, the real focus of Ma Jian's narrative becomes his encounters with the struggling Chinese peasants he meets on the road. Questionable sanitation, scarce food supplies, and rigid social structure characterize the towns Ma Jian visits, making it increasingly difficult for him to pursue his artistic and poetic ideals. Western readers will find Red Dust an important, eye-opening work, one that opens a window onto a vastly different world.
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.
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.
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.
If you have time to read only one book on China this year, choose Red Dust.
In this skillfully constructed
An extraordinary-and offbeat-insider's account of life in post-Mao, pre-Tiananmen China. Born in 1953, Ma Jian had a wife, a child, and a good job working as an artist and propagandist for a government trade-union organization. But he wasn't satisfied living in a China that "feels like an old tin of beans that having lain in the dark for forty years, [and] is beginning to burst at the seams." Unwisely, he let his disaffection be known by growing his hair long, hanging out with dissident artists, and having a fling or two. His actions caught up with him: his wife divorced him, while his section heads brought him in for endless, surreal self-criticism sessions-one deputy accusing him of using a splotch of yellow paint to "suggest that we are a federation of pornographic trade unions." Ma took an unlikely course by simply walking away, traveling hobo-style through the western desert, down to the China Sea coast, and eventually to Tibet, where he kept out of trouble with the oppressed, Chinese-detesting locals by passing himself off as a citizen of Hong Kong. Spinning a single narrative, he collects notes on all he saw and did. Always a step ahead of the law, always with a fresh eye, blending in with the crowd, he was able to see things forbidden to Western travelers, from out-of-the-way oases to sometimes unpleasant scenes of daily life ("I went in and ordered a bowl of mutton noodles. They were quite filling, but I kept thinking of the sheep's head I saw bubbling in the pot"). Out among the cutthroats, brigands, shamans, and rural unemployed, Ma kept clear of the Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution for three years, living a grand life of adventure. How he managed eventually to wanderback into Beijing and resume a more or less ordinary life is a matter, presumably, for another book-one that readers will eagerly await.
