196 Books: China

Red Dust by Ma Jian

You probably know where China is. It's big. The US is mad at it. 

Here's the summary from the book cover:
"In 1983 Ma Jian, a photographer, painter, poet, and writer, set out for the most remote and toughest parts of China. Dispirited and fearful, accused at work of having 'a sluggish mentality,' confronted with a failed marriage, an estranged young daughter, and a girlfriend involved with another man, he abandons Beijing and a life he can no longer endure. Red Dust is the account of his travels, a remarkably written and subtly moving journey toward understanding. 
A dropout, a fugitive from the police, a Buddhist in search of enlightenment, Ma Jian embarks on a three-year trek that takes him from the deepest south to the western provinces and Tibet, journeying across deserts, over mountains, through icy rivers. And as he travels to increasingly remote areas, his circumstances become increasingly strained: he stays in filthy inns, sleeping four to a plank bed, learning to wait until his companions fall asleep and then lying on top of them. To support himself, he buys a pair of scissors and becomes a roadside barber, sells scouring powder as tooth whitener, lives by his wits posing as an enlightened religious man. 
His sense of humor and sanity keep him intact-'Danger is not exciting,' he tells a friend, 'it's just proof of your incompetence.' The greatest hardship he faces is disappointment-or perhaps his own honesty. Tibet offers no enlightenment ('Is Buddha saving man or is man saving Buddha?' he asks); his own restlessness undermines his yearning for love. Ma Jian's portrait of his country provides no understanding of its enigmas, no neat generalizations, no sweeping predictions. It simply reminds us of China's scale, its shadows, and, ultimately, its otherness. 

China is interesting. I know it's still communist, but I wonder if it's as rampant and obvious as it is in the book. Anyway, here are some tidbits I picked up from Ma Jian's account. So he decides he wants to run away and travel, because his job and the powers that be are, well, communist. But you can't really just go. Everywhere he stays he has to have like an invitation or a letter saying he's allowed to be there. So in going travelling, he's basically running away and it seems like he could have been put in jail for it. Or maybe the jail part would have been because he forged a bunch of the introduction documents. Anyway it's bananas that you had to go through all that to travel. I wonder if it's still like that. Also it seems like China is one big, gross smell, or it was in the 80s. 
So even though he had to have these letters to go anywhere, people's hospitality was amazing. They would just let him stay in their homes and feed him and get him into culturally interesting spots. And they would give him names of family or friends in other cities to stay with and those people would be just as hospitable.   
I thought this was a really interesting point: "I recount my thoughts after leaving the desert. 'Walking through the wilds freed me from worries and fears, but this is not real freedom. You need money to be free.'" And, at least in a city or "civilized" culture, that's true. This was another good one: "When man's spirit is in chains, he loses all respect for nature." Is that what's happening now? 

One of the last accounts Ma Jian gives is of a sky burial, which kind of grossed me out. I just had to look up more information on it to see if people still do it. They do. So they take the dead body to the top of the mountain, and this one had some sort of contraption they set the body up on. Then they like cut up or bashed the body for vultures and wild animals. And they hang out there while the body is being eaten. I mean, I also think burial like we do in the US is super wasteful, so this is better and more environmentally friendly than that. But it's still so gruesome, and to sit there while your loved one gets ripped apart and devoured by vultures seems awful to go through. 

This was a pretty cool book. It's awesome to read about people who are just like "fuck this, I need something new." But it also goes to show that you can't run from yourself. Eventually he grows tired of his nomadic lifestyle and decides to go back to Beijing and stability. End of page, end of story, gooooodbyyyye.