Ma Jian - Red Dust

He tells me of the Muslim and Tibetan minorities who inhabit this area. He speaks of the history of Tibetan revolt and of the Xunhua Tibetan Uprising of 1958 in which five hundred monks were killed by the People’s Liberation Army and over three thousand civilians were arrested. Before I came here, the only thing I knew about Xunhua was that it was the birthplace of the Panchen Lama. After a few days’ browsing through the local records, I decide on a route that will take me to the Salar village of Mengda, the sacred Lake of Heaven, and onwards to the Tibetan pastures of northern Sichuan. The director tries to dissuade me from travelling through Tibetan regions alone, as there is still much hostility towards the Han. Nevertheless, when I say goodbye three days later he gives me a letter of introduction, and twenty yuan from his own pocket.

After leaving Xunhua, I walk five kilometres south to see the sacred stone camel of the Salar people. According to legend, the Muslim ancestors of the Salar left Samarkand in the fourteenth century in search of a new home, bringing a white camel to lead the way and a copy of the Koran. When they reached Xunhua the camel turned to stone. The statue of the stone camel now stands outside the Salar’s oldest mosque, surrounded by an ugly cement wall.

The next day I climb higher into the mountains and reach a clear stream. If a local peasant had not informed me, I would never have guessed that it was the Yellow River. I follow it east through a deep ravine, taking photographs along the way. At one bend in the river, I see a long beach of silver shale curving like a woman’s leg around the base of a grassy slope. It looks a nice place to take someone you love.

Later, I meet three men and a woman washing for gold. They scoop sand from the banks on a ribbed board, flush the dirt away with buckets of water, pour the residue into a basin then pick the grains out by hand. They tell me they can each make five yuan a day from this.

Twenty kilometres along I reach a mud village called Mengda. I wander through the narrow lanes and see six or seven cretins, a cripple, and a child with a squint.

‘Where are all the grown-ups?’ I ask a girl with a baby in her arms.

‘Out in the fields.’

‘And that baby’s mother?’

‘I’m her mother.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Fourteen.’ She turns and carries the baby indoors.

The village head puts me up for the night. He says Mengda is so isolated, people marry young, often with members of their own family. ‘Reforms don’t mean much to us up here. A free economy won’t make bicycles or sewing machines grow from the earth. We planted a small orchard last year. I don’t know if it will produce any fruit. All the young men have left to find work in the cities. They come back at Spring Festival with new watches and big bags of clothes.’

‘What about the family planning regulations?’

‘The Salar are allowed three children. The soil is so thin, we need big families to help on the land or we would never grow anything on these mountains.’

Continuing east I pass a single cable bridge suspended high above the river. Apparently, a small Tibetan community lives behind the mountains on the opposite bank. It is hard to imagine how they survive in such isolation.

A further twenty kilometres along, there are a few mud huts clinging to the steep slopes. The people who live in them tell me the Lake of Heaven, worshipped by the Salars, is only a six-hour walk into the mountains behind. I stop and spend the night with a gruff peasant who lets me sleep on his mud floor.

I climb up the next day and reach the lake at noon. There is snow on the mountain peaks. The lake is so deep I cannot see the bottom. A band of woodcutters in a lodge nearby offer me a straw bed and a simple meal for a reasonable price. They tell me the lake is being developed as a tourist site and that poetic names have been assigned to each mountain, tree and cave. I have trouble sleeping at night. My nose is blocked, my voice has gone and the air is so thin I cannot think straight. I crave red apples and corn soup, and have flashbacks of my primary-school friend Rongrong selling hot rabbit heads outside the Red Flag Cinema in Qingdao. I see the heads steaming in her saucepan. You could buy four heads for a mao.

There are holes in my shoes. I patch them with sticky tape, but it falls off after a few steps. I come down from the lake and continue along the ravine to a village inhabited by the Baoan. These people are Muslim, and claim to be descended from Central Asian soldiers who intermarried, centuries ago, with local Tibetan tribes. I look at them closely, but apart from the white caps on their heads, they seem indistinguishable from the Han Chinese. A little boy strikes a pose in front of an old man with a wispy beard, and shouts, ‘Take a picture,’ as I pass. So I do.

Five kilometres downstream I reach Guanmen. A bull tethered to the village gates observes me through the corner of its eye. A child lugging a heavy basket of potatoes walks past and pauses to catch his breath. Further along I see two women washing spring onions by a well, and an old woman and a hen sleeping in a courtyard. The rest of the village is dead.

As the ravine veers north, I continue east to Dahe and book into a doss-house that charges one yuan a night. The sesame cakes in the village store look good but they cost eight mao a jin, so I buy some boiled sweets instead and a new pair of plimsolls. Back in the doss-house, I lie on the brick bed in the dark, pining for a hot shower and a soft mattress. The man lying next to me says the small market town, Linxia, is a two-hour bus drive away, and that tickets cost one yuan twenty. I calculate that I have just enough, and decide to take the morning bus. In the middle of the night the police storm in and demand to see my documents. They suspect I am a drug smuggler. The peasant next to me says the locals make small fortunes growing opium on their private plots.

In a backstreet of Linxia I see crates of tangerines stacked along the pavement. I would buy some if I had any money, and if I wasn’t carrying a heavy bag, I would steal a few and run. Instead, I crouch down, rummage through my belongings and pull out a pair of socks. I look at the old woman and say, ‘I’ll swap you these socks, Aunty, for a few of your tangerines.’

She takes the socks from me and holds them to the sun. ‘The heels are threadbare.’

‘I’ve only worn them once. They’re a Hong Kong designer label.’

She shakes her head and throws them back to me. I must make some money, I say to myself as I turn down a side road. There are no tangerines for sale here, just tables, plastic buckets, wash-bowls, food racks. A calendar seller has tied a rope across the road, and it is blocking the way of a passing tractor. The peasant in the driving seat howls abuse as diesel fumes chug from his exhaust pipe. A boy in a blue cap sits on the pavement behind a green carpet heaped with medicinal herbs and fly-infested bones. The carpet trader beside him pins a leopard skin to the wall. The black and yellow markings still exhale the air of mountains and forests. I ask him how much it costs. ‘Sixty yuan,’ he says. Cantonese pop purrs from an imported tape recorder on a table outside a hardware store. Deng Lijun sings, ‘If I forget him I’ll lose my way, I’ll sink into misery. .’ I remember playing that tape to Lu Ping. She sang the chorus ‘Forget him, how can I forget him?’ in a southern accent as soft as water.

I reach a busy crossroads and see people pushing barrows of beer, rice and cigarettes. Bicycles pass with racks carrying bundles of bean sprouts, women with bare arms or children with large staring eyes. Dusty long-distance buses, back from the mountains, splatter mud as they crawl to the terminus.