Ma Jian - Red Dust

Xiong Gang’s doctor sees me immediately and gives me a week’s worth of pills. He tells me he is a poet, and is writing a poem about fish-eating fish. I tell him it sounds interesting, and take the opportunity to ask what happens during a ligation. I have always been curious to know.

‘We constrict the Fallopian tubes with a piece of wire.’

‘Do you still have to use contraception after that?’

‘No. Unless it was a fake ligation.’

‘What do you mean fake?’

‘If you give the doctor some money he’ll make a loose knot and you can go home and have another baby.’

The next day we cross the Yangzi and visit a New Stone Age burial site near Daxi. Local peasants make their living by selling fake Neolithic weapons. Xiong Gang takes me to one man’s house where I am able to buy a real one.

On 1 October, I catch a steamer to Fengjie, a town a hundred kilometres downstream. When the poet Li Bai travelled down this stretch of the river during the Tang Dynasty, he wrote of coloured clouds above the Yangzi and monkeys wailing from the banks. Today the monkeys have been replaced by fertiliser plants and cement factories that pollute the river with yellow waste. Where the green slopes have been cut away, the earth shines like raw pigskin.

I lie awake all night, soaked to the bones in sweat. My fever is still raging. The river breeze is not strong enough to blow the flies from the greasy bunk-bed frames or dispel the stench of urine and rotten pickles from the waters that slop over the floorboards. At dawn, I see a young man standing on deck with a book in his hands, and I walk over for a chat. He tells me he has left the army after three years in service. He managed to secure Party membership but not a driver’s License, so he was unable to find employment in his home town. Now he is off to Wuhan to try his luck. An old army friend of his has found a job there as a driver for a factory chairman.

Fengjie is set high in the hills. Its tangle of narrow lanes wriggles up a steep slope. The only piece of flat land is a small basket-ball court, where villagers sit gazing at the Yangzi or at the boys who circle the perimeter of the court on battered bicycles. There are red flags everywhere and National Day banners which say CONTINUE THE STRUGGLE FOR MODERNISATION.

After touring the temples of Baidicheng, I take another boat to Wushan that passes through the first of the famous Three Gorges. I crane my head out of the window at the appropriate moment. No one else in the cabin can be bothered to look, they just sit on their bunks staring at me. I think back on the buddhas I saw at Leshan, Emei and Dazu. Although their size and beauty were impressive, they struck no chord within me, and I left each one as disappointed as I left the Buddhist caves at Dunhuang.

The Yangzi River cuts through the heart of China, dividing the country into north and south. The south is green and fertile but I prefer the wastes of the north. I will travel to Shaanxi Province next. There are too many people in Sichuan, everyone has to fight for attention. The men glower with bloodshot eyes. The government has liberated the economy, the country is moving, and the south is moving faster than the north. The waters of the Yangzi look tired and abused. When man’s spirit is in chains, he loses all respect for nature.

A white cruise ship sails by laden with camera-toting foreigners. It is hard to believe they have to travel so far to see a river and some mountains. When we arrive in Wushan I go straight to the cultural centre to look for Ai Xin.

I knock on the door, Ai Xin is not there, but a boy leads me to her parents’ home. When her father hears I am from his native Qingdao, he invites me to stay and have dumplings. I spot a photograph of Ai Xin pressed under the table’s glass cover. Her mouth is pinched into a smile and there is sadness in her eyes. I can tell the moment I set eyes on her my heart will jump.

My temperature is still high when I wake in the hostel the next morning. I take some medicine, slip into my flip-flops and go for a stroll outside. Mountain peaks loom on all sides; I feel as though I have fallen into a deep crevasse. I find a copy of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea in a small bookshop, then return to Ai Xin’s parents to say goodbye. I walk into the room and notice a chicken tied to a leg of the double bed. The mother says, ‘My husband wants you to stay for supper, I’ve bought food in especially.’ She brings out her daughter’s photograph album and tells me to take a look.

About fifteen, wispy hair, tongue sticking out.

About eighteen, looking straight into the lens, blue skirt blowing in the wind, face framed by the clouds of the Wu Gorge.

Ballet tunic, one leg high in the air. ‘She studied at Chengdu Academy of Dance,’ her mother says proudly.

Hair in bunches, smiling at me, lips pressed together. On the back of the photograph: ‘Chongqing, Aug ‘83.’ I remember how Lu Ping was still beautiful then and full of life.

Her mother goes to the kitchen to kill the bird while I sit on Ai Xin’s single bed. Her small desk is covered with a neat red and white cloth. There are notes scribbled on her calendar: ‘Send poem to Huai Dong. . Ask Old Wu for the libretto. . 4 yuan 8 mao.’ I take the comb from her pencil box and touch the wavy strands of hair. Variously shaped lipsticks and bottles of nail varnish stand next to her notebook. I flick it open and find it filled with her poetry. Many of the lines have been crossed out and rewritten in the margins. ‘The sea breeze brushed through my heart and tossed it into the ocean’ is struck through and replaced by: ‘The sea breeze blew away my secrets/ My love became an ocean.’

Her parents’ bed is pressed against the opposite wall, next to a sofa and two red thermos flasks. Her stilettos and gumboots peep from under a tall wardrobe. At the end of her bed are a pair of soft pink slippers that bear the dark imprints of her feet. I decide I have to see her.

So I stay another night in the hostel and move in with Ai Xin’s parents the next day. I take a sampan up a tributary river through a smaller version of the Three Gorges. Steep flights of stone steps rise from the banks to villages high above. I close my eyes and think of the smell of her hair on the pillows, and imagine holding her in my arms.

Two days later her father says she will arrive by boat tomorrow. He pours me some beer and talks about his daughter. He says he doesn’t want her to spend the rest of her life trapped in the Wu Gorge.

I wait for her at the wharf at the top of the stone stairway. A steamer comes into dock, all the passengers get off, but she is not among them. I sit down again and open my book. Two hours later another boat arrives. A woman emerges from the crowd and moves along the rickety wooden plank like a lotus rising from the mud. I stand up and feel myself getting smaller and smaller. She climbs the steps and peers up at me. In this sea of peasants heaving wicker baskets and cardboard boxes we are the only ones with empty hands. I call out her name. She smiles and asks who sent me.

‘I’ve waited for you for five days,’ I say pathetically.

‘What on earth for?’ she asks, as if she didn’t know.

We stick to each other’s side all day. When one of us goes to the toilet, the other stands outside and we continue our discussion about life and poetry. We go for a meal and talk about love and sacrifice. I tell her about the ocean and my childhood by the sea. We go shopping and she buys me food for my journey. In the evening we go to her office and sit together in the dark. She speaks of the men who are in love with her and the studies she longs to pursue in Beijing.

And she keeps asking me again and again, ‘What is it you are looking for?’