Ma Jian - Red Dust

When I reach Yulin, I walk into the hills to seek out Sun Xi’s friend, Chen Jiang. He lives in a cave-dwelling on a cliff high above town. When I tell him I am a friend of Sun Xi, he shakes my hand and invites me to stay in his adjoining cave. The arched chamber holds a desk, a stone bed, some cabbages, and a fridge full of grain. I ask why he has a fridge when there is no electricity, and he tells me he bought it for when his little boy gets married.

At dusk, I sit on the terrace and watch smoke rise from the thousand chimneys of Yulin and hear children and dogs crying in the lanes. Chen Jiang’s wife prepares cabbage soup and fried bread for supper. The men eat at the table and the women crouch on the ground.

I wake the next morning and see half the chamber fill with cool sunlight. It is nice to lie in a cave. I feel protected from the outside world. Next door, the entire family is sitting on the brick bed. The room smells of corn gruel. The children are doing their homework, the grandmother is twisting hemp and the wife is kneading a lump of dough on a wooden tray. Since the wife’s hands are covered with dough, I help myself to a cup of hot water, then sit down and chat until noon.

In the evening, Chen Jiang takes me to a folk singer. I listen to his songs and jot down some interesting lyrics. In Shaanxi, folk songs are called ‘sad tunes’.

The next day, I stroll through the narrow lanes of Yulin, and am amazed to see Liu Yu, the patriotic walker, marching towards me, hair down to his shoulders and dressed in nothing heavier than a sky-blue shirt. He shouts my name and laughs with joy and astonishment. I am the first friend he has met since he set off from Jiayuguan. We find a small restaurant, order two beers and talk until dusk. I tell him about my journey then he tells me about his. In the evening we order some noodles. He says loneliness is the greatest hardship, everything else he can get used to. I tell him the biggest problem is finding shelter for the night. He says he usually sleeps outside. He practises qigong and has learned to sleep sitting up so that the slightest noise will wake him. He has twice been attacked by wolves. When the restaurant closes I take him back to my cave and we talk until dawn. He says when he has finished walking the Great Wall, he plans to trek across the Taklamakan Desert. I tell him I never want to see another desert as long as I live.

In the morning, I walk him back to the Great Wall, and we promise to meet up next year in Beijing. Then I climb the ramparts of Zhenbeitai Fort and gaze into the northern wastes. For thousands of years, nomadic tribes from the northern steppes charged through these plains to wage attacks on Chinese farm-land. The Great Wall was able to keep them at bay, until Genghis Khan united the tribes and led his cavalry south. For a hundred years the Khan’s descendants ruled the Chinese empire, but their dynasty was doomed from the start. The Mongols are wanderers of the wide steppes, and are not suited to sedentary life. The Great Wall here resembles China’s compound wall, and the yellow earth that sweeps to the south is China’s garden.

In the afternoon I leave Yulin and reach a fork in the road. I wait for half an hour, but no one passes to tell me the way, so I flip a coin and head west. Twenty kilometres on I come to a village and see a tractor parked by the side of the road. I walk over, hoping to wangle a lift. Four peasants are squatting on the mound behind having a smoke. I ask them for a ride but they say they are not going anywhere soon. Then I ask if there are any sites to see in the area and they tell me there is ‘White City’, a ruined town that is protected by the provincial government. As they speak, a jeep drives by and gets stuck in a ditch in the road. The driver struggles for a while, then gives up and shouts, ‘Twenty yuan!’ The peasants reply, ‘Eighty, nothing less!’ At last they settle for fifty, and haul the jeep out with their tractor. When the jeep disappears, the peasants rush over to deepen the ditch, then return to wait for their next victim. I ask them how much they make from this and they say more than they used to make on the fields.

The next village stands at the edge of a large gravel plain. I see a man sitting by a stream and ask him the way to White City.

The ruined city was built by the Western Xia Kingdom. Its walls lie half-buried in the gravel. They are constructed of ground stone and rice glue, which explains the white colour. Locals use them as sheep pens.

Another twenty kilometres south I cross a frozen river and reach the village of Qingbian. A child carrying a basket of firewood sits down and watches me pass.

Further south the road winds back into the yellow hills. I see a beacon tower on the Great Wall to the right and walk towards it. There are peasants crouched below the ramparts. A man in a nylon jacket drives up to them on a motorbike, balancing a large wooden cross over the handlebars. It looks like the central cross of a window frame. One of its four nails is missing. When he dismounts and takes the cross in his arms the peasants fall to their knees.

I walk up to him and ask what is going on.

‘Jesus Christ was born today,’ he says. ‘I am here to lead the prayers.’ I think how strange it is that Jesus should share a birthday with Mao Zedong.

‘I couldn’t make it yesterday,’ he continues. ‘Too many villages to visit. There are three hundred Christians in the area now.’ He is the priest of the local Christian society which has recently been restored after two decades of religious persecution. I ask him if I can borrow his bible, but he tells me it is on loan from the library, and is the only copy in the county.

I reach Jiaxian the next day and go straight to Baiyunguan, a large Daoist temple on the banks of the Yellow River. The muddy beach below is strewn with black boulders and blocks of ice. I seek out the sage Yao Lu told me Chairman Mao used to consult, but am told he has travelled to Xian for a meeting with the religious affairs committee. So I shake the divination box myself and pull out a stick.

When roaming the land keep your face hidden. Conceal yourself in the cities; Nurture your spirit in the wilds.

I register the advice, drop a coin into the collection box and step outside. A song celebrating the ninety-first anniversary of Mao Zedong’s birth blares through the village speakers. ‘The Red Army climbs a thousand mountains and crosses ten thousand rivers, yearning for a moment of rest. .’

In the hostel courtyard a troupe of peasants practises their red drums for the New Year parade. The noise is deafening.

The next morning, I continue down the main road south. As the cold wind blasts the sweat from my face an old folk song comes to my mind: ‘I live on the Yellow Plateau, where the wind scrapes down from the hills. Whether it blows from the north-east or blows from the north-west, the wind is always my song.’ A bundle of straw sits on the roadside, waiting to be squashed by a passing truck.

I hear a sudden burst of firecrackers and notice two cars parked outside a house. I poke my head over the gate. It’s a wedding. Before I know it, a middle-aged man in a Mao suit drags me into the courtyard. The villagers sitting down eating sunflower seeds clear a path for us. Every door and window is pasted with the words DOUBLE HAPPINESS cut in red paper. The bedroom is crammed with silk quilts and metal thermos flasks — gifts which the family will later wrap up again and pass on to the next couple in the village to get married. I am introduced to the bride and groom and given a seat and a pair of chopsticks. I wolf down some fried cakes and drain a bowl of soup. When I lean over the table to take some fish I discover it is rock hard. The person next to me explains that it is made of wood. I am reminded of how my mother used to boil stones in a pan of water so the neighbours would think we had food in the house. When my stomach is full I take a group photograph as thanks for their hospitality, and instantly my pockets are filled with sweets and sunflower seeds.