Ma Jian - Red Dust

In the next valley I see a school in the caves on the opposite bank. Classes have finished for the day and children are sweeping yellow dust from one side of the yard to the other. I am curious to know what these children want to do when they grow up. I decide to cross the river and pay them a visit.

A dirt track leads me down to a village of mud huts but there is no sign of a bridge. Four or five women are leaning against a wall, soaking up the winter rays. I ask them the way to the school. They laugh. I assume they find my accent difficult so I repeat the question slowly.

A women in a green scarf says, ‘It’s a long walk.’

‘But I saw it just now from the path.’

‘If it’s across the river it’s a long way. The nearest bridge is seven kilometres down that track.’

Patches of snow lie on the mud fields next to heaps of dry manure. There probably is a bridge down there but I suspect it is further than she says. When you ask peasants for directions, the distances are never reliable. You can walk for hours and still be told your destination is seven kilometres away.

I watch a woman feed her baby with a piece of bread from her mouth, and ask her how many children she has.

‘None,’ she says, looking at the track behind me.

‘Isn’t that yours then?’ I say, pointing to the baby in her arms.

‘Doesn’t count, it’s a girl.’ The baby’s mouth is smeared with wet dough.

‘Women are equal to men now, haven’t you heard?’ I say. I watch an insect land on the baby’s chapped cheek then fly away again. The mother tuts and rolls her eyes to the sky. I ask if there is a hostel in the village. They tell me the nearest one is in Mizhi, fourteen kilometres away.

I ask them if the Mizhi women are as beautiful as people say and they collapse into giggles. One woman pulls off her white scarf and walks away. I give the baby a sweet from my pocket and walk back up the way I came. From my map I see that Mizhi is twenty kilometres away. With no stops I should be there in three hours.

As I walk into Mizhi, I remember Fan Cheng saying he wished he could marry a northern woman. He said southern girls are weak and flighty, but northern girls are strong and chaste. That comment has always stuck in my mind.

It is market day. The path is muddy from melted snow. Pigs, sheep, dogs and bicycles jostle for space. The man selling rat poison shows a pile of dead rodents to prove the efficacy of his potion. The tooth puller displays a heap of teeth to prove his skills in dentistry. His gaze is unnerving. I suspect there are dog teeth and pig teeth mixed in his pile. A girl walks by with a steaming roll. I am too embarrassed to ask where she bought it so I walk behind her, breathing the sweet smell.

When the crowd becomes overbearing, I sit down at a food stall, order a bowl of noodles and watch the villagers walk by. There are men in blue overalls and young girls with red scarves tied at their necks and big rosy cheeks. On my left, a freckle-faced women sells plaster casts of the goddess Venus and slices of yellow cake. The fruit stall on the right must have caught fire earlier. Its burnt frame lies toppled on the ground. Charred apples and oranges steam in a puddle of water. An old woman in an army coat swears at a child. Six beautiful pheasants hang limply from the side of a bicycle rack.

I mop up the remains of my soup with a piece of dry bread from my pocket, then go to look for a place to sleep.

In the morning I search the streets for beautiful women, but see none, so I wander into a video room and watch a Hong Kong action film instead. Halfway through I realise it is Beyond Forbearance, the film I saw in Golmud. The worse something is, the easier it is to forget. Suddenly I hear the thud of drums. I step outside to see what is going on.

A crowd has lined the street. Through a cloud of dust, a yellow dragon advances, swaying above the heads of ten burly men. Behind it march peasants in yellow tunics beating the red drums fixed to their waists. Next come acrobats hobbling on high stilts dressed as Guanyin, Black Face, White Beard, and Pigsy and Monkey from Journey to the West; then singers with rouged cheeks and red cummerbunds and dancers with babies in their arms. I remember being paraded like that in the National Day processions. My headdress was so heavy it nearly broke my neck. The huts along the street are old and ramshackle, but the red flags and exploding firecrackers liven them up. The po-faced crowds, however, look completely out of place. They are still clutching live chickens and bags of flour, and their battered shoes are covered with dust.

For me, New Year’s Day is no different from any other. The fleas that plague my body will not leave me for the holiday. I walk back to the hostel, slip a towel into my bag and take to the road.

Beyond Mizhi the bare terraced hills follow in endless succession. No grass, no trees, no rocks. When the wind blows the air turns yellow and I cannot see a thing. But I will walk the road however hard it is, because only on the road can you see that yesterday lies behind you and tomorrow waits on the path ahead. The road measures life in distance. The further you travel the longer you live.

The yellow plateau resembles a wind-dried skeleton, and its insides are as pitted as an ants’ nest. After days of tramping the empty road I long to see a sweep of houses.

Sometimes I see shepherds and sheep searching for grass, but at dusk they all scurry back to their holes. When night falls I switch on my torch and keep walking.

Finally I reach Suide and go to find Sun Xi’s friend, the poet and doctor, Yan Hu. He lets me stay in his room in the hospital dormitory block, and in the evening invites his literary friends over to meet me. We finish four bottles of rice wine and litter the floor with cigarette stubs and owl bones. We stole the bird this afternoon from a glass jar in the hospital dissection lab. It reeked of formalin, but after braising it in ginger and soya sauce the taste was quite bearable. We embrace for jovial group photographs, then everyone starts accusing me of being a fake and a scrounger. ‘Swanning down here from the big city looking for your bloody roots. What a joke!’ Then Yan Hu mumbles from the floor, ‘I’m the only real poet in this room.’ His ambition is to secure a transfer to a Xian hospital.

Before my departure, Yan Hu agrees to show me the maternity ward. I have always wanted to visit one, but would never get a chance in a city hospital. The ward is so crowded the women have to sleep two to a bed. Four women lie in the delivery room with their legs wide open. A piece of string tied to a jar of water dangles from one woman’s vagina. Drops of blood fall into a washbowl below. Yan Hu tells me the other end is hooked to a five-month-old foetus. ‘She’s an unmarried mother. Doctors don’t have time to give women like her a proper abortion, so they just attach the string and let gravity do the rest.’ I watch her pale, damp face stare at the ceiling and wish someone would put an end to her agony.

The woman on the next bed screams as a doctor drops a slimy infant into the nurse’s hands. Another child born to gather firewood by the roadside and watch the traveller pass.

When I come out of the hospital my bag is packed with frostbite ointment and a roll of bandages. Yan Hu has some fresh placenta that he will use to stuff dumplings tonight.

I leave Suide in the dawn mist. The wind is north-easterly in the morning and south-westerly in the afternoon. The road south to Yanan follows tributaries of the Yellow River through a maze of dry ravines. Everything that grows on the yellow soil is yellow too. In the north, the Chinese eat yellow gruel, drink yellow wine and when they die they go to the Yellow Springs. I never used the colour in my paintings, it set my nerves on edge, but now I have grown numb to its effects. Life is so precarious here that people learn to change with the wind. Sons of men killed by the Party work for the Public Security Bureau. Families destroyed by Mao Zedong hang posters of him on their walls. Because they all know Chinese history changes as frequently as the Yellow River floods its banks.