Ma Jian - Red Dust

The scrambled eggs I ordered are riddled with flies. They crawl from my mouth as I chew. I ask the waitress when the eggs were cooked. She says yesterday, so I tell her to bloody well heat them up again.

From Yanan I travel a hundred kilometres east to the Hukou Falls and see the vast Yellow River charge through a narrow channel and gush down a precipitous cliff in wild yellow waves.

It is almost dark when I reach Yichuan. I spot a mud hut with a light on and knock on the door. The old man who opens it tosses some straw into his storeroom and says I can sleep there. We talk for a while by candlelight. I ask him what is the furthest place he has travelled to in his life.

‘The top of the hill by the Yellow River,’ he says.

‘How far is that?’

‘About eight kilometres.’

‘Have you never wanted to go a little further?’

‘They say there is nothing but fields beyond that.’ His face is like the furrowed earth.

‘Not all the land is tilled.’ For a moment I forget what towns are for.

‘What do the town folk eat then? People die after three days without food.’ He picks a burning twig from the stove and lights his cigarette.

Later the old man remembers he did go further than eight kilometres once. He injured his eye on the fields one day and was taken to the county hospital, but his eyes were shut all the way there and all the way back so he never saw a thing. He says he lost his wife in 1961. She was sowing melon seeds by the banks of the Yellow River and was washed away by a sudden flood.

As I approach the town of Hancheng, the road becomes black with soot. When trucks from the nearby mines rattle past, people as black as the road slide from their shacks to collect the coal that has toppled to the ground. The ditches they have dug into the road are so deep that even the best drivers cannot help losing some of their load.

From the hills above Fenglingdu, I see the Yellow River run through its wide valley like a thin trickle of urine. I am exhausted. China is too old, its roots lie too deep, I feel dirty from the delving. I have seen enough. A month walking these winding roads has twisted my mind. I need to find a patch of flat land and rest for a while.

A week later, I take a train to Qingdao to spend Spring Festival with my family. As I walk out of the train station, I hear the wide ocean and smell its damp, salty breath. The noise of the crashing waves holds memories of my childhood, my first love, my early passions for art and life. I glance over the tiled roofs to the highest hill, and see the Catholic church whose steeple was removed in the Cultural Revolution. The Germans took control of Qingdao at the end of the nineteenth century, and during the seventeen years of their rule, transformed it into a replica of a Middle European town. The elegant architecture had no effect on the chaos of my childhood.

It is nine years since I last visited my parents’ house. The yard seems to have shrunk. The red characters LONG LIVE MAO ZEDONG THOUGHT I painted on the wall at thirteen have almost flaked away. The sky looks a familiar blue above the red-tiled roof. I open the wooden door. The brass handle is still missing its inner ring and decades of turning have scraped a large hole into the wood. I removed that ring myself at the age of eight when my parents were out and donated it to the school furnace so that my teacher would praise me for my selfless contribution to the communist revolution.

The inside is as shabby as ever. The leaky lead kettle still hangs from the same nail on the kitchen wall. My school math book lies in the dust on top of the bookshelves, my Young Pioneer’s badge pressed between its pages. It takes me back to the Cultural Revolution, when my high-school friends and I would jump into the classroom through the window. The teachers had lost control. I remember when my English teacher tried to teach us to say: ‘Long live Chairman Mao. Long, long live Chairman Mao!’ my classmates threw paper darts at her desk and shouted, ‘Stop spouting the language of our capitalist enemies! Shut up and go and clean out the toilets!’

My brother has a child called Ma Yong and my sister is pregnant. My old classmate Wang Jun got his feet stuck on a railway line last year on his way back from work and a train drove right over him. My other classmates are all married now, but they still seem to be stuck in the 1970s. Their only new topic of conversation is which factories give the highest bonuses. I do not tell them that I am a rootless vagabond now, who has travelled down from the Yellow Plateau for some rest and some good food.

My mother does not reproach me when I confess that I have resigned from my job, but she is very upset when I tell her about my divorce. So for her sake, I pretend to the neighbours that I am still married. My father urges me to stay in Qingdao and find proper employment. He has some contacts in the printing trade and suggests I start a small publishing company. I tell him I am planning to find a job at Shenzhen University, then settle down and get married — so there is no need for him to worry.

When I sit on the sofa I can hear the clock turning back twenty years and start ticking again. But my childhood memories no longer tug at my heart. They lie quietly on the bookshelves or under the bed. That piece of wood wedged under the leg of my parents’ bed is the lid to my old pencil box. I remember holding it over my penis one day in the classroom when Rongrong was sitting next to me, and whispering to her, ‘Go on, have a look. Boys can piss standing up, you know.’ She leaned her head on the desk and I slowly pulled the lid away. The rusty metal leg pins that memory to the ground.

Although I grew up in this house and this town, I feel they have both moved away from me. I can no longer find my place here. The more I retreat into my past, the more dislocated I feel. The person I was and the person I am are two quite separate people.

Three days later, I catch a train to Hangzhou, desperate to see Wang Ping. I pick up a note from her at her office and join her at her parents’ house in Zhenhai. The house sits on the edge of a cliff with views onto the open sea. Fishing boats chug over the waves below leaving trails of smoke in the air. Two tall parasol trees shield the sunlight from the yard. The mother puts up a camp bed for me in the damp kitchen, next to a vat of pickled vegetables.

Wang Ping and I spend every day together, walking along the beach and talking, and my feelings for her grow like the beans her mother has left to sprout in the pot by the kitchen stove. I like to see her face change when she laughs. Her expression is usually blank, but she has a sweet little nose that makes her look amusing and intelligent, and detracts from her vacant eyes. Only once, when she discusses her plans to study abroad, do I see her eyes flutter with life briefly, like a bird trying to land. She is very quick and capable. When two policemen come to the house one night to check my identity papers, she sees them off with a few polite words and they never bother me again.

I finish writing a story about a scene I witnessed as a child, and I give it to her to read. In the 1960s, Qingdao fishermen were ordered to abandon their petty capitalist trade and devote their lives to studying Mao Zedong thought. They soon could not afford to feed themselves. One day they were so hungry they swam to a seaweed farm run by the local commune and stole handfuls of kelp that had drifted through the nets in a storm. Militiamen spotted them as they were swimming back, caught up with them in rowing boats and beat them with wooden oars. Some of the men were pulled aboard and tied up with ropes, but most were beaten so badly their stiff bodies were just left to float on the water. The men were stark naked. The wives who were waiting with their clothes on the beach looked on in horror and screamed.