Ma Jian - Red Dust

My two compasses were giving different readings, so I split the difference and headed towards what I hoped was north-west. As dusk fell, birds swooped back to their nests and small animals croaked in the undergrowth. Insects suddenly filled the air and swarmed into my mouth when I coughed. I chose a tall tree and climbed to a branch halfway up. I stuck my knife into my belt, tied myself to the branch with a length of rope and doused myself with tiger lotion. After draining the last drops of beer from my water bottle, I tied a chiffon scarf around my face and looked up. In the fading light, I saw a patch of white flowers above, but when I touched them they transformed into a swarm of white ants. I pulled my hand away and shook them off. Some hours later I heard a loud cracking of branches. It sounded like a family of bears. The moon was out but I could not see beyond my hands. It was long time before the noises stopped. I sat on my perch, terrified and exhausted, counting the hours till dawn.

The following day I reached a small village of grass huts, asked directions, downed a bowl of bitter tea and continued on my way. Before dusk I came to a Lahu settlement in a remote fold of the mountains. A naked child sunning himself on the balcony of a bamboo hut saw me and screamed. His mother came out and leaned over, her breasts tilting up like the eaves of her roof. When she realised a stranger had arrived, she shrieked and ran indoors, leaving her son to cry on his own. Soon, heads peeped out from every balcony. Two men smoking in a doorway watched me pass. A half-naked woman with a shaved head sat with one breast in her baby’s mouth, the other drooping towards her thigh like a courgette. A skinny chicken stared at me then jumped onto the village fence. A dog barked at the stick in my hand. A girl stood in the high grass chewing a stick of bamboo. Her cotton tunic was missing a sleeve, and her bare arm hung down like a peeled twig. A man crouching on a balcony stared at me blankly. He was wearing an old army suit and had a blue bag over his shoulder.

The Lahu believe all paths are evil. When the Han tried to build roads through the jungle in the 1950s, the Lahu waged a bloody attack. The few members of the tribe that survived the battles retreated deeper into the hills and refused to have any contact with their ‘liberators’. The woman with the shaved head must have just married. Before their wedding day, Lahu women shave their heads and throw away all their jewellery. As I left the village I decided to hide in the mountains and loop back to spend the night in the valley behind. I suspected the Lahu might pursue me. They never kill on home ground. When I passed through the village again the next day, they took me for a ghost and ran away in terror.

A Han woman with long hair stood by a path, wearing a shirt, trousers and shoes. I ran up to her and said I was travelling to Bulangshan to interview the village head, but was afraid I would not make it before dark. She told me she taught in a school nearby and invited me to spend the night in her bamboo outhouse. Her husband examined my introduction letter under the oil lamp. He was having difficulty reading the handwriting so I told him he could take it back to his room and read it at his leisure. I asked them about their lives and they went blank for a second. The man said he worked on the fields and grew cabbages on their private plot. The woman said she had eleven students, and taught them writing, arithmetic and domestic chores. ‘Is it safe for the Han to live here?’ I asked. ‘Yes, but the villages are a little backward. Some parents refuse to send their children to a Han school. They say, if you want to teach them to speak your Han language, it is you who should be paying us! Only five or six children stay to the end of the year.’

I put some clean plasters on my cuts and blew out the lamp to save them the oil. I felt as weak as a punctured tyre. My spirit can return to nature, but not my flesh.

A bird sang out as it flew over the roof. I opened my eyes and saw the morning light filter through the bamboo walls and the cracks in the wooden door. I stepped outside. Clouds of white mist still shrouded the forest. The clearing was no larger than half a basketball court. The thatched hut opposite served as a cattle shed by night and a school by day. A few cows had pushed through the door and were strolling in the yard. I stepped inside the shed and found it filled with flies and dung. There were wooden stumps on the floor for the children to sit on. A blackboard hung on the bamboo wall at the back. I could still see some chalked characters from yesterday’s lesson.

‘Mao Zedong said: "China is poor, we must learn to be frugal. ." Read the text and explain how we know that Chairman Mao lived a simple life. . His socks are darned. . New words: frugal, remind, sofa, bodyguard, interview. .’ The other characters had been wiped off by the swish of a cow’s tail. I used that same textbook as a child in the 1960s. It had a story about Mao Zedong tucking his feet under the sofa when foreigners visited so they would not see his darned socks. To this day, whenever I see pictures of Chairman Mao, my eyes always go straight to his feet. A portrait of Mao Zedong hung from a metal wire above the blackboard, out of tails’ reach.

The mist slowly lifted. I was very grateful for the good night’s sleep, and to thank my hosts I offered to take their family photograph. The man said, ‘Bet you’ll never send it to us,’ while the woman rushed indoors to comb her hair and dress the children. When I took out my camera, the man decided to join the group after all. The two boys sat on wicker baskets, rigid with fear. When the four startled faces stared into my lens the distance that separated our worlds seemed magnified. The sun rose above the school roof behind. I put on my pack, scribbled their address on a cigarette packet and promised to send them a copy. But the ink was washed away when I fell into the Nu River, and the photograph is still at the bottom of my bag.

In the morning I passed through a small Ake settlement, a remnant of a much larger village that was razed by the Han. I entered the largest hut and asked for a bowl of tea. The owner’s possessions consisted of an iron pot, a woman, the string of shells around her waist and the key that hung from her necklace. The key was puzzling, because he clearly had no need for a lock. I gave them a snake I had killed on the way and took my leave. As I continued up through the mountains, I saw peasants prodding terraced fields with bamboo sticks and dropping seeds into the holes. The dung heaps that littered the path were covered with large tiger butterflies.

On the third day I finally reached Bulangshan, the mountain stronghold of the Bulang tribe. Women in blue tunics and black turbans twisted cotton and kicked their buffaloes along as they returned from the paddy fields. The little baskets swinging from their waists were full of insects they had collected for the evening meal. I stayed with the village head, Secretary Lu. His grandmother was over eighty. When I asked to photograph her, she smiled and flashed her black-stained teeth. The secretary’s two daughters had beautiful eyes. They had not yet reached the teeth-staining age, but knew how to be shy in front of strangers. I gave them two lead pencils. I noticed a pair of plimsolls in the corner of the room and asked the secretary about them. He said he wore them to meetings at the town committee house.

In the next village I was told a frontier regiment nearby offered beds to visitors, so I marched there at full speed. When Instructor Chen heard how far I had walked he assigned me a bed and told me to rest. ‘It is a miracle you didn’t lose your way,’ he said. ‘You can relax now though. There’s a road just north of here that goes straight to Menghai.’