Ma Jian - Red Dust

An old woman selling a garlic bulb bought a bunch of herbs and stuffed it through the large hole in her earlobe. A little girl sat on the pavement trying to sell a scrawny hen. I gave her five mao, told her to feed it up and sell it when it was bigger. Naked children scoured the streets like hungry chickens, searching for grains of rice. Occasionally a Wa trader from Burma strode through the dirty crowds in clean clothes and shiny shoes.

I will never forget the Xuelin villagers who lived in those conical straw huts. They each carried a bamboo pipe that was specific to their gender and age. Boys played loud courtship tunes on four-holed dangli, girls blew love songs on small, flute-like lixi, and old women whistled simple melodies on their two-holed enqiu. After a day on the fields, they would return to their huts, pour themselves a bowl of home-made rice wine and listen to an old man play love songs on a one-stringed lute. In the morning they would run to fetch mountain water from the village pipe, tie their babies to their backs and set off for the fields. I stayed with the village head. On my last night, his wife cooked a chicken stew. After dinner we huddled around the pot of simmering pig slops, and I asked them what they wanted most, because I could not believe that life could be so simple. Almost everything they wanted I could buy in a flash, but I still did not know what I wanted. My notebook says:

Bilisong, village head, 47: I want a brick house that keeps the rain out, like the ones in the county town.

Kanggeng, Bilisong’s wife, 43: I want a gold tooth. (She smiles. Her teeth are perfect and white.)

Sangamu, Bilisong’s daughter, 25: A watch, and an alarm clock.

Abengyi, Sangamu’s husband, 30: When I’m rich, I will buy a bicycle.

Junmei, Sangamu’s daughter, 5: I want an ice lolly.

Biniou, Sangamu’s son, 10: A dog like the frontier police have. One will do.

Eiwo, Bilisong’s daughter, 18: I don’t want anything.

Eiwo is weaving cloth for a skirt. She always curls her toes when she speaks. I gave her a chiffon scarf the other day and she has worn it ever since. She always sits furthest from the fire. The pigs in the sty below stick their tongues through the floorboards by her feet, licking around for scraps. I’ve lost two pencils to them already. Eiwo’s lips are so thick they stick out beyond her nose. When she sings her nostrils tremble. Last night she sang a Wa folk song called ‘Let Me Run Away With You’. The translation goes: ‘Let me come with you. If our water runs out, we can drink our saliva. If our saliva dries up, we can learn from the wind-monkeys and drink the wind.’

The Wa believe a new hut has no soul until the house spirit has been summoned. They entice the spirit into the hut with chants and a potion made from wine, oxtail and dried rat. Whenever an object is bought, money-ghost ceremonies are performed to ensure the ghost does not stay with its past owner. If a stranger approaches the hut during the ceremony, they rush out to shake his hand, as they believe he carries the money ghost.

The next page says:

May 21. Beautiful weather. I hired a guide in Xuelin to smuggle me across the Burmese border. We looped round the official border post and sneaked into Burma at Zuodu. The exhilaration of leaving China was overwhelming. I felt like an escaped prisoner. I tore off some leaves for mementoes. We crossed ancient woodland and fields of high grass and saw a mountain village with the same conical huts as Xuelin and Zuodu. We climbed over its wooden fence. There were lots of pigs but very few people. It looked like a model primitive village. My guide was afraid of crossing Decapitation Gully alone, so he found a local to take us through. The gully was indeed quite frightening. Looking up, all I could see was a thin line of sky. In the past, neighbouring villages met here to fight their battles. The victors would march home with severed heads and stick them on the village gates. I remember Chairman Mao politely suggested to a Wa delegate in Beijing, ‘Now that we have entered the modern age, surely you could rethink the custom of placating grain gods with human heads. Perhaps you could use monkey heads instead.’ Following that remark, the skulls were removed from the Wa gates and the decapitation custom slowly died out.

Suddenly my two guides stopped and started whispering to one another. I was afraid they were discussing my head. The knives dangling from their waists were longer than mine. I sneaked a knife from my bag and stuck it in my belt, then asked them what the matter was. They muttered in Wa and pointed to the sky. At last I guessed from their gestures that a bird had flown across our path and it was dangerous to proceed. I said we could rest for a while and wait for a bird to cry out ahead. According to Wa custom, if a bird sings on the path behind, you should turn back immediately.

I put my notebook down, lean back against the tree and close my eyes. All I took from that foreign land were memories of old women with caved stomachs, girls with bloodshot eyes selling loose tobacco, a desperate mother crouched by a pothole, dropping potatoes to her son who had fallen down four days before while out picking berries, and a man dragging a banana tree to market hoping to earn some drinking money. People who live isolated from the modern world maintain their traditions, but also their poverty. In just thirty years the population of Xuelin has grown from three hundred to two thousand. The mountains’ resources are stretched to the limit, and the people have no choice now but to build a road. I rushed across that land, knowing I would never return. Those villages belonged to the past. My destination still lies ahead, somewhere on a different path.

The next day the roadworkers have still not arrived and the line of trucks is nearly four kilometres long. Business is roaring. To pass the time, I take out the chiffon scarves I bought in Kunming and planned to use as presents, and start selling them for two yuan a piece. Our bald driver is still standing inside the bus trying to sell off his consignment of ducks before they die of starvation. He charges one yuan for a live duck and five mao for a dead one. Peasants who bought the birds yesterday have roasted them at home and are now selling them for twenty yuan. The makeshift stalls are selling their chillied beans, spicy peanuts, tobacco, tinned beef and beer at double yesterday’s prices. A couple of newlyweds take turns to guard the presents stacked in the back of their truck. The bride’s dress is filthy. She is asleep in the driver’s cabin now, mouth wide open. The pink silk roses in her hair are crushed flat. The groom is in the back, whisking the flies away as he rubs his dead pig with salt. Someone tried to steal some cement from another truck last night and the driver beat him so badly he had to be rushed to the county hospital. The policeman who has come to investigate told me the driver is the son-in-law of a local Party secretary, and will probably be let off scot-free.

I sell ten scarves in an hour. As I sit beneath the tree on my folded jacket, my mind returns to Li Chengyuan’s comfortable sofa that I slept on a few days ago. His study was neat and tidy. There was a potted jasmine in the corner and all his books were bound in leather. His wife belongs to the Dai nationality and is a nurse in Baoshan Hospital.

Li Chengyuan is a very cautious man. He does not smoke or drink alcohol. He insisted I visit the local clinic for an inoculation against Japanese encephalitis. He is one of the few city youths who decided to remain in the countryside after the Cultural Revolution. He said there were subsidies for living in the frontier regions, and that the salaries were higher. The stalls outside his house sold large-grain Zhefang rice, the smell was delicious. The streets were full of foreign goods that had been smuggled across the border at Wanding. But drugs were rife too, and the town already had two detoxification centres.