Ma Jian - Red Dust

He told me many of his friends escaped to Burma in the 1970s to join the communist guerrillas. I asked him how the city youths managed to clear so much of the rainforest. He took a swig of tea and said, ‘We burnt the trees then detonated the roots. Our political instructor made us dig one metre into the soil. He checked it with a ruler. Said it was our political duty to "expose the roots". Chairman Mao wanted us to "Change Heaven and Earth". We worked like slaves.’ He told me a girl from his group went for a piss in the jungle and was attacked by a swarm of hornets. The boys stood and watched her writhing in the sea of yellow insects, but not one of them dared go to her rescue.

His group spent a week in the Jinuo mountains, felling a sacred banyan tree to make way for terraced paddy fields. The tree had one hundred trunks. The locals called it Niunaixiu. All that remains of it now is a patch of dry land.

‘How did you get through those eight years? I wouldn’t be able to last more than a month in those mountains,’ I said, rubbing cream onto my insect bites.

‘There was a road seven kilometres away, with a petrol station and a farm shop that sold ice lollies and mangoes. We went there every Sunday to buy tins of canned meat. We sat under trees with a lolly and cigarette, and watched long-distance buses pull up at the petrol station and passengers get off to stretch their legs. Those people were our only contact with the outside world. They told us about the arrest of the Gang of Four, bell-bottom jeans, ballrooms opening in Shanghai. We knew about tight trousers two whole weeks before the central authorities banned them.’

‘But you could write to family and friends, surely they kept you in touch.’ When my brother was sent to Inner Mongolia, he visited us every two years and always left with large supplies of lard and soya sauce.

Li Chengyuan stared at the tea cup lid twirling between his fingers and said, ‘I have not told anyone this before, you must promise to keep it a secret. My real name is not Li Chengyuan, it’s Li Aidang. My parents were murdered in the Cultural Revolution because of the names they gave to my brothers and me. Being the youngest child I could have stayed in the city, but I knew it would be safer to leave.’

‘Aidang — love the Party. What’s wrong with that?’

‘My brothers were called Aiguo and Aimin. Get it? Love the Guomindang!’ He smiled bitterly. ‘My parents had no idea, you see, never occurred to them. Guo-min-dang. Who would have guessed? In 1979, there were still seventy thousand city youths stuck in Yunnan. Forty thousand went on strike, demanding to be let home. I didn’t join them though, I had just got married and wanted to stay out of trouble. Then the government announced that everyone could go home except for married couples. The next day a few shame-faced couples filed for divorce. By the second day, there were five hundred of them queuing outside the registrar’s office. The government then stipulated that divorces would have to be registered within the next seven days to have any effect. You can imagine the chaos. Suddenly there were seven thousand couples queuing for divorce. It was a sobering sight. Half an hour before the deadline, hundreds of frustrated couples stormed the office. The walls collapsed and several people died in the crush. In the following weeks the streets were filled with abandoned children. Some parents tied their babies to bicycles and stuck notes on the handlebars that said: "Whoever takes my child can have this bicycle." ‘

When people have no sense of self, relationships are just temporary distractions from the inner emptiness and fall apart at the first obstacle. My brother’s friends used every means possible to secure return permits to Qingdao. Some slept in tight bandages for six months and were sent home with crippled limbs. Some chopped their fingers off. Our neighbour Zhang Li took pills on the sly and was discharged with liver disease. They were proud of their injuries. But proudest of all were the girls who gained their return permits by sleeping with village heads and political instructors. Li Chengyuan never wanted to leave though. He was afraid of the cities. He was afraid of himself. He said life was safe in Yunnan because if the government decided to launch another campaign he could escape across the border.

My last scarf is sold. I have made twenty yuan, but feel uncomfortable seeing all the women walk by with my pink chiffon scarves on their heads. A man walks up to me and asks whether I want to buy one of the water bottles dangling from his neck. I tell him I have an army bottle. He says plastic bottles are much lighter, and he’ll sell me one for just two yuan. I tell him to bugger off.

My patience has run out. I fetch my bag from the bus and start walking. I reach a hostel before dark. Dali is just a day’s trek away now. Next week, I will continue to Lijiang and explore the matriarchal Naxi villages around Lake Lugu, then I will cross the Yulong mountains and head into Tibet. I hope that there at last I will find a place where man can live close to his gods.

He strides ahead, waving me on occasionally with his army cap. We are nearly four thousand metres above sea level and climbing a hill, there is no way I can keep up with this local boy. On my first day in Lhasa I played basketball with Mo Yuan and Liu Ren and collapsed after just ten minutes. The boy has followed me all day, watching me take photographs. He loves to look through my camera at the crowds on the street.

We sit down for a rest. At our feet lie broken prayer stones and yak horns carved with the six sacred syllables. The view is perfect. Not a road or telegraph pole in sight. Just the red and white Potala Palace rising from the cliff, swallowing the sun’s rays and the hearts of the pilgrims. I have been here a month, but have still not visited the palace. Every day a man crouches below its walls carving mantras, boddhisattvas and auspicious symbols into the rock. He strikes his chisel with complete concentration as the dust flies into his face. When he pauses to rest or meditate his body seems to merge into the cliff. The images of Avalokiteshvara, Boddhisattva of Compassion, daubed with rainbow aureoles stare at him with piercing eyes. He has carved the cliff for five years, apparently. The pilgrims who pass on their way to the prayer wheels drop coins or food by his feet. Once I spent a whole day seated behind him, trying to discover the source of his faith.

I look in wonder. The boy seems pleased with my expression. He is a good guide. He led me here through a maze of side alleys and backyards. I would never have found it by myself. I position my camera on a heap of stones, adjust the focus and aperture, place the boy’s finger on the button and ask him to take my picture. But before I get to my feet, he presses the button with the force of a shepherd restraining a wild sheep. I sweep the broken stones away, reposition the camera and take a picture with the self-timer instead.

The boy gestures it is time to leave. I follow him through more narrow streets to a small hillside temple. He walks in and wriggles up a tunnel at the back. I climb up behind him to a cave filled with the acrid smoke of yak butter lamps. I move forward and see a lama seated beneath a gold buddha. The lama lifts a black stone in the air and slams it onto the back of a woman crouched at his feet. The woman looks up, bows appreciatively and disappears down a hole behind. The stone then crashes on the boy’s back, and he wobbles and creeps to the side. Without thinking, I crawl up and close my eyes and wait for the stone to strike. But the lama sees me and shouts in Chinese, ‘Han man! Han man!’