Song of the Open Road

Ma Jian has a failed marriage, a daughter he’s forbidden to see, a girlfriend who’s twice betrayed him for a pair of nylons, a prize-winning photo titled “Sunset Over Yanshan Petrochemical Plant,” a fetid flat on a Beijing lane and trouble at work.

“You do not understand how deeply you have been poisoned by bourgeois spiritual pollution!” accuses his Foreign Propaganda Department head. Ma can’t keep up with the latest directives: He photographs heavy industry when the new focus is on light. “If you can’t see the problem, then that is an even greater problem!” It’s 1983. Orwell was off by one. Ma’s circle of artists gathers surreptitiously at his home, a target of the new Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution. The police are watching. Should they migrate to Shenzhen, the new capitalist “special economic zone” at the Hong Kong border? Should they take lovers? Should they start a new literary journal?

On his 30th birthday, Ma faces a more existential dilemma. “Confucius said that at the age of thirty, a man should take a stand in life, but you still don’t know who you are. You have about twenty thousand days left before you die. Why are you wasting your life?” The walls of the lane and ghosts of imprisoned reformers close upon him and choke the polluted sky. His temple textbook entices, “Sentient beings, lost in the red dust of the world, come to the Western Paradise of Amitabha, Buddha of Infinite Light.” Ma sets off on his own campaign against spiritual pollution. He quits his job, forges an assignment letter, tucks “Leaves of Grass” into his pack, secretly buys a train ticket to the end of the line and leaves Beijing and its red dust behind.

China’s western expanse has propaganda, too, but here the sky that Ma sees above the roofs shines as blue as the one in the painted pictures. At the end of the Great Wall, he steps through its Gate of Hell, once the limit of imperial China. Ma has banished himself. But when at last he reaches the mural of Amitabha’s Western Paradise, at Dunhuang, the Buddha’s face reminds him of Mao Tse-tung. “I walk out in a daze. That was the largest Buddha I have seen in my life, but my mind is blank. I am more confused than when I went in.” Ma walks on, down China’s open roads and into himself. Three years later, his journey ends in Lhasa. A Tibet Press editor complains to his just-arrived friend: “There are only two things people write about in China: the contradictions of market socialism or painful memories of the Cultural Revolution.”

Ma doesn’t answer just then; “Red Dust” is his response. A memoir of his peregrination through enormous, diverse, awakening China, the book is an album of impressions and encounters that evince Ma’s realization that his homeland comprises more than Communism and the Han, the nation’s predominant ethnic group.

Ma is no different; he is large, he contains multitudes. We best see what he’s made of when he stops walking and holds his gaze long enough to describe the commoners and fellow travelers he meets along the path: a gold-panner, a drug addict, an IUD remover, a boy searching for his abducted sister.

He’s smashed his “iron rice bowl,” a guaranteed, state-supported income. Ma must rely on the kindness of strangers, a network of artists, manual labor and charlatanry. He poses as a feng shui master and packages scouring powder, marketing it as “Miracle Teeth Whitener.” A sucker catches up with him: “That powder you sold me was lethal. My teeth may be clean, but my mouth is all swollen.”

“It is a French product. Perhaps the formula is a little strong for Chinese gums.” Ma’s dark humor as urbanite and Han deepens with every pace. In Canton, he helps build a “minority park” to display the customs of some of China’s 56 ethnicities. He later meets an elderly woman who shames him with her memory of being exhibited in a cage at a similar park for three months as a girl. He sits in on a Miao woman’s folk song, then admits he can’t understand a word. In responding, Ma winces at his superior tone. He visits the great monuments and crosses the major rivers but comes to see that more fascinating are his steps across the open thresholds of his countrymen’s homes, shown so beautifully in his chance encounter with a leprosarium. Ma captures the feel of wandering off China’s beaten track, which is to say most of the country, far from the tour buses and souvenir stands.

People older than he is tell local legends and horror stories from the Cultural Revolution; those younger crow fairy tales of Shenzhen. Ma exists somewhere between this rural, whispered past and urban, exultant future. In the end, Ma realizes that his story is more than another travelogue or survivor’s tale. Like Gao Xingjian’s “Soul Mountain,” also set on the Chinese road during the Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution, “Red Dust” describes a journey in search of one’s self in a country crowded with selves. “I wanted to be alone and forge my own path,” Ma concludes, “but now I know that no path is solitary, we all tread across other people’s beginnings and ends.”

I carried “Red Dust” on the same trains and to the same monasteries Ma so vividly depicts. Last summer, for the first time, the rails held more domestic than foreign backpackers. At Book Mansion in Beijing, just east of the former site of the Democracy Wall, Chinese travel guides filled the bestseller shelves alongside Harry Potter. My fellow travelers, college-age Beijingers, listened to a summary of Ma’s tale and shrugged. Their generation has money, two-day weekends, cell phones, laptops, hiking boots, youth and, just that week, the Olympics bestowed upon them. Cui Jian’s once-banned lyrics blared from their headphones. Their bags bulged with the glossy literary journals Writer, Lotus and Frontiers. Exploring this great land was their birthright, they asserted. China was developing quickly. How could travel ever have been so daring and difficult?

At the end of the Great Wall, tour buses disgorged rumpled Westerners in front of the Gate of Hell. They swapped stories about toilets, zealous souvenir sellers and ancient sites restored to postcard beauty. They couldn’t imagine China any other way. May “Red Dust” remind them of the harsh consequences of the Chinese road, and also its comely possibilities.

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Mike Meyer first went to China in 1995 with the Peace Corps. He is finishing a memoir of his five-year journey across China.