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Red Dust
Unavailable
Red Dust
Unavailable
Red Dust
Audiobook10 hours

Red Dust

Written by Ma Jian

Narrated by William Rycroft

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

In 1983, Ma Jian turned 30 and was overwhelmed by the desire to escape the confines of his life in Beijing. Deng Xiaoping was clamping down on 'Spiritual Pollution'; young people were rebelling. With his long hair, jeans and artistic friends, Ma Jian was under surveillance. One day he bought a train ticket to the westernmost border of China and set off in search of himself.
The result is a compelling and utterly unique insight into the teeming contradictions of China that only a man who was both an insider and an outsider in his own country could have written.
‘Honest, raw, insightful... The Chinese equivalent of On the Road' TIME
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 9, 2014
ISBN9781471252730
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Red Dust

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Rating: 3.834558757352941 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Jian's memoir begins in 1983, when he is living in Beijing. He works as a propaganda journalist but is a dissident poet, and as he is about to be arrested by the Public Security Bureau, he takes off on a journey through China. He leaves not only to avoid arrest but also because he feels he is looking for something. A blurb on the back cover of my edition refers to him as part of "China's Beat Generation," and this really is a lot like On the Road, with a longer and more dangerous journey. Jian travels by train, hitchhiking, bus, whatever, but in many cases walks for days at a time as he criss-crosses huge chunks of China. He meets all sorts of people along the way--other poets and artists but also many of the native peoples of China. He nearly dies at least three times. His travel adventures are a sufficient story, but added on to that is a story of what it was like to live in China in the 1980s. I have only read a couple of books about China, but in every one, I have been struck by how incredibly dirty it seems. Jian talks about terrible pollution--not as a tree-hugger, but as someone who has to wear a face mask at times to be able to keep walking. Jian, as a dissident, also experiences the illogical but terrifically harsh wrath of the Communist Party. One of the reasons he comes under suspicion in Beijing is that he used too much yellow in designing a newspaper piece, which his boss says makes them look like a "pornographic trade union," because he thinks yellow equates with pornography. I have read a fair amount about communist rule in Eastern Europe, but the extent to which the Chinese government interfered in people's personal lives--things like whether they went dancing and how long their hair was--surprised me. In addition to all this, most everyone Jian encounters seems to live in terrible poverty. Even city dwellers with what appear to be respectable jobs live (in the 1980s!) in tiny apartments or houses that lack indoor plumbing. What I cannot understand is how the Chinese government managed to keep the millions and millions of people living in these conditions under control for so long. Why didn't the Chinese rise up against the terrible poverty, pollution, and totalitarianism? Having just read Prelude to Independence, in which the author describes how American journalists kept colonial sentiment against the British stirred up because of things like a tax on documents, it is difficult to understand why a group of people would submit to such awful conditions.

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Lotta press blurb comparisons to On The Road. I dunno, haven't read it. Most of the characters were writers/artists but hard to keep track of everyone. Goes a bit into some of the cultural sides of the non-Han Chinese, which mostly came across pretty dark
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Ma Jian’s account of his three-year journey around China is classified as a travel book. But it is most certainly not the typical “best sites,” “best restaurants,” kind of travel book. Instead, Red Dust is a fascinating look at China, especially rural China, at a unique period in history, the early 1980s. This look comes from the point of view of a young man who was one China’s Beat Generation of poets, musicians, artists, and writers which emerged following the end of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s death, and the Deng Xiaoping “Opening.”Ma’s life begins to fall apart in Beijing. Ma’s wife divorces him and refuses to allow him to see his daughter. Next, it’s his job that is threatened. He has a good job as a photographer and writer for the government propaganda agency in Beijing. He becomes a target of the Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution when he publishes photos showing a bridge with flaking paint on it. Only photos showing China in its best light are acceptable to his bosses. He chooses the color yellow to illustrate one of his documents, a color his bosses and the Campaign associate with pornography. The bosses also criticize him for sloppy dress, long hair, and for spending all his free time with fellow artists and poets. He is detained for a brief time. Ma sees the writing on the wall. He flees Beijing with a few yuan and a forged letter of introduction. He learns later that thousands were arrested and hundreds executed during the Campaign so he knows that he made the right decision to abandon his life in the capital. He travels around China and experiences directly the red dust of life, a phrase from Buddhist writings that describes the human state of so often being lost in confusion and despair. His travels are extensive, from the deserts in the northwest to the lush mountainous valleys of the southeast where several ethnic minorities live. He experiences starvation and violence and near death more than once. His travel commentary gives the reader a great opportunity to learn about China during this time period. For example, in the northwest, he meets a young man searching for his sister who has been abducted and forced into marriage with a farmer in an isolated village. She is chained to the bed so she cannot run away. She contacts her brother and begs for help. There are many examples in this book of an intimate look into the lives of common people in this time of transition in the life of the Middle Kingdom.We also come to know Ma as a young man adrift. He is lonely, confused about the meaning of life, a young man who misses his friends and the sexual companionship of women. He has the urge to create that we see in artists, but he doesn’t know the meaning of why he does what he does, or of his relationships, or much of anything else. His wandering is in the world and also in his soul. He ends this tale of his journey in Tibet. It is there that he decides that he values Buddhist teachings, but that the Buddha has not entered his heart in a way that he had hoped. And communism is no alternative for him at all.After his epic journey documented in Red Dust, Ma makes his way to Hong Kong and then travels back and forth between Hong Kong and Beijing. After the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China in 1997, he moves to Germany to teach, then to the U.K. where he becomes a citizen. When in Hong Kong he meets China expert Flora Drew who becomes his translator and life partner. They have four children and live in London. Ma Jian’s books are banned in China.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Comparison's to Kerouac's On the Road are unfair. This authors is more sympathetic and takes more interest in the world around him. All the events are believable but whether or not it all happened exactly as described is probably not important. It's not a history book but it offers raw and exciting glimpses of it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    What an amazing book! Ma Jian is a Beijing photographer who flees Beijing just ahead of a smallish cultural purge in the 1980s. He's travelling not just to to escape the politics, but to escape his discontent with his love life and work life. He's off to find himself, and to find the real China. He travels in alarmingly precarious ways, nearly kills himself getting lost in deserts and jungles. He survives by doing small art works or selling souvenirs, or relying on the kindness of strangers and old friends.It's a fascinating view into a very different world. At times it's hard to get into, Ma can seem callous and unsympathetic on first glance, but his love for the people of his huge, sprawling, complex country is a constant background glow.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Winner of Thomas Cook Travel Book Award 2002This is a fascinating account of travels across China in 1983-6 by the journalist Ma Jian. Tired of his job working for the Propaganda department of the Communist Party in Beijing and disillusioned with his personal life, Ma Jian spends over 3 years travelling across China. I found the book initially hard to get into, but I was won over by the tales of ordinary, very poor people's kindness towards Ma Jian, his numerous brushes with death and the law,and his portrayal of a China amidst change i.e. the development of places like Shenzhen and Guangzhou as economic hotspots against the campaign of the Communist Government against Spritual Pollution and the contrast between the relatively affluent lifestyles of the Beijing set alongside the subsistence lifestyle of country people. I was particularly touched by the story of a festival celebrating regional way of life where a number of people were invited from country villages to demonstrate their culture, but they were duped into buying cassette players (remember this is 1983!) which had bricks in the middle, having spent a year's savings on the item. I am really looking forward to Ma Jian's new book about the events leading up to the Tianmen massacre.****
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Set in the mid 1980's in multiple locations across China, Ma Jian shares an inside look at a rapidly changing China. From the politics in the business sector, to social mores and the one child policy, this is a must read for those who want to gain a better understanding of an emerging world super power.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    China of the 80's through the eyes of a 30 year old intellectual tying to make sense of himself and China as it and he changes. The context is trying to avoid the consequences of a campaign against spiritual pollution at the height of the four modernisations policy. Over a million went to jail and 23,000 were executed. It captures the range and complexity of China and the pain of rejecting a Buddhist's response to Marxism or the Market. Being in China now you can see how much its has changed materially and even politically since that time where many of the things he did at great risk( have parties, sleep with girls, talk about art and poetry, travel are now commonplace. But he does pose an unanswered question: if you have economic liberalism without political pluralism will you run the risk of promoting greed as the main civic value? Seeing the growing divide in China and the flashy new money you wonder. The cake is certainly bigger so even the poorest are better off then 20 years ago but...but
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I owe this book a lot for awakening me to the possibility of traveling to Urumqi, but ultimately, it's not one of my favorite pieces of travel writing. Ma Jian's writing style is a little too restrained and doesn't convey a full and vivid picture of the places he visits.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A difficult but interesting read. A Kerouac-esque journey on foot through the hinterlands of China in 1985.