Ma Jian was born in Shandong, China in 1953. His works have included: Bejing Coma, a fictional account of the Tiananmen Square student protests, and Red Dust, a tale of his epic journey of self-discovery, that took him away from his surveillance existence in Beijing to the western most border of China. He is now a British national. His works are banned in China.
Red Dust (2001)
“In the afternoon I leave Yulin and reach a fork in the road. I wait for half an hour, but no one passes to tell me the way, so I flip a coin and head west. Twenty kilometres on I come to a village and see a tractor parked by the side of the road. I walk over, hoping to wangle a lift. Four peasants are squatting on the mound behind having a smoke. I ask them for a ride but they say they are not going anywhere soon …… As they speak, a jeep drives by and gets stuck in a ditch in the road. The driver struggles for a while, then gives up and shouts, ‘Twenty yuan!’ The peasants reply, ‘eighty, nothing less!’ At last they settle for fifty, and haul the jeep out with their tractor. When the jeep disappears, the peasants rush over to deepen the ditch, then return to wait for their next victim. I ask them how much they make from this and they say more than they used to make in the fields.”
Published by Vintage Press
Featured image: James Wheeler, Pixels.com
