The PEN World Voices (NY Festival of International Literature) was in town a few weeks ago. I had decided to buy tickets for a panel discussion called "Voyage and Voyeur: Travel and Travel Writing"; the speakers included Alain de Botton and Ma Jian. Whenever I plan to go hear a writer speak, I like to prepare by reading at least something he/she has written. Thus I bought and started reading Ma Jian's Red Dust.
Mother Jones called it a "Sino-beatnik travelogue" and Time Magazine said it was "the Chinese equivalent of On the Road." As much as I like Kerouac, Red Dust is one of those books that captures the need for escape and the sublime freedom of travel, without the ego of many of the Beat and pseudo-Beat writers. Ma Jian was a Beijing artist who faced political persecution, and decided to escape to China's interior. For three years he walked and hitched through some of China's harshest and most remote regions, including Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia. After he escaped to Hong Kong, he wrote a book on the experience, long before he had even heard of a genre called travel writing.
Many others have written books about China, but I can't think of anyone else who had the dual roles of being both an insider and outsider. He was also the only one on the panel, and one of the few "travel writers" I have read, who traveled not out of choice, but necessity. There were times, when stranded and exhausted and alone in the middle of nowhere, when he wished he could go back home to Beijing. But he knew that home was something that had disappeared long ago when his persecution began.
One of my favorite parts of the panel was a discussion between the writers about idealizing a place and Westerners superimposing their preconceived ideas of a place over the reality. Ma Jian, through an interpreter, said, "People come to China and invent grand versions of it, like the Shangri-La in Tibet. I have been to all the places they are describing...There is no Shangri-La."
It is unfortunate that we live in an age when even the most remote and poorest places on earth are being hyped up and commodified as "destinations" by those with money and influence. Voices like Ma Jian's are becoming rarer and rarer. I'm crossing my fingers that they don't disappear.
