Ma Jian - Red dust: a path through China

Red Walls

Last year, in the spring of 1981, my work unit moved me from the staff dormitory block to a small house in Nanxiao Lane. Number 53. The house is squeezed between Dongsi Eleventh Street and Dongsi Twelfth Street in the Eastern District of Beijinga hundred metres from the former residence of Liang Qichao, a member of the 1898 Reform Movement, whose calls for modernisation so enraged Empress Cixi that he fled the country and spent fourteen years in exile. The old locust tree outside his gate twists up a narrow gap between a wall and a telegraph pole. Nanxiao Lane lies twenty metres from my front door at the end of a narrow passage and is just wide enough for two buses to scrape past one another. At eight in the morning and four in the afternoon, the lane fills with people and bicycles, and everything comes to a halt.

From my sofa, I can hear buses stop and a conductress bang on a window and shout, Wait for the next one if you cant squeeze in. Hey! You with the gold wristwatch! Yes, you! Wheres your ticket? All right, smug bastard. Take a cab if youre so high and mighty. Filthy rag...

The house is surrounded on three sides by red-brick apartment blocks. When kitchen windows open, eggshells, cabbage leaves and plastic bags drop onto my roof and roll into the yard. On one occasion I received a plate of fried kidneys someone up there must have smelt they had gone off and wanted me to deal with them. When I hang out my clothes to dry, pigeons nesting on the third floor splatter them with shit.

The yard is just two metres square. In autumn, the locust tree behind the back wall scatters it with twigs and branches. In the summer months, watermelon skins and empty ice-cream cartons fall from the flats and attract swarms of flies and mosquitoes, so I tend to stay indoors. Winter is the best season as my neighbours seal their windows. And when the snow falls, my mean little house even recaptures some of the charm of old Beijing.

I use the house to paint, write and sleep. My wife and daughter still live in my old flat in the compound of Yanshan Petrochemical Plant, a two-hour bus drive away. For four years I was the plants publicity photographer, while my wife danced in the propaganda troupe. Then three years ago, my photographs won a prize in a national competition and I was transferred to the capital to work for the foreign propaganda department of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. The job keeps me so busy, I seldom get a chance to return to Yanshan.

The house may be a crumbling old shack, but the tap in the yard and the private gate give me an independence and freedom I never had in the dormitory block. A band of writers, painters, poets, dissidents and hangers-on use the house as a meeting point. We talk into the night about art and politics. We discuss the new Household Contract Responsibility System and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. We play tapes of the Taiwanese singer Deng Lijun and distribute mimeographed copies of underground poetry. Sometimes we disguise a foreign journalist in balaclava and overalls, and sneak him into the house to show him our paintings and hear his stories. Many improbable plans have been debated between these four walls.

The room is filled with my paintings, I even use one as a rug. When I hold exhibitions here, many pictures go missing. But a man from the U.S. Embassy actually bought one once. He paid me forty dollars.

My neighbours prying eyes inevitably focus on my house. But the loud music and stream of visitors have also aroused the interest of the local police force. My friends all own keys to my front door. They try to arrive before dark so as not to attract attention. But when it is time to leave in the middle of the night no ones safety can be assured. So they either sleep over, or leave separately at five-minute intervals.

One night, I invited a colleague back to the house - a girl called Xi Ping who works in accounts. After supper, we talked for a while then I offered to walk her home. We had barely stepped two hundred metres from my gate when the police descended on us. Fortunately I had my identity card with me. I said I lived nearby, said we had been chatting and forgotten the time, said lots of polite things and at last they let me off. They let Xi Ping off too, but she had to walk back to the dormitory block through the long dark lanes all by herself.