One can forget, when reading this gentle translation, that Li Juan’s account of her time with nomadic Kahakh herders in China’s Altay prefecture, was not written for us, the anglophone audience. Not only was Winter Pasture written in Chinese for a Chinese readership, it was a critical and commercial success. It’s easy to see why.
It is not quite as peculiar as it might at first seem for a young Chinese woman to pick up sticks and spend several months freezing in the desert with camels and sheep. Li Juan was born in Xinjiang and, at least at the time of writing, lived close by her subjects, in a small village by the Ulungur River where her mother ran a small shop. She had already spent a summer with one Kazakh family up in the hills. Finding a family to take her for the winter was no easy task: she’s Han with only minimal Kazahk, few Kazakhs speak much Mandarin and none think she would be able to handle it. But one family owes her mother money, so a deal is made:
it didn’t look like they would ever pay us back, so we gave up expecting it. Why not stay with them for a few months and cancel the debt? That was my mother’s idea.
And off she goes, by camel, into the desert, to spend several months in a burrow, which is pretty much what it sounds like.
Later, when I found myself hoisting thirty pounds of snow, tottering across the desert huffing and puffing like an ox, I couldn’t help but sigh: bad idea.
This is of course, an artificial situation: she’s not even remotely extended family, she doesn’t have any of the requisite skills and, although only glancing mentions are made of it in the book itself, she’s taking notes all the time. But somehow she makes it work, or at least so runs the narrative.
The paterfamilias is Cuma, who drinks too much, and is something of a martinet. And although he’s obstreperous, an inveterate liar and entirely self-centred, he loves his family and, in his way, takes care of them, someone who in other circumstances might have been called salt of the earth. His wife, referred to throughout as “Sister-in-law”, is much put-upon, and gets by on stoicism and fortitude. But the star of the book is Kama, the daughter just emerging from her teens: a girl on the cusp of womanhood, a traditional woman on the cusp of modernity. Kama manages to walk this tightrope with a combination of naivete, grace and insouciance. Other people come and go—so many it can be hard to keep track of who they all are—as do pets and various other animals. Through them, Li Juan traces the season: the onset of winter, the slow warming until it’s time to break camp and return.
Not a great deal happens, it must be said. The sheep have lambs, the dog has puppies, the kitten naps, Li Juan goes for long walks. The major excitement is when they get the TV to work and when Li Juan suggests how to rig up a phone. There are no major injuries, no one gets lost, no one dies. A great deal of time is spent drinking tea and thinking about, preparing and consuming food.
In the hands of a lesser writer, this might have been banal, dull or, perhaps worse yet, anthropological. But Li Juan is a keen and empathetic observer, with a great love of the land, its people and animals. She is forever curious, inquisitive, self-aware with an evident desire to communicate her interest and sympathy to her reader. In this, she resembles no one as much as Sanmao, another Chinese writer who wrote of her time in a different desert a generation earlier. And like Sanmao, Li Juan is both self-deprecating and, when she wants to be, quite funny: a newly-born, and rather poorly lamb, is in danger of getting lost in the snow:
I suggested tying a piece of red cloth or some sort of colorful fabric around its neck. Sister-in-law considered it for a long time before she agreed. She rummaged through the yurt beside the burrow for a long time before finding a red neckerchief her children used when they were little. Wearing the neckerchief, the lamb immediately acquired a sort of gravitas. It had become a glorious Young Pioneer.
In this she is aided by her translators Jack Hargreaves and Yan Yan who leave Li Juan with a distinctive voice. The readable translation steers just this side being too idiomatic: although Li Juan can be “grossed out” and an injured camel is “the poor fella”, she never sounds anything other than Chinese. (The Americanisms however lead temperatures being rendered in Fahrenheit and hence to some spurious specificity: the peculiar numbers of fourteen and “negative thirty-one degrees Fahrenheit” are surely the rounder numbers of ten and minus thirty-five Celcius in the original.)
The subtext to the narrative is that this will be last year that the herders will be allowed to travel to the winter pasture: they are, for reasons that remain unclear, to be settled. Li Juan does not dwell on this and the herders themselves are ambivalent: the nomadic life is a hard one and the financial compensation looks attractive. But the prospect lends the final goodbyes a certain sadness and finality: something is being lost.
It was already being lost, of course. The children are sent off to school, livestock is delivered by truck, people hitch rides into town. Cellphones are becoming de rigueur, at least for the young (given the lack of signal, more for their ability to play music than as a communications device). Li Juan delivers her opinions obliquely: Cuma’s black and white TV becomes a focal point for the few families nearby…
Everyone felt sympathy for the girl from Beijing sent to the northeast to herd sheep (an “educated youth”) because of her beauty and her misfortune. However, one thing that confused the audience was that if she’d been sent to herd, why were there no sheep from beginning to end? At last, during the next evening’s episode, there came a shot—the girl holding a lamb, gazing into the distance. With a collective “ooh,” the audience felt their skepticism alleviated. They waited for the frame to zoom out or pan so that they could see even more sheep. But the director let them down. Clearly, due to their tight budget, the production had only rented the one little lamb…
In another scene, the lead character’s horse broke a leg, stranding both horse and man in the middle of a blizzard. Everyone felt terribly sympathetic. But soon after, another man rode the same horse to save the stranded man. They all cried out, “The leg’s fixed!” Silly director, he didn’t think to cast a different horse. To poor city folks, all horses look the same. But for a herder, the difference between one horse and another is as obvious as the difference between two people.
A decade has passed since the book was written. Reading it from this distance can leave one wistful.