Red Dust: A Path Through China

Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.

I will not let a political party tell me how to live, when to die or what to believe in. Our souls are linked to the universe, but we can never see heaven, because our flesh ties us to the earth and the people around us. But when the people around you have lost their will to be free, then earth becomes a hell.

I don't know where I am going, I just know I had to leave. Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.

There are still many white mountains to cross, but I am on my way home.

If there is road in front of me, I will follow it. I don't mind where it goes, as long as it takes me forward.

Is the Buddha saving man, or is man saving the Buddha? From now on I will hold to no faith. I can only strive to save myself. Man is beyond salvation.

Communism can wipe out individual rights, but it cannot destroy a nation’s traditions. Although, when traditions are too strong, they can smother the individual as much as any political tyranny. This country is now caught between the two faiths.

People who live isolated from the modern world maintain their traditions, but also their poverty.

When a country is ruled by a band of thugs, men behave like savages.

My other classmates are all married now, but they still seem to be stuck in the 1970s. Their only new topic of conversation is which factories give the highest bonuses. I do not tell them that I am a rootless vagabond now, who has travelled down from the Yellow Plateau for some rest and some good food.

This region has suffered from famines every year since the 1960s. Families own one pair of trousers between them, and the men who share them nag their wives to get pregnant so they can sell the babies for money.

It’s Tibetan custom that if a herder sees someone on the grasslands after dark he is obliged to ride them to safety. There are wolves out at there at night, you know.

I remember how we sat up in the tent last night without a care in the world, safe, warm, talking and drinking by the fire, and I feel a strange pang — the joy of entering their simple lives mixed with a sadness that I don’t belong.

I know now that no path is solitary, we all tread across other people's beginnings and ends.

When the people around you have lost their will to be free, then earth becomes a hell.

It is only when you take control of your life that you know you are alive.

no path is solitary, we all tread across other people’s beginnings and ends.

It’s easy to be kind when you are poor. I’ve met a lot of kind people in my travels, but the cost of their kindness is exclusion from the outside world. As soon as a road is built, the kindness vanishes.

When people have no sense of self, relationships are just temporary distractions from the inner emptiness and fall apart at the first obstacle. My

My real name is not Li Chengyuan, it’s Li Aidang. My parents were murdered in the Cultural Revolution because of the names they gave to my brothers and me. Being the youngest child I could have stayed in the city, but I knew it would be safer to leave.’ ‘Aidang – love the Party. What’s wrong with that?’ ‘My brothers were called Aiguo and Aimin. Get it? Love the Guomindang!’ He smiled bitterly. ‘My parents had no idea, you see, never occurred to them. Guo-min-dang.

If the sages have managed to transcend the fetters of samsara, why do they feel the need to leave these mementoes behind?

Families destroyed by Mao Zedong hang posters of him on their walls. Because they all know Chinese history changes as frequently as the Yellow River floods its banks.

The Chinese alive today are reincarnations of torturers. The wronged souls of the past will haunt us for ever. We must pay for the sins of our ancestors.

When man’s spirit is in chains, he loses all respect for nature.