Red Dust

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In Chinese, surnames precede first names. Surnames have one syllable; first names have one or two. Each syllable is a transcription of a Chinese character and each character has a meaning and a sound. It is customary in English to write the two syllables of a first name as one word, for example, Guoping.

Transcriptions are pronounced as they read, with the following four exceptions: q is ch; x is hs; zh is j; c is ts.

The characters in this book are based on real people, but, except for Ma Jian’s daughter, their names have been changed.

Friends and acquaintances featured most prominently:

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 Beijing — a 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.

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