Winter Pasture must be the coldest book of the year. One day Li Juan gave up her job running a store with her mother in Xinjiang, China’s far north-west to go with Kazakh nomad herders on their winter migration to see what it was like.
It was cold. Bone-piercing, skin-destroying, prematurely ageing cold.
Winter Pasture, the story of a winter with Kazakh nomads. Photo: Supplied
A few hours into the ride, Li describes how her skin cream had frozen, water had frozen, food was inedible. Riders had to sit almost in a fire for warmth, their backs still frozen.
In one cold snap the temperature falls to minus 40 degrees Celsius, says Li who tends to the thermometer. Minus 30 at noon. The slightest breeze causes her eyes to shoot messages of pain.
Over the next few months, her job was to collect snow in the windswept, barren, nearly featureless Altai plains where they camped. In the morning, she would set off to find any snow drifts which had managed to settle against an undulation in the ground, gather it up and drag it home. Once she sees emaciated herds being driven north because there is no snow - or moisture - where they were. At night, the herders would slide off their horses, unable to move, until their families rubbed their legs to get blood flowing.
Li’s account, Winter Pasture; One Woman's Journey with China's Kazakh Herders, was a bestseller when first published in 2012. It found its way onto lists of best Chinese books awaiting a translation, and has finally just been released in English translation.
Han background
Li was born into a Han Chinese farming family in Xinjiang, now the centre of global attention over Chinese treatment of the Muslim Uighur and Kazakhs, but also miles away from the cultural centres of Beijing and Shanghai. She worked on an assembly line in Urumqi, began blogging her experiences, then moved back to her small town to help run her family’s store. She recently wrote, Distant Sunflower Fields, about a year trying to raise sunflowers with her family; it won the best essay in one of China’s top literary awards, the Lu Xun Literary Prize, named for the great 20th century critic and writer.
Tiny, bespectacled and preferring to remain unobtrusive, Li is also self-deprecating and tough. She recounts how she wanted to understand how the Kazakh nomads lived, but no-one would take this slight Chinese woman for fear she would be a nuisance, until she encountered Cuma, a drinker, who owed her mother some money. Her prose is quiet and watchful. She never claims to understand the nomad life. She records her own mistakes and misunderstandings.
At first, she is overawed by the cold and emptiness.
“The endless sky, the boundless earth, left us speechless,” she writes. The plains were so vast, she sensed the rim of the earth curving down.
“The earth was pale and boundless, but the sky was as dark as metal - heavy, lustrous and hard. Nothing else existed between heaven and earth.”
But slowly the story shifts from awe to domesticity. The figure of Cuma, alone against the wind, watching over his sheep and cows, gives way to the lights of the family’s burrow in the emptiness.
Cuma and his wife and children live underground to escape the cold. The burrow is six feet deep, lined with sheep manure on the walls and floor as insulation, then covered in rugs. Overhead, the beams support a dirt ceiling made from damping down the soil. When the dog walks over the ceiling, showers of dust fall. The family struggles to keep clean. Li washes her hair with laundry detergent. Cuma says it is a step forward from the yurts they used to live in.
I was, says Li, living in a “vacant part of this planet, as a member of this humble, even wretched family, owning only the most basic of daily necessities.”
A Story of Family Life
Winter Pasture becomes a story of family life in the midst of the most extraordinary conditions, united against the cold. She notes how the walls are decorated with the children’s school diplomas. The family cook, sing, discuss and argue, they watch Chinese TV series in 20 minute blocks because the generator can only last that long. Li records how the family are flabbergasted at one soap, supposedly set in the wintry north-east but obviously made on the cheap somewhere else, where none of the characters seem to be wearing the requisite layers of clothes to survive. There is a constant hustle and bustle against the emptiness.
She records the visitors who come from days riding away and must be entertained with a feast of welcome. And the occasional passing car, a lifeline for passing on letters to children sent away to state boarding school for the winter.
“There are no longer any secluded corners. Even our burrow settlement, tucked in the heart of the desert, maintains a degree of contact with the outside world,” she writes.
Father Figure
The undoubted centre of the story is the arthritic Cuma, the hard-drinking, charming, meticulous but ageing herder who sulks when he is not the centre of attention, can fix any implements and adores his wife and kids. To beat the boredom one day he spray paints the kitten pink. Then there are his gnomic utterances to Li about nomad lore. “Why don’t the horses have a stable,” she asks. “Because horses have no stomach,” he replies. We, and Li, are never quite sure if Cuma is pulling our leg or delivering ancient Kazakh wisdom. Most probably it’s the former.
The nomad life of the Kazakhs in Xinjiang was changing rapidly and Li Juan charts its impact on the family. Cuma’s children come home from school speaking some Chinese, they know Party slogans and watch Chinese TV. Their parents can’t understand the words. The children yearn for the life of the town; their parents know the life of the nomad. When Cuma gives his son Zhada money for the doctor, he spends it on a mobile phone to listen to music while herding. He was the son of a shepherd, says Li, “but what truly inspired him was the glittering life beyond the pastures.”
There is talk among the nomads their life is coming to an end. The land is to be restored with new grasslands but the nomads can no longer roam. It will be fenced off. They will be paid a government subsidy to settle down and farm. Cuma grumbles about the loss and grumbles he is getting too old to get the money to settle down. Life in a town is easy but life on the plains is what he knows.
In the end there is no simple resolution. When spring comes, Li hitches a lift with people heading for town. She makes no claims of ever wanting to return. Perhaps, Li’s Xinjiang and Cuma’s are just too different. Yet somehow in this book, Han Chinese and Kazakh, town-dweller and nomad, managed to meet and co-exist. And that feels like a minor miracle.
Winter Pasture
By Li Juan
Translated Jack Hargreaves and Yan Yan
