Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud

by Sun Shuyun

We returned to Korla the next day. It was time to call on my aunt. I had last seen her almost twenty years earlier. When I rang her the evening before from Kucha, she recognized my voice instantly, and burst into tears. I asked her where she was living and said I would be there by midday tomorrow. There was a long silence: perhaps she thought I was playing a trick on her. Now I rang again and fifteen minutes later I saw my aunt and uncle and their two daughters waiting on the roadside in front of their building. I got out of the car. There was no hug. They simply grabbed my hands, my shoulders and my head, patting me all over. They stared at me long and hard, as if I had just landed from space. ‘I thought I would never see you again before I died,’ my aunt said, crying.

  Then they saw the taxi with Salim waiting in it. ‘Is that who brought you here?’ my aunt asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we’ve been visiting the Kizil Caves. I’ll introduce him to you.’

  My aunt hurried to dry her tears; Salim got out of the car and she shook his hand. She invited him in for a drink, but he declined, and turned to me: ‘This is a rare moment for you. Enjoy it. Give me a call before you leave town.’

  Once Salim was out of sight, they all started off: ‘Where did you meet him? Don’t you know it’s dangerous here?’

  ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘take it easy. He was highly recommended by a friend. He’s clever and very thoughtful. Don’t you think he’s handsome? I quite fancy him.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s funny,’ my cousin said seriously. ‘People would say you’ve gone to the dogs.’

  My aunt and uncle are retired and living with my cousin. On the main wall of their sitting room hang three rows of pictures. My grandparents sit regally on top; below them are family reunion photos, and then group photos of each family. My cousin pointed to a little girl like a Japanese doll in one photo. I could hardly recognize myself.

  ‘We miss you and your parents so much.’ My aunt broke down as soon as she started speaking. ‘How I regret coming here,’ she wailed. ‘My mother went mad because of my stupidity. I have ruined my own life, and my children’s and grandchildren’s. What a fool I was!’ My cousins looked embarrassed and went out to prepare dinner.

  After leaving her village in 1952, my aunt travelled by train, truck and cart for three months, and finally arrived at a vast, desolate plane in the middle of nowhere. There was nothing in sight except for the horizon in the distance, no trees, no animals, no houses. She started screaming and refused to get down from the truck. ‘Where is the factory I have been promised?’ she shouted angrily, desperately. When the soldiers escorting the truck said she had to build the factory, she fainted.

  They had to start from scratch, to reclaim land from the desert, just as the imperial army used to do in the old days to produce enough food for themselves and to guard the frontier. They dug holes in the ground to sleep in and for the first year, they ate nothing but wild plants. They worked day and night to get the first crops planted. Even today, my aunt feels restless on nights with a clear moon: that had meant working through the night. My aunt cried her way through the first year, especially after she heard that her mother had gone mad and drowned in a river. They could not escape because they needed official letters to buy train tickets. Caught without them, they would be sent to prison or returned to the construction farm, where even more severe punishment awaited them.

  Having grown up in a village, my aunt was able to deal with the material hardship and the tough regime. What she was not prepared for was the mental agony. She and one million other young girls were recruited as brides for the People’s Liberation Army who had marched here two years earlier. She was under enormous pressure to marry quickly. ‘Marriage is not a personal matter,’ she was told in the endless political sessions. ‘It is a political task that concerns the stability of our frontier and the motherland.’ The men like my uncle had been waiting for so long and when they set eyes on the young girls, desire and frustration were written all over their faces. ‘I felt happy to see even a hen,’ my uncle joked. But he had to wait. The senior officers, often old or already married, took their pick first – they usually chose the pretty ones. When it was finally his turn, he had to be content with ‘ugly ducklings’ like my aunt, small, dark and almost emaciated. ‘She looked so alone and vulnerable. I felt I had to protect her,’ my uncle recalled. Every Friday he would give my aunt something to eat, the most precious token of love saved from his weekly ration. He was a country boy and pursued her in the only way he knew – through food. After three years’ courtship, they married, almost the last couple in the regiment. By then, quite a few of the better-looking women who were picked up first had had nervous breakdowns, overcome by disillusion and the strain of the ill-matched marriages that were thrust on them. ‘My poor looks saved me,’ my aunt said.

  My cousin came out of the kitchen and told my aunt to cheer up and stop complaining. ‘You made your bed; now lie in it,’ she said gently but firmly. They had prepared a huge feast, with a dozen courses of fish, duck, lamb, even prawns flown in from the coast. I felt bad but it was no use stopping them. ‘What do I save money for?’ my aunt asked. ‘I save money to go and see you and your family. Now you are here, we should celebrate.’ I knew how much my being here meant to her. Family ties are of the utmost importance for the Chinese. Before Buddhism spread to China, we built temples for our ancestors, not for the gods. Chinese society still revolves very much around the family. My grandparents are dead, our family is my aunt’s link with her past. She clings to it tightly, as if her life would have no meaning once she let go.

  ‘Come on, eat, eat,’ my aunt urged me, putting a mountain of food in my bowl. ‘I probably won’t see you again. I don’t think I will live for another twenty years. This may be our last meal together. So you must eat.’

  Tears were pouring down her face and into her bowl. I tried to comfort her, mumbling something about phones and planes making it easier than ever to talk and to see each other. I knew I was missing the point. Her dream is to leave Xinjiang, and to return to somewhere near home or what she could call home, anywhere that was not Xinjiang. I remembered my father tried many times to help her leave and did not succeed. It was almost impossible. The Construction and Production Corporation, with over three million people, is the backbone of Chinese rule in Xinjiang. Its real importance, as my guidebook says, is ‘the unique role it plays in safeguarding the harmony of all nationalities in Xinjiang, the stability of society and the unity of the motherland’. Now they are retired and nobody would take them in, and their children were not sure they could find jobs elsewhere. They were stuck here.

  When my aunt calmed down, she asked me what I was doing here. I showed her my book on the Kizil murals. ‘Who are these foreign devils?’ she asked, pointing at the red-haired Kuchean knights on the cover of the book.

  I quickly explained to her what I saw in the caves.

  ‘Why did they come here? I suppose this was a nicer place in those days, or they wouldn’t have come,’ she said.

  My uncle remembered the good old days. ‘It was better when we first got here. At least the locals were friendly. In the market, I could watch the women with their amazing plaits and exotic looks.’

  The situation deteriorated in the late 1980s, when the Central Asian Republics became independent and Islamic resurgence turned into a big wave. The ripples came over to Xinjiang. ‘Now if you go to the market, you can’t even bargain with the Uighurs. They think it means you don’t trust them,’ my aunt said.

  In the two days I was with them, we remembered the times the two families met; I answered their questions about all my relatives and we talked about my father’s death. But the pain of their life in Xinjiang, the regret for having come here in the first place, and the erosion of their early idealism – these realities dominated our conversation. I felt very sad. They have been in Xinjiang for fifty years but in an emotional sense they did not live here. It was a life of exile, but also self-exile: the Construction and Production Corporat
ion consisted entirely of Han Chinese, who were totally isolated from the local population. After all this time, they still did not speak a word of the Uighur language. The Uighurs were like some barbarian tribe outside their fortress, a fortress they have built themselves. They live in an impossible dream of returning home, and their longing has become a poison, filling them with loneliness, fear and resentment.

  If my aunt had only had to contend with earning a living and making a good life for her family, she might have been happy. But she and all her generation lived through endless campaigns, which put before them ever new goals of improvement, purging ideological impurities, identifying new enemies and demanding new sacrifices. They lived in perpetual agitation and fear. It was like a prison cell where the light was never switched off. Now suddenly it was dark, and there was nothing there. They felt lost and abandoned.

  I could hardly bear to say goodbye, thinking I might never be with my aunt again. She came with the family to see me off at the long-distance bus station. She was in tears once more, clinging to me and trying to hold me back. I felt something was tearing me apart. As the bus pulled out, she rushed forward on her unsteady feet to catch a last glimpse of me. I watched her becoming smaller and smaller, desperately waving.

  I sat back in my seat and watched the city go by, and then abruptly we were back in the desert, mile after mile of grey sand and pebbles, nothing else except for telegraph poles. It was extraordinary to think that my aunt and uncle and the people in their regiment reclaimed hundreds of thousands of acres of land from the desert, turning them into oases, with little more than their hands and their will to survive. Communism is about changing the material conditions. Mao said we can change heaven, we can change earth, we can even change nature – in fact there was nothing we could not change; that the settlers in Xinjiang have done. Yet they could not change what is in their mind, their attitude and their outlook.

  I could not help comparing Aunt with Grandmother. There was someone whose life was full of pain, and for most of it she had nothing. Yet I never heard her grumble; and whatever dreadful things we said to her, she remained loving and kind, all the time she was with us, forever optimistic. Grandmother could have been consumed by her suffering and spent her life complaining and hoping that others would help her. Instead she mastered her pain, as if she said to herself, ‘You cannot change your life, you have to change how you look at it.’ This is what Buddhism teaches. A monk once told me the story of two girls who loved the same policeman. One said, ‘He must love me, he always waves me on.’ The other said, ‘He must love me, he always holds me up so he can look at me a little longer.’ If you want to, you can see things in a good light.

  I thought of how Grandmother always tried to make me think positively. I had to wear glasses when I was young. I hated them – they made me look bookish, at a time when books were out. The other children taunted me with the usual ‘four-eyes’. The moment I left the house I would take them off. When Father found out, he slapped me. ‘We’ve spent all this money on you. Your glasses are more than your mother’s monthly salary.’

  Grandmother took a different tack. She said, ‘Didn’t you say your head teacher wears glasses? It’s a sign of intelligence. They suit you. You’re a very clever girl. Look at me, I never learned to read and write. I can’t even tell the characters for men and women outside the toilet. Don’t end up like me. Study hard, a skill is never a burden.’

  In those days the more you studied, the more reactionary you were considered to be; young people like my elder sister were sent to the countryside instead of university. I do not know where Grandmother got the idea that studying would be good for me. Perhaps from the old operas she watched, where penniless young men came out number one in the imperial exams and married the emperors’ daughters. Grandmother proved right. When the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, universities began to recruit again. I was fortunate to have gone to Beijing University, and then Oxford – a world apart from Handan, the small city where I grew up. Grandmother was so pleased for me. ‘A phoenix has come out of a hen’s nest,’ she told anybody who cared to listen.

  Aunt is so tough, so brave, so strong. Hardship meant nothing to her – she survived so much of it. But she is consumed with self-recrimination and regret, and they have almost overwhelmed her. If only she could have seen her experience differently. Perhaps mind is reality, as the Buddha said: with one thought, we can be in heaven, with another, in hell.

  FIVE

  Land of Heavenly Mountains

  IT WAS EARLY IN 628, and Xuanzang was beleaguered in Kucha. The wind howled and storms raged over the desert, hurling up the snow from the ground. It was deep winter and the thriving Silk Road was brought to a standstill. Looking out from his monastery, Xuanzang could see the Heavenly Mountains, whose passes were closed. His heart was on fire. He had been on the road for almost six months and had barely made a dent in the journey, considering how long it was. He felt he could not afford to wait any longer.

  He went to the caravanserais near the city gates daily, hoping to find some new arrivals with the latest travel information. But it was the same stranded merchants who greeted him. He tried to persuade them to leave at once but they said they would wait; more haste, less speed. It was expensive to keep so many people and animals supplied, but their job was to deliver their valuable goods and guarantee everyone’s safety.

  After two months’ waiting, Xuanzang finally decided to climb the Heavenly Mountains in the deep winter, against everyone’s warning. The King of Kucha begged him to stay until it was safe. ‘What fear can I now have in facing the passage of the ice-bound glaciers? My only anxiety is that I should be too late to pay my reverence at the spot where stands the tree of wisdom,’ Xuanzang replied.

  Soon they were climbing towards the Bedal Pass. Hui Li gives us a vivid account of its dangers: ‘Since the creation of the world, snow has accumulated here and has turned into blocks of ice which melt neither in spring nor in summer. They roll away in boundless sheets of hard, gleaming white, losing themselves in the clouds. Looking at them one is blinded by their brightness. The path is strewn with cliffs and pinnacles of ice, some of them as much as one hundred feet high, others two or three dozen feet wide. The latter cannot be crossed without great difficulty nor the former climbed without peril.’

  It was a terrible passage. Even wrapped in the heavy folds of their furs they could not keep warm; the men were freezing, huddled together shivering. If they stopped, the wind and snow made it impossible to sleep or to cook. The horses wore felt on their hooves but they were frightened and skidded on the ice. For seven days, the party struggled on with hardly any sleep or food. They grew weaker by the day, and kept falling over. The King of Gaochang’s men had never been exposed to such cold. Xuanzang himself was soon suffering from some disease that would give him pain for the rest of his life.

  ‘Frequently violent dragons’ – as he called avalanches – ‘impede travellers with the damage they inflict. Those who go on this road should not wear red garments nor carry hollow gourds or shout loudly. The least forgetfulness of these precautions entails certain misfortune. A violent wind suddenly rises with storms of flying sand and gravel; those who encounter them, sinking through exhaustion, are almost sure to die.’ Xuanzang would have made sure no one in the group broke the prohibitions, and the danger made him appreciate the warning of the merchants in Kucha. But it was too late. The avalanche he described struck, and killed fourteen men and many more oxen and horses, destroying most of his supplies – the worst calamity he suffered on his entire journey.

  Xuanzang was fearless. Obstacles made him redouble his exertions; danger increased his courage. Ordinary men would become disheartened – the enlightened look straight towards their goal, and do not stop until it is achieved. This is viriya, or effort, one of the ten perfections of the Bodhisattvas. But this tragedy brought home to him that his rashness would jeopardize his entire journey. He needed a little caution, more willingness to listen, mo
re careful planning. The lesson was a powerful one; it stayed with him and he never made the same mistake again.

  I wanted to go through the pass, following Xuanzang. But the Bedal Pass today is jointly operated by the Chinese and Kyrgyz governments. The Chinese have built their half of the road up to the pass, only two hours from the foot of the mountains on a brand-new tarmac road, but the Kyrgyz have not started work on the way down. I had to take a plane from Urumqi to Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, and retrace Xuanzang’s footsteps from the foot of the Heavenly Mountains on the other side.

  Urumqi is a sprawling city, whose only distinction is to be further from the sea than any other city in the world. What struck me about it were posters everywhere exhorting everyone to safeguard the motherland, to resist the separatists who want to split it. In the Xinjiang Airline office the counter selling tickets to Bishkek had no customers. It was a nice change from the usual scrum. I was offered a one-third discount, and departed on an almost empty plane.

  We were soon over the Heavenly Mountains. The plane was flying very low. The sky was a brilliant blue with only a sprinkling of clouds; the peaks below, wave after wave of them, craggy and snow-clad, stretched as far as the horizon. Looking down, I could see right into the depths of the ravines, cut between them like surgical incisions. Xuanzang survived the avalanche but he was uncertain what would be waiting for him when he descended.

  He was now in the territory of the arch-enemy of Tang China, the empire of the Turks. One of the numerous nomadic peoples on the Eurasian steppes, the Turks established, in the short space of barely fifty years, one of the biggest empires in the world at the time, controlling the vast territory between Persia and China, stretching to Afghanistan in the south, and to the north Lake Baykal in today’s Russia. The oases in the Western Region such as Gaochang and Kucha all pledged allegiance to the Turks. But their ambitions were not yet fully realized. They looked east to China, and dreamed of taking it with all its ancient civilization and wealth. It would be six hundred years before Ghengis Khan fulfilled their dream.