Wild Grass (eBook)

The Peasant ChampionThe photo of Ma Wenlin fluttered in my hand, catching the attention of the man sitting across from me on the train. 'He's a lawyer,' I said. 'I'm looking for him.' The man was silent for a moment and then said, 'He looks like a peasant, not a lawyer.' The black-and-white picture showed Mr. Ma staring straight into the camera, his face expressionless except for his faint eyebrows, which arched slightly in a quizzical expression. His hair was short, almost crew-cut, and he had a light stubble above his lips. He wore a plain white dress shirt, buttoned to the neck but with no tie. There was no effort to engage the viewer, no grin, no smile. It was an old-fashioned photo of a man who didn't pose for the camera as modern people do, a man who in the first half of his fifty-nine-year life had been photographed just once or twice. 'He represented peasants,' I said. 'In a lawsuit against the government.' Like all second-class sleepers, ours had six bunks and no door, allowing people to wander freely down the car, poking their heads in to visit friends and see who else was on board. But we were alone: the only other person in our compartment, a man in a middle bunk, was snoring lightly and the other passengers bustled back and forth in the corridor, concerned only with finding thermoses of hot water to make tea. 'Those kinds of lawsuits are complicated,' the man said ambiguously. Then he paused and collected his thoughts. He had a shock of gray hair that hadn't receded an inch from his tanned, creased forehead. His suit was Chinese style, the sort worn by the founder of modern China, Sun Yat-sen, and popularized by Mao Zedong, or Chairman Mao, communist China's first leader. Like Mr. Ma, the man wore his shirt buttoned up to the neck, with a fountain pen sticking out of the left breast pocket. It was the outdated uniform of Communist Party cadres from a decade ago, one rarely seen in the country's prosperous areas. But here, in a slow train leaving a remote county seat, it didn't look quite so out of place. 'I'm sure he won't be successful,' he continued, looking at me carefully. 'This is a poor part of the country.' I nodded but disagreed, casting a glance outside for confirmation. The windows of the train were streaked with rain, and through the blurred glass the denuded hills and earth-colored villages of the Loess Plateau rolled by. Once, this had been fertile forests and steppes, one of the birthplaces of Chinese civilization. Nearby was the grave of the Yellow Emperor, mythic founder of the Chinese people. Down in Xi'an, where we were headed, were the world-famous terra-cotta warriors that had been buried with China's first emperor more than two thousand years ago. He and other rulers had protected this cultural heartland by building fortifications not far from here that later became known as the Great Wall. Seventy years ago the plateau's mountains and gullies had sheltered the Communist Party for a decade, first during China's civil war and later during World War II. It was a region oozing in history and significance but now was exhausted, poor and relatively obscure. One commonly hears that these parts of the country are where change is least likely to happen. Instead, one is always encouraged to go to the prosperous coastal metropolises, such as Shanghai or Shenzhen, to look for China's future. But the more I learned about Mr. Ma, the more I understood that this region's backwardness had made it a precursor of change elsewhere in China--the poverty, the intransigence of local officials and the extreme environmental degradation bringing to a boil here problems brewing across the...