Tao

Venturesome young Japanese student Aya Goda travels deep into the remote western and southern interior of China as protests swirl in the cities and foreigners are cloaked with the authorities' suspicions. She falls in with the charismatic and combative wandering painter Cao.

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Far from boomtown Beijing, there is another China - join an unlikely vagabond couple exploring it in this exhilarating "Chinese On The Road". This title is for readers of Xinran, Kerouac, Mao, Rinpoche, Mo Yan and Ginsberg, and fans of modern east Asian film. Venturesome young Japanese student Aya Goda travels deep into the remote western and southern interior of China as protests swirl in the cities and foreigners - especially Japanese - are cloaked with the authorities' suspicions. She falls in with the charismatic and combative wandering painter Cao, whose work is at the very edge of acceptability as far as the Chinese establishment is concerned, and after permitting him to exhibit in Beijing, they recant and decide to ban him. Always keeping two steps ahead of the pursuing police, the pair criss-cross the vastnesses of middle China and push up into Tibet, where Cao has been trained as a sky-burial master, expert in the ritual preparation of the dead for outdoor consumption by passing vultures.
By truck and by jalopy, by biplane and by train, dodging bandits and bureaucrats alike, surviving abortion and expulsion, the pair move through social landscapes of compelling power, leaving behind them an unprecedented trace map of the rural China left behind as its cities race on to commercial glory. Like some East Asian Cassady and Kerouac, Cao and Goda are a pair of wild kindred spirits in search of enlightenment and freedom, and Goda's prose - clear and metallic as a mountain stream - permits the reader to share their every intrepid step and twist and to taste tangily different flavours of contemporary China.