For many, the life of the Kazakh minority in China is nothing short of a mystery. Living a nomadic lifestyle in the vast expanse of Xinjiang and travelling thousands of miles every year in search of water and pasture, the Kazakh people with a population of 1.5 million and a history of a thousand years, seem like they come from somewhere far away and long ago.
But one book in particular allows us to take a closer look at this distant world: Winter Pasture, written by Han Chinese writer Li Juan and first published by New Star Press in 2012. Narrating the author’s trip with a Kazakh family into the depths of the winter pasture, the book has been a bestseller in China for years and won the People’s Literature Award. In February 2021, Astra House published the English version of the book, Winter Pasture, translated by Jack Hargreaves and Yan Yan.
Li Juan is widely regarded as one of the best narrative nonfiction writers of her generation. Born in Xinjiang in 1979, she grew up in Sichuan Province and returned to Xinjiang at 18. She and her mother run a small convenience store / tailor shop in the Altai Mountains, which the Kazakh herders frequent. They are one of the only two Han families in town. Living among the Kazakhs has given Li Juan a chance to observe and document the life of the rugged herders in the northwest of China. She has written several collections of essays about life among the grasslands and snowy peaks, with Winter Pasture considered to be her most popular and representative work.
The book is the result of a winter spent with a herding family. Amongst talk that the herders must settle in the next year as a measure to control overgrazing, Li decides to join a Kazakh family on their last migration as they take their three camels, 500 sheep and over 100 cattle and horses to pasture for the winter. The so-called “winter pasture” occurs in a remote region that stretches from the Ulungur River to the Heavenly Mountains. The family journeys across the vast, seemingly endless sand dunes, and Li Juan helps herd sheep, rides horses, chases after camels, builds an underground home using manure, collects snow for water, mends clothes, explains TV shows, and more.
Her Kazakh companions include Cuma, the often drunk but mostly responsible father; his teenage daughter, Kama, who feels the burden of the world on her shoulders and dreams of going to college; his only son, Zhada, a proud and smart boarding school student; his youngest daughter, 9-year-old Nurgün, who is Kama’s only bestie and confidant; and his reticent wife, a paragon of decorum against all odds, who is known as “sister-in-law”.
Li forms an intimate bond with them and gets to know their remarkable resilience and grit. As Cuma puts it, “If you want to make it in the wildlands and survive its winters, any fear of pain or hardship will be met with derision.” Months of life together allowed Li to get involved but also keep the perspective of a stranger. She spots the traces of tradition in the Cuma family: waving a small flame over the bed to ward off evil spirits; melting a spoonful of sheep tallow to massage into their hair; placing a horse skull as high as possible – because an object as noble as a horse’s skull must not be trampled upon, therefore it should be placed up high.
Modern influences are also seen: mobile phones, television and trendy pop songs; the young boy begging his parents to buy him a computer and install the Internet at the permanent encampment; Sister-in-law putting the litter directly into the stove – “she no longer thought of it as an offense to the fire; this ancient taboo had long been abandoned”. Li is writing about an unfamiliar world, but her works are by no means novelty – or sensation-seeking; instead, they exhibit great respect for a different culture. She explains in a talk with David Der-wei Wang and Mingwei Song held in April, “I set aside any preconceived ideas and entered this world entirely, accepting everything I had found difficult to understand before. I learned to appreciate the people who are destitute, vulnerable but incredibly courageous.”
Throughout the book, the writer has a keen eye for things happening around her, and vividly captures the extraordinary hardships of life in this desolate landscape. Here she describes the daily routine of sheep during winter, which gives readers a taste of the nomadic life: “The herder’s winter is harsh and lonely, and equally, the sheep’s is long and grueling. Every day, from December to March or April of the following year, the flock must leave their pen precisely at first light to wander the wildlands, scouring for withered grass. After they leave, the damp and warm sheep pen steams with white mist.
During the day, while the sheep are out, bits of frozen snow float about. The sky is always overcast, the sun always gloomy.”
It is natural to feel humbled in front of the unforgiving nature, and the author begins to notice the all-too-often-neglected things in life. She observes the relationship between the moon’s trajectory and its phases; she notices that the sky explodes with stars on dark, moonless nights, but the Milky Way fades into darkness as long as there is a moon – even if it is only a sliver of a crescent; she is moved by the moon rather than the sun as it feels closer than ever before. She sees the world around her and herself in the world, and dots the essays with lyrical prose and a healthy dose of self-deprecation: “On another one of those evenings beneath a perfectly round moon, a great southeastern gale filled the world with howls and hisses. But beneath the earth, it was as quiet as the bottom of the ocean, except for the occasional flapping sound made by the flimsy plastic covering the high window. Cuma drank his tea in silence. During those in-between moments when she wasn’t serving tea, Sister-in-law embroidered. Zhada stared at his phone. Then, the door opened and Kama came lumbering in holding an unweaned calf across her waist … those moments profoundly triggered my curiosity. I wanted to know everything, but I didn’t know where to start. I was only an outsider.” We see through the pages the image of the writer: sensitive, weak-bodied, at times puzzled and clumsy, but always sincere and genuine.
Winter Pasture is a collection of essays with the structure and rhythm of a captivating fiction, or as Li Juan puts it, “a non-fictional novel”. It shatters the boundaries between nature writing, travel writing and personal memoir, and is far more encompassing and thought-provoking, delivering an engaging and immersive reading experience on every page. The Translator’s Foreword by Jack Hargreaves and Yan Yan also provides helpful background information about the journey. For the first time, English language readers can get to know the rugged people, the remote places and the disappearing nomadic lifestyle and appreciate the charm of Li Juan’s writing.
The English version of another of Li Juan’s widely praised books, Distant Sunflower Fields, translated by Christopher Payne (Sinoist Books) was also published in February 2021.
Winter Pasture
by Li Juan
Astra House
Translation: Jack Hargreaves, Yan Yan
