Waiting is an Expression of Xinjiang

In a couple of years, I had tried to search the information about Xinjiang as much as possible to get a clear picture of people and things on that land, to know conditions of the life there. Without doubt, the news reports about that land are mostly significant social news, and less day-to-day details, which is easy to give a person one-sided opinion about Xinjiang. Definitely not solely because of Liu Chengliang’s In Xinjiang which records daily details about Xinjiang, but through the author’s writing I saw a place more closed to my imagination, where the climate is dry, and easy to preserve the dream.

Like The Village with One Resident, In Xinjiang is still about Liu Liangcheng’s own Xinjiang. But this time, the writer described more than the sand bay. In In Xinjiang, you can see writer’s observation of reality, and his own judgments. The differences between urban and rural areas are always being discussed, and Liu Liangcheng’s elaborate depict of the land is not of novelty as well. But through the bright and clean words, you can feel that this author from countryside is not indifferent to where he is from. To the opposite he is always concerned about the people’s situation.

He deliberately suppresses critical enthusiasm to find a reasonable explanation for the people who lead a life passionately. I wonder if there is a literature called fate-choosing, for that the wise people who muddle along a not so wonderful life have never been the topics of authors. However Liu Liangcheng noticed their lives doubtlessly. I’m not meaning that he depicts the fate of the lower-class people, even though it seems that the characters described by Liu Liangcheng are some ordinary people.

The ordinary Xinjiang natives live so simple, yet so unbridled lives. The barber who has a diploma in Law of Xinjiang University choose to be barber as he has not found a job after graduating for three years. “Just keep busy.” Although he did not move around for the sake of running a street barber shop, he knows many things happened in the city. “People are inevitable to have things to handle, big and small. People can lead a thrifty life without much money, for example people can chew dry naan bread if they can’t afford to buy bread, but how to kill a day without nothing to handle?” We can see that this is his philosophy. He’s not the only one to think so. When Liu Liangcheng visited the million-people bazaar, what he saw proved that these people always can find something which can be turned into money to kill time.

And the time should be another door to Liu Liangcheng’s prose world. The antiquities dealer in “Broker” “can understand the meaning of being old which means he understand the meaning of time”. “In the antique dealer Tohti’s eyes, the local life has never changed. Life itself is a huge antique. The life style adopted by past citizens has never changed for thousands of years, but this kind of antique has not been collected and can’t be traded with money, however it is of more value.” “Time stops here, where a lot of old stuff exist or linger here. Those old things of thousands year old can be waited at Kusen Bridge. Waiting itself is an old stuff, because the people here have been living a life called waiting.”

Waiting should be a common expression of the local people. Because of the harsh natural conditions, people’s life is really difficult. But it is rightly in this ubiquitous predicament where author has discovered a philosophy: people learned to lead a steadfast and persevering life. The guardians of Thousand-Buddha Cave in Kizil Gaha not only search for water for himself to drink, but also water the two elm trees planted by past guardians out of the door of the cave . “We support them for decades as our family members.” Liu Liangcheng can always extract shocking reality from common things. What can be more important and more exciting than understanding how to live a life?

As he said, he seems to “almost have no way to describe it” (Gurbantunggut Desert) because he is too familiar with this piece of land, but he still managed to describe it with a means of freehand brushwork in traditional Chinese painting. With his narration, we get the picture of Xinjiang, though those little fragments of which are not very close to reality, at least we can get some impression about it.

With superficial understanding, these things and people entering the writer’s vision are in hardships because they are indeed poor. It is too simple and too rough to make such an originally ecological summarization. As early as ten years ago, Liu Liangcheng has attracted attention with Village with One Resident. Some critics studied this book and concluded that the label of this book is “village philosophy”. The superorganic things are too obscure. After reading In Xinjiang, what impressed me most is the ending sentence of “Fate of Tree”: “I want to buy it, but I can’t find a private place in Xinjiang to store such a big thing”. Such a big thing perhaps only belongs to this land.