Winter pasture One woman's journey with China's Kazakh herders

Juan Li, 1979-

Book - 2021

"Li Juan and her mother own a small convenience store in the Altai Mountains in Northwestern China, where she writes about her life among grasslands and snowy peaks. To her neighbors' surprise, Li decides to join a family of Kazakh herders as they take their 30 boisterous 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. As she journeys across the vast, seemingly endless sand dunes, she helps herd sheep, rides horses, chases after camels, builds an underground home using manure, gathers snow for water, and more. With a keen eye for the understated elegance of the natural worl...d, and a healthy dose of self-deprecating humor, Li vividly captures both the extraordinary hardships and the ordinary preoccupations of the day-to-day of the men and women struggling to get by in this desolate landscape. Her 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 reticent wife, a paragon of decorum against all odds, who is simply known as "sister-in-law." In bringing this faraway world to English language readers here for the first time, Li creates an intimate bond with the rugged people, the remote places and the nomadic lifestyle. In the signature style that made her an international sensation, Li Juan transcends the travel memoir genre to deliver an indelible and immersive reading experience on every page."

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Subjects
Genres
Travel writing
Autobiographies
Published
New York, NY : Astra House, a division of Astra Publishing House [2021]
Language
English
Chinese
Main Author
Juan Li, 1979- (author, -)
Other Authors
Jack Hargreaves (translator), Yan Yan
Edition
First edition
Item Description
Translation of: Dong mu chang.
"Originally published in the Chinese language as Dong mu chang by New Star Press ©2012"--Title page verso.
Physical Description
viii, 304 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm
ISBN
9781662600333
  • Translators' Note
  • Map
  • Part 1. Winter Burrow
  • 1. In the Beginning
  • 2. A Three-Day Journey
  • 3. The Importance of Sheep Manure
  • 4. Winter Pasture
  • 5. Our Underground Home
  • 6. Winter Slaughter
  • 7. The Only Water
  • 8. Cold
  • 9. The Sheep's Winter
  • Part 2. Masters of the Wilds
  • 10. Kama Suluv
  • 11. Cuma
  • 12. Sister-in-law
  • 13. The Neighbors
  • 14. Plum Blossom and Panda Dog
  • 15. Everyone
  • 16. Walking in the Wilderness
  • 17. Isolation
  • 18. The Only Television
  • 19. Rahmethan and Nursilash
  • 20. Kurmash
  • 21. Zhada
  • Part 3. Serenity
  • 22. Twilight
  • 25. The Cattle's Winter
  • 24. Food
  • 25. Visitors (1)
  • 26. Visitors (2)
  • 27. Peace
  • 28. The Final Peace
  • Part 4. Last Things
  • 29. Year of the Blizzard
  • 30. What I'm Experiencing
  • 31. Everything Disappears Quickly
  • 32. Herding Together
  • 33. Visiting Neighbors
  • 34. New Neighbors
  • 35. The Way Home
  • Glossary
  • About the Author
  • About the Translators
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Chinese journalist Juan makes her stateside debut with a magnificent tale about traveling through the freezing tundra of northern China. After publishing her second book, Juan decided "to embark on an adventure truly worthy of an author" by engaging in a way of life the Kazakhs have practiced for centuries. She joined the Cuma family, a couple in their 50s and their 19-year-old daughter, as they moved livestock to their winter home, a remote region that stretches across the border between China and Kazakhstan. Their trek lasted three days and was followed by a crushing winter with temperatures dipping to minus 31 degrees Fahrenheit. Along the way, Juan learned the value of hard work and the symbiotic relationship between man and nature. She highlights the importance of the herders' chief survival tool, sheep manure, which is used to build animal pens and structures for human habitation in deep winter. She also recounts, in remarkable detail, learning the Kazakh technique of weaving textiles from the readily-available wool of the community's hundreds-strong flock of sheep. A seamless blend of memoir, travelogue, and nature writing, Juan's skillful prose paints an extraordinarily vivid picture of a remote world ("Nebulous nights etched with the moon's halo, and those dawns dim and gloomy"). This mesmerizing memoir impresses on every page. (Feb.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Multi-award-winning author Juan (My Altay) and her mother have a store in northwestern China that caters to Kazakh nomads. She always hoped to join a family and chronicle their lives. In 2010, she got her wish and accompanied Cumo and his family for a season in the winter pasture. Cumo is 50 years old, powerfully built, skilled but also argumentative, and drinks heavily. His wife is supportive. Zhada, their only son, is "their center of gravity." They own 500 sheep, 30 camels, and 100 cattle and horses. Juan describes the backbreaking work of building a burrow (house). Herdsmen cover large distances with their herds, and cold is always present. Everyday someone must walk a long distance for snow for household water. Nineteen-year-old Kama sacrifices her freedom to work and relieve Cumo when he's ill or needs to travel. From this experience Juan observes, "herder children mature slowly but age quickly." Conversation is lively with meat-centered meals and endless cups of tea. People are surprised by Juan's presence (a Han Chinese among Kazakh Muslims) and stare shamelessly at her, yet she returns their stares! VERDICT Readers who enjoy descriptive writing about challenging lives will love this work.--Susan G. Baird, formerly with Oak Lawn P.L., IL

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A warm portrait of stark, strenuous lives in remote China. From her home in northwestern China, essayist and nature writer Li joined a family of Kazakh herders--and their camels, sheep, cattle, and horses--to spend winter on immense pastureland where the population density was "one person per every square mile and a half." Winner of the People's Literature Award in China, this charming memoir, the author's first to be translated in the U.S., captures the harsh reality and quiet pleasures of the herders' nomadic way of life, migrations threatened by the consequences of overgrazing. Amid "towering waves of immaculate golden sand dunes," where temperatures plummet to minus 31 degrees, the family constructs a burrow made with sheep manure, the "sole building material available in the desert," incomparable because it "can magically, continuously radiate heat." With wall hangings, rugs, a hearth, and a tablecloth for meals, the burrow becomes a home. Although the author wondered what contribution she could make, she took on a variety of necessary tasks: "I cleaned the cattle burrow and sheep pen every day, hauled snow"--critical for providing water--"made nan, embroidered," and sometimes helped out with the exhausting job of herding. Li offers affectionate profiles of neighbors, visitors, and members of her host family: Cuma, the father, "intelligent and ambitious, capable and cocky," and too often drunk; his reticent wife, whose "aloofness was enough to give you goose bumps. But when she did smile, she was radiant. Light beams shot out from between her brows as if she invented this 'smiling' business"; and their 19-year-old daughter, who had to leave school and dreams of becoming educated and independent in order to help her family. The arduous work caused Cuma and his wife to rely on daily doses of painkillers, but their mastery of their environment, and their contentment, earned the author's admiration. A rare look at a disappearing world. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

In the beginning From the moment I released my second book, my mother started bragging to the whole village that I was an "author." But our neighbors only ever saw me, day after day, muck-faced and mussy-haired, chasing after ducks from one end of the village to the other. They all expressed their incredulity. Even as my mother kept going on and on about it, when they turned to look, they'd catch sight of me scurrying along a ditch as fast as my slippers could carry me, hollering and brandishing a stick. Not at all as advertised, quite undignified really. Eventually, some of them came around to believing her. Eighteen miles from the lower reaches of the Ulungur River, the government was establishing a new herder village named "Humujila." One of the villagers approached my mother to ask me to become the "assistant village head," with a salary of two hundred yuan per month. To emphasize that it was a good deal, they said the village head himself only earned four hundred yuan. Deeply offended, my mother proudly declared, "My daughter would never agree to that!" The visitor looked perplexed and asked, "Didn't you say she's a writer?" In short, I am something of an enigma in Akehara village, where I live with my mother. I am suspicious for four main reasons: one, I'm unmarried; two, I don't have a job; three, I don't visit our neighbors much; and four, I'm not what they would consider "proper." But this winter, I decided to embark on an adventure truly worthy of an author--I would follow the migrating herds deep into the desert south of the Ulungur while observing and noting every last detail of nomadic life in the dark and silent winter. My mother didn't waste a minute before spreading this news to anyone who would listen -- to further emphasize how extraordinary I was. But how were we even to begin to explain my work to the herders? This was the best she could come up with, "She will write. Take all your comings and goings, your work n' stuff, and write it all down!" The herders let out a collective "ooooh" of understanding before lowering their heads to mutter, "What's there to write about?" In any case, word of a Han girl bound for the winter pasture quickly reached the herding teams across Kiwutu township. My mother began to select a family that would agree to take me along. At first, my ambitions were grand. I wanted to spend the winter in a destination that was at least two hundred and fifty miles away, which would mean over a dozen days by horseback, so that I could get a taste of the hardest, most unforgiving aspects of nomadic life. But all the families who were planning to journey more than ten days refused to take me along for fear that I'd be nothing but trouble. More importantly, as the day of the great migration approached, my ambition dwindled. Think about it: to sleep on the frozen ground only to wake a mere four hours later for two whole weeks. Before daybreak, every day, I would have to grope my way through the darkness to start the journey ahead. Herding sheep, keeping up with the horses, keeping the camels in check and grooming calves... for my petite 88-pound frame, two weeks would have been pushing it. So the trip was truncated to a week's journey... and finally, a week before we were supposed to leave, I cut the trip down to three days. *** Among the herder families that passed through Akehara village, those who intended to travel only for three or four days belonged to Kiwutu's herder team number three. Mama Jakybay and her family were no exception. I had spent a summer with them and, ideally I would join them again for the winter. But after a few months, a rumor circulated among the herders that I was Jakybay's son Symagul's "Han girlfriend," which made me angry, and Symagul's wife, Shalat, even angrier. For a while, whenever she saw me, her face stretched so long it nearly hit the ground. Another important reason why I couldn't stay with Mama Jakybay was because no one in her family spoke Mandarin. Communication between us was difficult and led to misunderstandings. Herding families that did speak a little Mandarin were mainly young married couples, to whom my presence would have been a nuisance. Newlyweds are invariably deeply in love. If at night they were to express that love, then... well, how would I get any sleep? The winter pasture isn't a particular place. It's the name of all the land used by the nomads during the winter, stretching south uninterrupted from the vast rocky desert south of the Ulungur River all the way to the northern desert boundary of the Heavenly Mountains. It is a place of open terrain and strong winds. Compared to the region to its north, the climate is warmer and more constant. The snow mantle is light enough that the sheep can use their hooves to reach the withered grass beneath. At the same time, there is enough snowfall to provide the herders with all the water they and the livestock need to survive. The winter pasture is considerably drier and less fertile than the lands the livestock graze in summer. Each family herd grazes an enormous area. The sheer distance this puts between the families means that contact with one another is a rare occurrence. You could almost call it "solitary confinement." Herders entering the winter pasture search for a depression sheltered from the wind among the undulating dunes. There they dig out a pit up to six feet deep, lay several logs across the opening, and cover it with dry grass as a roof. A passage is then dug sloping down into the hole and a crude wooden door is fitted to complete this winter home: they call it a burrow. Here, a family can return for protection from the cold and wind during the endless winter months. A burrow is never very big, at most a hundred or so square feet comprising one big sleeping platform and a stove, as well a tiny kitchen corner, a tight squeeze. Life inside is spent shoulder to shoulder without any privacy to speak of. In brief, living in a winter burrow is no vacation, but what other choice did I have? And so, I eventually settled on Cuma's family. Cuma could get along in Mandarin and three days was all it took to get to their land. The Cumas were pushing fifty, and their nineteen-year-old daughter, Kama, would accompany me and the migrating herd while her parents would drive to the burrow in a truck --it wasn't going to get any better than that! Frankly, the real reason they took me on was that Cuma had owed my family a good deal of money for several years. His family was poor and it didn't look like they would ever pay us back, so we gave up expecting it. Why not stay with them for a few months and cancel the debt? That was my mother's idea. Later, when I found myself hoisting thirty pounds of snow, tottering across the desert huffing and puffing like an ox, I couldn't help but sigh: bad idea. Excerpted from Winter Pasture: One Woman's Journey with China's Kazakh Herders by Li Juan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.