Review | Winter Pasture: writer Li Juan’s stay with China’s Kazakh nomads in northern Xinjiang
- Writer Li Juan’s story of her stay with a herding family is a mixture of personal travelogue, memoir, survival diary and ethnographic study
- She recalls sub-zero temperatures, hard work and a lifestyle that seems certain to disappear
Winter Pasture by Li Juan, Astra House
A mixture of personal travelogue, memoir, survival diary and ethnographic study … nothing much happens in Winter Pasture, and that’s just fine.
Author Li Juan tells the story of her stay with a Kazakh family in their winter encampment, a two-metre (6.5-foot) deep burrow in a depression in the desert of northern Xinjiang.
From there they herd 30 camels, 500 sheep and more than 100 cattle and horses across a vast area in conditions of eye-opening solitude – there’s only one person per 400 hectares (1,000 acres) – and bracing privation.
Li, who was born in Xinjiang, is a popular narrative non-fiction writer. This is her best-known book and the first to appear in English, in a pleasingly idiomatic translation by Jack Hargreaves and Yan Yan.
The owner, along with her mother, of a small shop in remote Akehara village, in the Altai Mountains, Li is already accustomed to the realities of rural life. Nonetheless, the conditions are tough.
It starts off unbelievably cold – and then a radio station forecast warns temperatures will drop further, to minus 42 degrees Celsius (-44 degrees Fahrenheit).
Li buys boots eight sizes too big and wears “more socks than anyone had ever worn”, sewing various items together and inviting a remark, from her mother, that her clothes look “like something the Monkey King would wear”.