Winter Pasture
One Woman's Journey with China's Kazakh Herders
Ratings2
Average rating3.3
15
One Woman's Journey with China's Kazakh Herders
Ratings2
Average rating3.3
"Li Juan spent minus-20-degree nights with nomadic herders in the Chinese steppes. You’ll want to join her." --Laura Miller, Slate "Deeply moving...full of humor, introspection and glimpses into a vanishing lifestyle." --The New York Times Book Review Winner of the People's Literature Award, WINTER PASTURE has been a bestselling book in China for several years. Li Juan has been widely lauded in the international literary community for her unique contribution to the narrative non-fiction genre. WINTER PASTURE is her crowning achievement, shattering the boundaries between nature writing and personal memoir. 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 world, 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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“To sing is to expand your presence, to occupy the vast silence with your voice.”
This book is one woman's first-hand account of her time amongst the Kazakh herders in China. These herder nomads live at the behest of mother nature, following the spring thaws north and then slowly working their way back south again for winter. The winters especially are quite harsh in this region of China, with temperatures plummeting and regular snowstorms that cause basically their entire existence without power or plumbing to freeze. Still, these people remain cheerful, with family and neighbors being at the center of their existence.
With a unique, interesting topic like this, I somehow expected more from the book. The author has periods where she seems very philosophical and lyrical in how she describes the environment, the people, and her surroundings, and then long periods of same-y passages about sheep, cows, tea, and manure. The people she lived with for this period of time were also kind of a mixed bag. Being honest, I'm not sure how she managed to put quite a positive spin on Cuma, because he sounds insufferable, brash, and annoying at the best of times.
So, unfortunately, this book is hard for me to recommend, as it's just too long and too dull in places. I'm hoping to find another book on this topic for maybe a better perspective, to give this another chance.
