Perspective: Soul-searching journey through China

In 1983, two things happened to dissident Chinese writer Gao Xingjian that forever changed his life. A routine visit to his doctor revealed he had terminal lung cancer. Then, following a second X-ray two weeks later, Gao's doctors told him the tumor had mysteriously and miraculously disappeared.

Given a clean bill of health, Gao re-entered his old life overjoyed, yet suddenly conscious of how stifling and hypocritical was his literary world. Aggravating his unease were rumors that the Chinese government planned to ship him to a worker camp in a remote province. Gao wisely fled Beijing for the cover of the ancient forests and mountains in the Sichuan area of southwest China. Over five months, he traveled nearly 15,000 kilometers, tracing the Yangtze River from its source to the coastline.

His journey, begun as an escape from potential peril, became an exploration of life's meaning. Soul Mountain tells the fascinating and exasperatingly elliptical story of that trip, as Gao searched for inner peace. A tapestry of travel notes, memoir, fabulist stories, and legends of the Qiang, Miao, and Yi people, Soul Mountain can be labeled a novel only in the loosest sense. The closest American counterpart might be Thoreau's Walden.

Like that work, Gao's novel lacks plot, character and forward momentum. What it does depict, however, is a rich portrait of the opinions and spiritual life of its author. Much like Thoreau, Gao is an environmentalist, a civil disobedient and a deeply curious thinker. He rambles, inventing scenes and embellishing on whatever subject comes to mind. While his thoughts meander, Gao stays true to his goal: the essence of life.

Away from the city's hustle and bustle, he wanders from town to town, wending toward more isolated, rural parts of China. On one train a fellow passenger tells him of a place called "Soul Mountain," reported to be one of the country's most spectacular sites. In each village he visits, Gao inquires about the mountain, getting varied and often contradictory answers. As he continues his trek he learns about his country's people along the way. He catalogs local customs with an anthropologist's eye, noting how differently people observe faith -- or lack thereof -- in a divinity.

As his journey stretches on, Gao realizes that Soul Mountain is less an actual place than a state of mind. Amongst the august beauty of China's metasequoia trees and the people who live in their shade, he recognizes how inconsequential is the self. In nature, he discovers the freedom of a cosmic unity. His country awoke to this truth in the aftermath of Tiannanmen Square, when legions of young Chinese artists, writers and activists protested -- valiantly and in vain -- the strictures of the government. Seen in this context, the novel is a relic of an age when an oppressive government caged the personal liberties of its best and brightest.

Dredging gems from the book can be at once refreshing and tedious. Translated from the Chinese by Mabel Lee, Soul Mountain shows Gao's inconsistency as a writer. Some passages, such as those which sing the virtues of nature, resonate with Gao's humble awe. Describing one vista of dead trees, he writes: "To pass by these towering crippled remains reduces me to an inner silence and the lust to express which keeps tormenting me, in the presence of this awesome splendour, is stripped of words." In other sections, however, Xingjian is less eloquent, offering such truisms as "Reality exists only through personal experience, and it must be personal experience." Perhaps this is a flaw of the translation, but Gao's narrative stunts muddy the waters even more.

He switches pronouns from "I" to "you" to "he" to "she" throughout the novel, depending on the locale and the chapter's subject. Rather than presenting us with different viewpoints, this gimmick merely distracts and annoys.

In the novel's closing pages, Gao defends his scattered approach to a make-believe critic. Like the best Chinese literature before him, he claims his will be modeled only after itself. It will reflect our paucity of knowledge in the world, rather than fabricate a tidy circumference for it. "It would be just like a story, with parts told from beginning to end and parts from end to beginning, conclusions or fragments which aren't followed up, parts which are developed but aren't completed."

A better description of this profound and elaborate vexing book cannot be had.

-- John Freeman writes frequently for Salon, the Village Voice and other publications. He lives in New York City.

Soul Mountain

By Gao Xingjian

Translated by Mabel Lee

HarperCollins, $27

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