Winter Pasture

Named one of The Washington Post's Best Travel Books of 2021.
 
"Winter Pasture is Li Juan's crowning achievement, shattering the boundaries between nature writing and personal memoir."
—Smithsonian Magazine

"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."Part travelogue and part cultural exchange, the book luxuriates in wide-open spaces and the simple wonder of the everyday... The book balances both beauty and accessibility on every page.”
—Named one of '51 favorite books of 2021' by the Washington Independent Review of Books

"Winter Pasture is Li Juan's crowning achievement, shattering the boundaries between nature writing and personal memoir."
—Smithsonian Magazine

"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."
—Sebastian Modak, The New York Times Book Review

“Chinese journalist Juan makes her stateside debut with a magnificent tale about traveling through the freezing tundra of northern China... A seamless blend of memoir, travelogue, and nature writing, Juan’s skillful prose paints an extraordinarily vivid picture of a remote world…This mesmerizing memoir impresses on every page.” 
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"A warm portrait of stark, strenuous lives in remote China...A rare look at a disappearing world."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Near the end of Winter Pasture Li Juan asks herself what it means to be “a passerby” in the lives of others. Her intimate depiction of a family of Kazakh herders is itself an answer to that complicated travel writer question: to connect the reader with people and stories she likely otherwise would never encounter.  In doing so, Li Juan is an empathetic, interrogative, and entertaining chronicler. She offers up a fascinating portrait of life in one of the world’s most remote corners." 
—Rachel Friedman, author of The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost and And Then We Grew Up

"More than just an exotic travel diary, Winter Pasture reflects on the relationships not just between humans and nature in the harshest of environments, but also between the Han Chinese and China’s Kazakh minority.”
—Nicky Harman, Literary HubBorn in Xinjiang in 1979, Li Juan grew up in Sichuan Province. In her youth, she learned to sew and run a small convenience store with her mother, living in a town where nomads shopped. Later, she worked in a factory in the city of Urumqi. In 2003, she became a public servant until 2008 when she became a full time author. Her writing career began in 1999, as a columnist for newspapers like Southern Weekly and Hong Kong's Wenweipo. Widely regarded as one of the best narrative nonfiction writers of her generation, Li Juan's writing has won several awards. WINTER PASTURE is considered to be her most popular and representative work.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.