People can figure out how to survive under the most punishing circumstances, and learning about how these people do it—how they have done it for centuries—makes Winter Pasture an unlikely but inspiring getaway read for the late pandemic ... Winter Pastures is rich with the habits and textures of domestic life in the burrow, presided over by Cuma’s wife—known only as 'Sister-in-Law'—a warm but taciturn woman with a particular knack for roasting flatbread in, yes, sheep manure charcoal ... Peaceful and quiet are a pair of words that appear like incantations in the passages of Winter Pasture devoted to her deepest feelings ... Winter Pasture features some beautiful writing, particularly when describing the landscape.
A memoir about hauling snow, shoveling manure, and living in a mud hut in one of the harshest environments on earth may not sound like a pleasure read. Yet, miraculously, Li Juan’s Winter Pasture is somehow just that. Part travelogue and part cultural exchange, the book luxuriates in wide-open spaces and the simple wonder of the everyday ... Initially, there are some lazy colloquialisms to get past, but it’s hard to know whether they’re the fault of the author or the translators. Soon enough, the book finds its stride and balances both beauty and accessibility on every page ... Not much happens...Yet it is packed with charm and the same kind of lyrical nature prose found in Henry Beston’s The Outermost House, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and the work of Tang poet Li Po ... I could feel the whisper of that dissent rippling between the lines. It was as subtle as it was undeniable ... With the intelligent, witty Li Juan as our guide, Winter Pasture becomes more than just a trip to an otherwise unknowable, far-off place full of people we’ll never meet. It’s a life-affirming declaration that the world would be terribly boring — and seem achingly small — if we all looked, worked, dressed, spoke, and dreamed the same way.
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.' ... 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 ... Li offers affectionate profiles of neighbors, visitors, and members of her host 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.
A magnificent tale about traveling through the freezing tundra of northern China ... 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 ... This mesmerizing memoir impresses on every page.
