The Sichuan Broadcasts

The hills are sparsely inhabited, but there are people everywhere.

   You never walk more than an hour without passing by a farm, or meeting somebody on the track, peasants carrying bags of chemical fertilizer on their back uphill or bringing cans of pine tree resin down to the town, traders leading a caravan of mules, a militant in Gold Star shoes with his portable radio in a custom-made pouch hung across his shoulder. There are no villages as we know them in Europe. Every five or six hours, there is a bazaar along the trail: a hamlet of a dozen houses at the most. Farms are scattered across the hills, close to the fields. The presence of humans is felt everywhere. Even the smallest flats have been turned into paddy fields, and the slopes are carved into terraces. When the slope is too steep to be  cultivated, it is common land for grazing. Even the trees of the jungles which cover seemingly inaccessible hilltops are often trimmed for cattle feed. There are trodden paths everywhere. You never go unobserved. Children grazing goats or women perched in trees cutting branches whom you didn't notice are watching you. The hills always know who is coming and who is leaving.
  I didn't take any maps, nor any notes about the places we went to. I had been told I would be taken to secret places, and I didn't want to remember their names nor the way to get to them. What you don't know, you can't tell. The chances for my ever being interrogated were nil, but I nevertheless felt better that way. The only things I wrote down during the trek are the official interviews I was granted by the leaders I met. They were never very interesting: the comrades are disciplined, and during official interviews, they never said anything more or anything different than what I had read in the Party literature.
  What I remember is a never-ending succession of exhausting walks and contemplative halts. Taking step after step, pace after pace, again and again. Sitting in front of houses, watching people's daily routine. Flashing memories alone come back to me, of small incidents and chance encounters, through which a people in revolution reveals itself.