Y: Yang Fuqing, host of Dialogue on CCTV 9

　　M: Andrew McEwan

　　J: Edmund Jocelyn

　　Y: The Long March undertaken by the Red Army from Oct. 16th 1934 to Oct. 19th 1935 is one of the greatest acts of heroism in the 20th century. Inspired by the spirit of the Long Marchers, two Englishmen, Edmund Jocelyn and Andrew McEwan<注1>, decided to retrace the route of the Long March. They set out from Yudu in Jiangxi province on Oct. 16th 2002. After walking a distance of 1,800 kilometers in 3 months, they arrived in Zunyi, where they are taking a short break before they continue their new Long March. They are now joining Dialogue to share with us their extraordinary experiences.

　　Y: Now you have finished about 1,800 kilometers, roughly 1/5 of the total length of the Long March. How would you describe your first part of the walk? How difficult was it?

　　M: The first week was easily<注2> the most difficult, lots of unexpected things. First of all, we were expecting very little rainfall on the way. And in the first week there was endless rainfall, which was kind of unseasonable, and then... eh...

　　J: I was sick. We set off and I was already feeling bad and I just felt worse the further we went. By the second day, I couldn't speak anymore. So Andy<注3> had to take over everything. He was always organizing and I just wrote notes for the next few days.

　　M: He was just about to get better when I got sick. I was throwing up<注4> along the road. So the first week was very tough.

　　Y: So as you continue you are getting used to the pains and the rest of the things?

　　J: Yeah. I mean, after this month or so, I think we started to get physically much stronger and things that seemed really difficult started to seem actually quite easy.

　　Y: Is it more of a physical challenge or a mental one?<注5>

　　M: Certainly it's a mental challenge. Physically it is quite demanding<注6> and I suppose that for most people it will be quite demanding. But I think mentally, basically what it comes down to is anybody can get up tomorrow morning and walk 20 or 30 kilometers. They can do it. But can they get up the next day and do exactly the same, and the next day, the same? I think that's the trick of the Long March—can you keep getting up when you are already tired and keep the pace in the same day. It's kind of boring sometimes.

　　Y: Did you come up with any way to kill time when you got bored?

　　J: Yes, we entertain ourselves with various made-up<注7> games. Sometimes we are even too tired to think about that, though. We are always focused on the next rest. All we can think about is our stomach.

　　Y: Was food a problem?

　　M: Food isn't often a problem but it can be a problem. For example, I'm vegetarian<注8> and Ed is supporting me. I stayed a vegetarian more or less<注9> for the rest of the journey. Sometimes we have problems communicating the fact that we don't want to use pork, fat or the fact that we don't eat meat.

　　Y: I'm very surprised to learn that you could still log on the Internet. I suppose that helps make you feel connected with the world.

　　J: It's true that we've been able to get on the Internet surprisingly often. I remember the first time was when we were in a very small town in Hunan. We found a little guesthouse and we went up to the boss of the guesthouse and asked her, "Do you have an Internet bar<注10> in this town?" And you know what? The boss said "Oh, yes." and we were taken out to the street. I couldn't believe it. So since then we always asked. They turned up in the most unlikely places.

　　M: Yeah. Sometimes you'll be very surprised that it's one. It looks like a shed for pigs or cows. You open it up and there's an Internet bar. So we have been very pleasantly surprised. But actually what turned up is that we had a week without much contact. I think about once a week we get to have contact with the outside world.

　　J: We look forward to those times when we get to a slightly bigger town, because we have been climbing up mountains, going through villages in Guangxi and Guizhou. There, communication is really our problem. Mobiles don't work. The villages don't have phones, either. If you want to use the phone you have to go to the nearest post office or maybe a government building.

　　M: I think the best day for that was when we were going up the mountains. I think it was in Jiangxi. We didn't expect much, but to our surprise, they had some English football games on TV and we love English football. Ed is a Manchester City football fan, which has Sun Jihai in the team.<注11> It was Manchester City against Manchester United. Ed was very very keen to see this big game. There it was! Suddenly we were in a restaurant and saw the TV. So he was very happy.

　　Y: Watching the game makes you less homesick, I suppose?

　　M: Yeah, it helps.

　　Y: How would you compare your difficulties with those of the Red Army soldiers?

　　M: It's a good question, but the truth is that there is no comparison and we don't pretend that there is one. We are not trying to be a sort of superman, all we are doing is retracing the route. There's no comparison. I mean those guys had to fight battles. They were being attacked by the Kuomintang. They had planes above them. And I think, you know, their footwear was pathetic<注12> and clothes were quite thin sometimes. Most of the Chinese are fairly familiar with these stories but foreigners don't really know how difficult it was.

　　Y: Now that you've walked part of the Long March, do you still think it was incredible for the Red Army to finish the Long March?

　　J: Oh, I think it's even more incredible. Before I started, I thought, well, that's a pretty remarkable achievement. Now I really struggled to understand how they could possibly do it. Like what Andy said, they'd got to fight battles as well. I had been so tired some days that I could hardly stand up, let alone pick up the gun and go into battles with someone.

　　Y: Did you find it difficult to find the correct route of the Red Army?

　　M: As I've mentioned, the second day I had to take over the responsibilities of finding the route for a few days. It's always going to be an imperfect solution but sometimes you can get very lucky. People will help you find the original journey that takes you over the mountain. I think by and large<注13> we have been quite successful. Every day we change our schedule. The thing we do is we walk up to the local people and we ask them how to find the route. There aren't many people who really know. The map is completely useless.

　　J: Mostly, if you see a main road today, then you can be fairly sure that's the way the Red Army didn't go. Their path is going to be a footpath somewhere up in the mountains. The local people still know where the Red Army went and most of the paths are still being used. They are not overgrown<注14>. They can show them to us. Unfortunately they don't always get it right. Then we've got to be pretty careful whom we ask, because people are not always that local. In south Guizhou, for instance, we were completely misdirected. The road we took was even harder than the original Red Army's route.

　　M: We found out that the best way to do it is to average out<注15> the responses. If you have five people, the same question, and you get five different responses. Then you can sit down and decide which one seems the most likely and then try again. That's usually what we do. We average out all the different answers. Sometimes they are completely contradictory; sometimes they are all the same. The most dangerous is when they are all the same because that gives you a kind of false confidence that you are on the right route. Quite often we find that we are on the wrong route. The most dangerous thing you could do is make suggestion. You should never suggest, "Is it this way?" because you can be sure the person will say, "Oh, yeah, it is that way." So never ever suggest which way or suggest the place name. If you do that, you are sure to get lost. Let the person tell you and see if you understand.

　　Y: You must have been to a lot of very remote places where local people have never seen a foreigner before. What were their reactions when they saw you?

　　M: That was certainly better than developed places, because people were so genuine and friendly with you. In a more developed place, people shout at you, they shout "Hello, Laowai", but in places which are very remote, people are very polite and courteous, and it's much more comfortable. People are a little careless, a little distant, but incredibly warm.<注16>

　　J: The kids are always distant. Sometimes we arrive at a little village just at the time when school finishes and all the children are coming out of school. We have been surrounded by maybe two or three hundred screaming kids.

　　Y: So meeting different people in different places must be a very big excitement for you.

　　J: Yeah. It's tremendous. That's why the great attractions of the journey is that every day we are moving into new places and meeting new people.

　　Y: And you've also talked to the locals about the Red Army, right?

　　J: Sure, because in every place the history is still there. Not just in the memories of very old people, but also their children, because they were listening to the stories from their parents.

　　M: The most exciting thing is when you sit down with an old person and with his family and the old person starts to tell the story, perhaps even in their local dialect and the family have to translate it into mandarin. And everybody listens to the old member of the family. They've never heard of these stories. They've never really asked about them. And so, by our arrival, we give this opportunity to kind of add these old stories.

　　Y: I'm sure you did a lot of research before you embarked on this journey. You must have read about the Red Army, their lives and even the lives of the local people they encountered. So how did you find the lives of the local Chinese along this route have changed?

　　M: There are a lot of changes, obviously. China's reform and opening has been going on for what is like some 20 years now. It's really quite remarkable when you go to this place in Jiangxi, which a journalist also trailed in the 1990s when following the Long March route. When he went there, he said they had no electricity, no glass in the windows, a very very poor place. But since the 1990s, they've built a major highway there. When we went there, we stayed in a place with hot running water and there was an Internet cafe across the road, a completely different place with completely different people. It's just a whole new type of place.

　　Y: I know you two are old friends from college years. Several years ago you all came to China to work. When did you develop your interest in China?

　　M: Well, I developed my interest in China virtually the first day I stepped off the plane in Beijing. Before that I had no interest at all. My reason for coming to China is to go to as remote and exotic<注17> and distant a place as I could possibly imagine. It was shut in the dark for me. So I had no real knowledge or interest in China before I came here and I couldn't even say "nihao" and that was about five years ago.

　　Y: You didn't learn anything about Chinese history or...

　　M: No, we never studied it in school and I certainly didn't study it in university. I knew a little bit about some of the politics but not very much.

　　Y: Do you think the situation will change?

　　M: Well, it's got to. Just as China is waking up, the West is waking up to<注18> China. There was a long time that China was closed. It was impossible for foreigners to know anything about China. We weren't allowed to come here. We weren't allowed to ask questions. And we weren't allowed to even walk around places.

　　J: China wasn't very important on the world stage. It didn't really act on it, didn't get involved. Now China is involved. There's got to be a recognition. We've got to know a bit more about it.

　　Y: I know you came up with the idea of retracing the route of the Long March during your last trip to Guizhou. What is the point for two Westerners to retrace this route?

　　J: Well, the point is to understand it more. It was a story and experience that captures their imagination, but one that we felt we didn't really have a very clear understanding of. We want to understand much more about the experience of them. Even if you have read about it, you read about it from a political viewpoint. It's all about political struggles and what the leaders did and said. What we are interested in was the experience of it.

　　M: To be honest, we find the politics a little boring sometimes and we don't really care too much about the politics. We are much more interested in the ground level experience, the people. That's not been very well covered in the past, although it has been covered by some people. We really feel that, from a western point of view, the story needs more people to ask questions about. In the West we all know about Napoleon's retreat, we all know about Hannibal<注19>, we know about all kinds of great events in history, but the Long March is really not given a lot of publicity in the West.<注20> People don't know that much about it. It's more of a kind of slogan. We hope people will get to know this story better. Maybe we can contribute to that process.

　　Y: Do you think it's worth it for you to spend the whole year on the road?

　　J: So far I've got no regret. I think it's been a remarkable experience. I feel like I've lived several years already in the last three months.

　　Y: Are you confident that you'll finish this journey?

　　J: Yeah, I'm confident.

　　M: I'm not. No, I'm always a little cautious. Basically, my approach to the whole thing since day one has been to be cautious. Just take it. One step at a time. Just each day, get through that. So to be honest, it's quite hard in the morning sometimes. I think when we finally leave Zunyi, we've had a nice break here. We've had a week to rest up. We stay in a nice comfortable place, just like when the leaders came here. I drank coffee for the first time in two months. I think after all that, to leave again is quite difficult the first day when you get up and set off again. You've got another 40 kilometers to walk. I think that's the hardest thing. The first kilometer and the last kilometer are the hardest of every day.

　　Y: So what's your next step?

　　J: The next step is to cross the Chishui<注21>, the Red River, for the first time. And then we will cross it again...

　　M: And then again.

　　J: And then again!

　　M: So that'll make it four times.

　　J: That's still just a small step on the way. And then we will head for Yunnan, Sichuan and the things that everybody is waiting for us to do.

　　M: They can't wait for us to get stuck in the grassland and snow mountain.

　　Y: A lot of challenges. Good luck to you for the rest of the journey.

　　1.马普安和李爱德，英国青年学者，于1997年到北京，曾在《中国日报》等报刊担任英文顾问。于2000年5月到贵州旅游时，偶然萌发了重走长征路的念头。经过充分准备，俩人于2002年10月16日从江西于都出发，沿着红一方面军的长征路线徒步前进。同年12月16日，进入贵州黎平境内。他们计划用368天走完8个省、2个自治区，最后抵达陕北吴起镇。

　　2. easily：无疑。

　　3. Andy为Andrew的昵称，下文中的Ed为Edmund的昵称。

　　4. throw up：<俚>呕吐。

　　5. physical：身体的，体力的；mental：精神的，心理的。

　　6. demanding：要求高的。

　　7. made-up：虚构的，指自己编的，想出来的。

　　8. vegetarian：素食者。

　　9. more or less：几乎，大约。

　　10. Internet bar：网吧，与下文中的Internet cafe意思相同。

　　11. Manchester City：曼彻斯特城队，简称曼城队；Sun Jihai：孙继海，大连人，中国国家足球队队员。2001年签约曼城队。下一句中的Manchester United指曼彻斯特联队，简称曼联队。该队是英国足坛的一支老牌劲旅，成立于1878年。

　　12. pathetic：可怜的，这里形容很破旧。

　　13. by and large：大体上，总的说来。

　　14.. overgrown：植被(或杂草)蔓生的。

　　15. average out：算出……的平均值，这里指综合各种回答得出最可能的结果。

　　16.人们有点随便，不会靠你太近，但却十分热情。

　　17.exotic：异国情调的。

　　18. wake up to：认识到，意识到。

　　19. Hannibal：汉尼拔［247-183BC］迦太基统帅，率大军远征意大利[218]，从而发动第二次布匿战争，曾三次重创罗马军队，终因缺乏后援而撤离意大利[203]，后被罗马军队多次击败，最终服毒自杀。

　　20.但是在西方，对于长征没有太多的介绍。publicity：宣传文章(或电影)。

　　21. Chishui：赤水，河流名，位于贵州省，红军长征时曾四渡赤水。下文中的3个again意思是说像红军那样过赤水河四次。