Women of the Gobi, by Kate James. Pluto Press, Melbourne, 2006. RRP $29.95, ISBN 1864033 290, website.
Kate James’ Women of the Gobi is a wonderful, personal journey along the Silk Road. James, a Lonely Planet editor, grew up in an evangelical family. Originally from Melbourne, she spent seven years in India with her family as a child. Upon returning to India, years later, she came across the writings of three women; Francesca and Eva French, and Mildred Cable.
The three women, known as the Trio, traveled the length of the Silk Road, traversing it five times between 1923 and 1936. Along the way, they founded numerous Christian communities, adopted a deaf Mongolian girl and established refuges for the wives of opium addicts.
Upon discovering the books by the Trio, James found a purpose—she resolved to follow in their footsteps, in the hope of giving some purpose to her own aimless wanderlust.
The novel ranges over her reflections on what life must have been like for three women, on donkeys, in a part of China still barely known to the west; James’ own experiences in modern day China, and her small victories and defeats as she makes her way from town to town, meeting helpful and unhelpful people along the way; and finally, the novel also addresses, with a great deal of sensitivity, James coming to terms with her own experience of evangelical Christianity.
The success of this novel is that it manages to mix and cross genres with ease. The narrative breaks from James’ ruminations on the experiences of the Trio, to her own personal trials and tribulations on the road, to her thoughts on her own life, all with an easy style.
The movement from one subject to the next serves to invigorate the novel, and keep the reader turning the pages. Just as one becomes fascinated by the struggles Chinese Christians faced at the turn of the 20th century in the time of the Trio, she will leap to a description of the conditions faced by Jesuits in China 400 years ago, and then on to the troubles faced by Christians in modern China.
The lives of the rarely mentioned Uyghur Muslims in modern day China are also discussed—the central government in modern China has oppressed this former majority in much the same way as Tibetans have been oppressed, though with much less press coverage.
James’ novel is