The Tree That Bleeds

In 2001 Nick Holdstock travelled to Yining, a city in China’s largest province – the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region – to ‘teach English’ (a benevolent ruse he used to indulge his ‘healthy interest in riots and racial discrimination’). And what a place to do it: shared borders with Kazakhstan and Mongolia ensure a demographic of minority cultures and an implicitly segregated society. While seemingly self imposed, it is obviously a holding paddock for a herd of discontent and Holdstock gravitates specifically around the supressed antagonism between the Uighur and the Han Chinese. Violent riots punctuate their history, but the details around the events – the why, who and hows – remain unclear. The Tree That Bleeds is part essay, part memoir: heavy moral questions and dry political matter are delivered in short chapters, easily digested and interspersed with Holdstocks personal anecdotes – sometimes amusing, sometimes redundant. It could be serendipity, or it could be that the themes within the book will always resonate when marginalisation occurs. On what basis is irrelevant: ethnicity, religion, the haves versus the have nots: there will always be greater and lesser people, these roles will chop and change as stories unfold, and governing bodies will often mismanage this dynamic. [Renée Rowland]