Leaving Mother Lake (11 page)
“Can you die?”
“You could, but the lama will cure you. He gives you medicine and you have diarrhea for three days, then you are all right.”
“What kind of Gu has Tsilidema’s family?”
“Who knows?” my Ama answered bleakly. “You don’t think they would show it to anybody, do you? But some people say that it’s a snake.”
And so it was that I learned to keep clear of poor, beautiful Tsilidema and all her family, and to fear the evil magic of snakes that could not die and that no one had ever seen.
IF LIFE IN THE MOUNTAINS
was pleasant in the warmer months, in the winter it was harsh, much harsher than it ever was in the village. After the snow had covered the meadows, I wore a goatskin coat and took to hugging the yaks to keep warm. Meanwhile, because it was too cold to wash, my hair became horribly matted and I was soon crawling with lice. When I had scratched my head and neck and shoulders to a bloody mess, my uncle sat me near the fireplace and shaved my head.
“You are a good person with sweet blood, that’s why they like you so much,” he said to cheer me up. And undoubtedly I needed cheering. I was very unhappy about my shaved head, for we Moso believe that a woman’s hair is her beauty. Uncle added: “Don’t worry, the more you shave your hair as a young girl, the more hair you will grow later!” He gave me his Tibetan fox hat to keep my bald head warm, and I did feel better. Besides, I had to agree that Uncle’s lice control was a better method than the white powder I had seen people use in the village, after which the children would lose not only their hair but the skin off their heads.
After he shaved my head, Uncle stoked the fire at night and gave me his blanket, but still I could not keep warm, and every day I woke up freezing and ran to the corral where the yaks were huddling against each other. Now, I don’t remember how the thought first entered my head, but perhaps it came naturally, just from watching the steam rising from the icy ground. At any rate, as soon as a yak began urinating, I sat on the ground and placed my hands and then my feet under the hot golden stream, paying special attention to the little bumps that looked just like baby mice that the cold had burned into my soles. Because they drink such huge amounts of water, yaks can pee for a very long time. The heat from the urine was heavenly, and so I would go from one yak to another. But then when my feet and legs dried out, they burned horribly and I hopped about on the cold ground, scratching and hollering in agony.
Yet, every morning, as soon as I opened my eyes, I wrapped my blanket around my stiff, shivering body and ran to the corral to put my feet under the yaks. I could not help myself. No amount of pain and no amount of scolding from my uncle, not even the goatskin boots he fashioned for me, could deter me from seeking out the blissful minutes of relief the yaks provided against the bitter cold.
A
t night I sometimes looked at the moon and wondered what it would be like to be a grown woman, to be back in the village and to have lovers giving me beautiful colored belts. Whenever Uncle saw me looking into the sky, secretly dreaming of my future lovers, he said: “You can look at the moon, but you must not point with your finger or you will get your ears chopped off.” I still don’t know if he meant by this to teach me respect for the moon goddess or to protect me from the sorrows of love. During the day, however, when I looked into the sky, I wondered where the birds came from and where they went to, and what was on the other side of the mountains. Sometimes I even imagined becoming a man and joining the horse caravan to trade far-fetched stories in distant and marvelous places where people rode in cars and airplanes.
Yet, at this time, I had not truly begun to suffer from our extreme isolation from the world. And certainly we were not always in the mountains and we were not always alone. Twice a year my uncle took me home — for New Year, and then in the fall, when we went home to help my mother prepare for the winter months. And even in the mountains, we had visitors — Yi herdsmen leading their goats and woolly sheep yet higher up on the mountain, and the horsemen who passed our way on the road to market and who sometimes pitched their tents on our meadow. I especially loved the old horsemen who told stories of their youth, when Moso country was still ruled by native chiefs and tribesmen from all over traded their goods from China to India, and foreigners with white faces and blue eyes flew their planes above our mountains to fight the Japanese devils.
In actual fact, not so many of those foreigners had ever made it to Moso country. No American pilot had ever landed or crashed or parachuted from his airplane, and neither the foreign experts nor even the Christian missionaries, who forbade the tribal people to sing and dance and drink wine, had ever trekked across our mountains. No doubt the Yongning chief, who was a devout Buddhist and who loved drinking and dancing, would not have tolerated such strange doings in his realm. The missionaries might have tried their luck with the La feudal lord in Zuosuo, on the other side of the lake, but they could not get there — their only possible access being through Yongning. For the northern and the eastern trails all passed through hostile Yi territories, and the western road through dense forests where Tibetan bandits waited only for the opportunity to murder and plunder. And, in fact, the few white people who had so dared venture had been pushed off the cliffs or had met with yet more gruesome fates. One white man, however, had come to Moso country and spent much time among us. His name was Dr. Joseph Rock. He was a big, fat man with blue eyes and yellow hair and a fiery temperament and he had traveled all the way from America to become the dear friend of the Yongning feudal lord.
One evening, while sitting around the campfire, a young horseman boasted: “During the war with the Japanese, my father rode with Dr. Rock all the way from Dali to Lake Lugu. It took them almost two months because Dr. Rock stared at the plants for hours.”
“What could he be looking at for so long?” my uncle asked.
“He was a botanist. He looked at everything like that.” An old horseman continued, “I knew him well. I was with him when he went to Gonggao Mountain, where the Yi lived. Rock was after a butterfly, and our chief had given him some tents and an escort of thirty men so that he could go wherever he wanted. When we were on our way back to Yongning, there was a terrible hailstorm. No one had ever seen anything like it before. The hail was so big it killed goats and sheep, and in no time it destroyed all the crops. Of course, the Yi chiefs blamed the blue-eyed devil for angering the mountain god. His eyes were like wolf eyes, they said. So they decided to cut his head off. Fortunately for Rock, a small Moso boy who was herding his goats in the mountain near the Yi villages heard the rumors and raised the alarm. As soon as our chief heard the news, he told us to take Rock back to Naxi country. Then the Yi made up for missing out on Rock’s head by raiding our villages. They stole cattle and horses and as much grain as they could carry, and they burned some houses. After that they rode their horses over our fields and trampled our crops. Ah! It was a terrible thing. The next time Rock came to visit, he felt very sorry to see the harm he had caused. So he brought all this glass from America and gave it to our feudal lord to build a little palace on the island. You should have seen it! It was so beautiful. Everybody went to the chief’s house to touch the glass. What a pity the Red Guards destroyed that little glass palace. What a shame! All that glass that had come from so far away! From America! And all of it smashed up!”
Once they began, the men could go on about Dr. Rock right through the night. For Dr. Rock had done a great deal for the Moso: he had studied our culture and published books about it in English, he had given our chief a pair of binoculars, and he had cured the villagers of venereal disease by writing to America for penicillin. The Americans had sent the penicillin via India and over the Himalayas in a little plane that landed in Lijiang at the foot of the Jade Dragon Mountain, and then Dr. Rock had carried it all the way to Lake Lugu by horse caravan.
All these stories were so entertaining: they were scary and sad enough, and in the end, Rock and the Moso always won. But what kind of place was America, I wondered, where people have yellow hair and blue eyes? Everyone we knew, everyone we had ever seen, had black hair and brown eyes, even the Han Chinese. Although, now I thought about it, I remembered that when I was very little, someone who spoke Moso and dressed just like us, someone with yellow hair and white skin and pale, colorless eyes, had come to our village. My mother had said: “It’s because he didn’t get enough salt.” But the horsemen laughed and said that he was surely one of the many blond-haired children Rock had fathered with Moso women and that it was a good thing — because in this way Dr. Rock would always live among us. Joseph Rock, who had lived and traveled in western China for the better part of thirty years, hauling a portable bathtub and far too much personal weight for the comfort of his horse, was truly a legend among the Moso people.
But the horsemen did not only bring us tales of times long gone. They also brought us news of the world and of the Cultural Revolution that was still raging beyond our mountains — which was how we learned of the mass meetings and the criticisms, of the Muslims who had rebelled in the northwest, of the lamas who had been imprisoned in Tibet, and of the former Communist heroes who had been purged in Lijiang, and those who had committed suicide. Then one day the horsemen brought news of our very own world, and for months to come, the news got worse.
The government had sent special teams of soldiers and officials to our valleys to reeducate the people — because the Moso shared everything, including their lovers, which amounted to a form of primitive communism that was a health hazard and a blight on the face of modern China and that nowhere fitted in with the thought of our paramount leader, Mao Zedong.
In fact, the people had heard all this before. Almost every year since liberation, government officials had visited Yongning to harangue the people there on the dangers of sexual freedom and the benefits of monogamous marriage. Once, even, they had brought a portable generator and showed a movie of people dressed as Moso, people who were in the last stage of syphilis, who had gone mad and lost most of their faces — and the villagers had set the makeshift cinema on fire.
But now the officials had held meetings night after night where they harangued and criticized and interrogated. And they had not gone home. Instead they had ambushed men on their way to their lovers’ houses, they had dragged couples out of their beds and exposed people naked to their own relatives’ eyes. Then they had issued orders for the couples to build new houses that no one could afford to build but where the couples ought to live together like married people did everywhere else in China. Finally, they had refused to provide the certificates for extra grain, and for cloth for the children, unless their mothers told the officials the names of the fathers.
The Moso protested. They spoke up at meetings to explain their way of life and the customs of their ancestors. But the officials did not give up, and the people stopped protesting. The men stayed at home, no longer daring to walk to the women’s houses at night. But still the officials did not give up. They waited for the women to make a decision about the planting and the harvesting, about the grain rations and the other things their children needed that the government provided. They waited a long time, until at last many people agreed to live as husband and wife and to participate in the government-sponsored marriage ceremonies, where they each got a cup of tea, a cigarette, pieces of candy, and a paper certificate.
“What shame,” Uncle whispered.
The horseman squashed the tears under his tired eyelids. As for me, I also pushed on my eyelids, although I cannot pretend that I understood how terrifying the events taking place in Yongning truly were. Whatever lay beyond our meadow was to me like the invisible and untouchable world of bygone times, the world of yellow-haired Americans and murderous Yi chiefs — whimsical places filled with strange beings, events I visited in my dreams that vanished as soon as I opened my eyes or when, very late in the night, the camp-fire died.
But that night, as I closed my eyes to the glow of the campfire and the government officials joined Dr. Rock and the Yi tribesmen in my childish imagination, I made believe that my father had really come to stay in our house forever, that Zhemi and my Ama were living under the same roof as man and wife. And now a deep sadness came over me — as I pictured Zhemi sitting near the hearth, no longer an honored guest, and yet, neither uncle nor brother but just a man living in my mother’s house.
W
hen the Great Cultural Revolution entered its tenth year, the lamasery and the pretty glass palace were gone; the lamas had been humiliated and their books burned; and the festivals were no more. The people too had changed. Many had married, and some had even abandoned their own traditional clothes — among them, my mother was now wearing trousers and a Chinese-style fur hat. But then Mao Zedong died and the winds of change soon blew over China. When they blew over Moso country, the people sighed with relief. Most left their wives and their husbands to live as they had always done, in their own mothers’ houses. They were ready to make up for lost time, to do whatever they could to honor their gods and their ancestors, to dress up and dance and sing again.
When Uncle took me home in the summer, the village was bustling with activity. Banquet tables had been set up in the courtyards and people were arriving from different villages to compete in wrestling and horse-riding contests, to sing and dance and drink wine and tease each other about their accents:
“Your voice is beautiful, but your words are garbled!”
“Maybe your mother did not straighten your ears when you were little!”
With so many visitors and so much taunting, Ama thought she should remind us of the finer points of etiquette: “When you go out in public, you must behave. Make sure you don’t fight with anyone and watch out for each other. When you meet an older person, you must show respect. If you see someone drunk, you must help him. If someone offers you food or drink, you must take it with both hands and say thank you.” She told us over and over until she got too busy to notice that we had stopped listening.