Leaving Mother Lake (19 page)

She took us upstairs to the second floor, where she unlocked a door to a square room with a smooth cement floor. The walls were painted green halfway up, and the rest was all white. There were four beds, arranged neatly at each corner, covered by a pink cotton spread with a flower motif. Each bed had two pillows, also pink, bordered by frilly trims. At one end of the room was a small wooden table and a chair, and on the table, four bright red enamel thermos flasks with white flowers and a blue enamel basin with pink flowers that looked just like the enamel basin we had at home. On the floor beside the table was a green plastic wastebasket. Sunlight poured in through the large metal window and the effect was perfect. I had never seen anything so beautiful, so colorful, or as bright and cool as this room. We stepped in, carrying our bundles in our arms, and then stopped in our tracks, overwhelmed by so much luxury, so much cleanliness, not daring to tread on the floor or to put our things down.

The service woman pushed past, budging me out of her way with her hip. She slapped the beds and lifted the thermos flasks and pointed to the wastebasket, all the while shouting in Chinese, evidently in the belief that if she yelled loudly enough, we would overcome all language barriers. When she was satisfied that we knew where everything was, she told Yisso where we would find the showers and warned that we needed to call her whenever we wished to get into our rooms and that she did not want to be bothered after eleven o’clock at night. Then she left us and Yisso followed her into the corridor.

Well, no Moso woman would ever shout like this and slap furniture! But then again, we were not in Moso country anymore, we were in the city. We tried the beds, sitting on them and bouncing a little, and then lying down, and then we discovered the white sheets inside. We had never seen sheets before, but we had a good idea that we needed a wash before we dared sleep between them.

The showers were in an outhouse across the street — another brick building, dank and black, with slimy walls glumly lit by a single electric bulb hanging from the low ceiling. On the wall nearest the entrance were a series of hooks with clothes and towels hanging, and only a few feet from those, women were standing on slippery wooden slats, scrubbing themselves under some metal pipes that spouted a jet of hot water when you aligned a little handle in the direction of the tubing. Ah! Turning that little handle was the most beautiful experience! At home, we were at least two days’ walk away from the hot springs in Yongning, so we washed ourselves out of the enamel basin, or else we bathed in the cold water of the lake. And now we had not washed for days. The water ran deliciously hot and black off our bodies and our hair. We stayed in the shower room, soaping ourselves over and over under the steaming warm water, for such a long time that when we came out, squeaky clean, having forgotten all about the car ride and looking magnificent in our Moso costumes, the sun was beginning to set.

Yisso was waiting for us in the yard, sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette. “Did you enjoy yourselves in there?” he asked, laughing.

“Yes, we did! We really enjoyed ourselves!” we answered in one voice, laughing back.

“Do you want to go for a stroll in the streets before dinner?”

“Yes! Yes! We do!”

And on Yisso’s instructions, we ran to the guest house to give our dirty clothes to the service woman and ran straight out again, laughing with joy and entirely amazed at the fact that someone we didn’t even know was going to wash our clothes.

Everything to us was so new, wonderful, astonishing — from the electrical switch that lit the neon tube in the middle of the ceiling in our bedroom, which we turned on and off over and over, to the soft wheezing of the bicycles, the din of the trucks and tractors on the street, and the people bullying each other. It was not as though we were entirely ignorant of the world, but what we knew, we had pictured in imagination, we had learned by hearsay, through others’ stories — some of them tall stories, as we had found out when we had touched the “oil road.” And now that we were touching and smelling and hearing and seeing for ourselves, we were not only setting things right in our own minds but discovering other things we knew nothing about, like bedsheets and hot showers and, almost as soon as we had stepped outside for our first stroll in the city, toilets. In Zuosuo we didn’t have toilets. But here, in the city, there were no fields to go to and no dogs or pigs to clean up after you. Instead there were concrete blocks where you had to squat hurriedly over a narrow slit in the floor between two low walls, closing your nose to the stench and your eyes to the pit below, and then you rushed outside, back into the strangely acrid city air, and then the wonderful streets and the shops, lit magically by naked electric bulbs, where you could buy everything you’d ever dreamed of owning and at least as many things none of us could even identify — shops not built of rough planking with a countertop for you to lean on but brick buildings with concrete floors, with wide-open entrances where you could walk all the way in. And there were so many people, and all of them strangers. Nationality people in colorful dress, and Han people; Han women who did not wear turbans or caps on their heads or braided hair but wore their hair cut short, just below their ears. “Are you sure they’re women?” “Yes, look, they’re wearing those little stick shoes!”

“And what about them?”

Outside a shop, there were two young Han women whose curly hair made me think of the sheep the Yi herded in the high mountains. They were sucking on pink sticks.

“It’s ice cream,” one said in Chinese.

Icecreem, we repeated. Icecreem. What’s icecreem? She tried to explain but there was no point. So she walked into the shop and returned with three sticks.

I loved the ice cream so much I did not bother licking but chewed on it instead and ate the whole thing in no time. Then I chewed on the wooden stick while I watched my girlfriends lick theirs, and then lick the sweet melted goo off their fingers, and I thought of how my little brothers and Jiama would love this ice cream.

When we got back to the guest house, the dining room had been set up with twenty or so big round tables and was brightly lit by fake brass chandeliers. It was filled with people all dressed in colorful ethnic costumes. Latsoma, who prided herself on her knowledge of ethnic dress, identified the Tibetans, Naxi, Yi, Pumi, Miao, and Lisu, and Yisso pointed out the Bai, Dai, Zhuang, and Hani. All these people had come to Yanyuan to take part in the singing contest. Some were already seated, and others were moving between the tables looking for their friends. I spotted a few faces we had passed in the corridor, and also Mr. Li and his colleagues, who were looking very clean and were waiting for us at our designated table.

“So, you’re feeling better? I heard you got very carsick,” Mr. Li said as he took out a little brown bottle from his pocket and emptied a few pills into his hands to hand over to us. It was traditional Chinese medicine, he explained. “Something to clear your throat and energize your qi.”

We swallowed the pills and then drank some tea that tasted like hot water to us. But if we could not help wishing for our butter tea, the food was splendid. We had never seen such a variety of dishes. The rice especially was so white and fluffy.

Mr. Li explained that Chinese rice was steamed, not boiled like our rice, and that was why it was so sweet. “Good food?” he asked, turning to me directly, perhaps impressed by my gluttony.

“Yes, very good food,” I answered him in Chinese. And I dished myself a fourth helping of rice.

“Very good,” Mr. Li continued. “You need to eat well and get a good rest so you can be strong and practice tomorrow.”

“Practice, what for?” Zhatsonamu asked. “All we have to do is sing!”

Yisso translated and Mr. Li laughed out loud. “Well, at least you can make the most of a good night’s sleep, don’t you think?” He paused for a while, still smiling, and again addressing me directly, he said, “Do you like your room, Namu?”

“Yes, the bed is very comfortable, thank you,” I answered him, once more using Chinese and feeling very proud of myself for doing so.

“Good, good,” Mr. Li said, and he picked up a little piece of meat with his chopsticks.

Zhatsonamu turned to Yisso. “Can you ask him why the bedrooms have no fireplaces?”

“Oh, yes, ask him! Ask him how people light their fires at night!” Latsoma giggled.

Of course, Yisso knew what they meant — that it was hard to imagine yourself whispering to your lover under the bleary light of the neon tubing. He smiled and shook his head. “I’m not asking him that.”

“Come on, Yisso, ask him!” Latsoma put on her prettiest smile.

So Yisso asked Mr. Li, who answered matter-of-factly: “It’s difficult to get wood in the city.” And when we burst out laughing, he continued in earnest, “Besides, if you were to light a fire in these rooms, everything would turn black and you’d suffocate.”

Even without a fire, my girlfriends slept very well that night. It was so good not to sleep on the floor and not to be bothered by fleas. The beds were so comfortable, and the sheets and the covers smelled like the soap we had used in the shower.

THE NIGHT OF THE SINGING CONTEST
, Mr. Li said, “Don’t be nervous. Everything will be fine. There’s no need to be afraid.” We laughed, of course. We were not afraid, we were going to sing! What was there to be nervous about? But Mr. Li looked nervous. He wiped his face with his handkerchief, and he told us over and over as he led us through the big function room to the backstage area that when the hostess called our names, all we needed to do was walk to the middle of the stage.

We were the first to be called. And when I stepped onto the stage, I understood what Mr. Li was worried about. It was easy enough to answer to my name, but I took only a few steps before I was blinded by the stage lights and all I could do was stop and wait for the hostess to take me by the hand and lead me to where my girlfriends were standing, their eyes blinking and their faces glowing in unearthly fashion. Gradually I began to make out the faces in the darkened audience before us, and my heart missed a beat. It was the first time in my life that I was going to sing in front of people I did not know, and there were so many of them. And I was afraid.

When the clapping had quieted, the hostess introduced us as “three Moso girls from the Country of Daughters,” and we sang and the audience clapped again. And we could tell by the clapping that the people had loved our song. I turned around and looked for Mr. Li, who was standing behind the curtain, a big smile on his face. He nodded for us to sing again, and we sang another song, and again the audience loved it. We were about to begin a third song, but the hostess walked up to us and congratulated us and ushered us out. For the rest of the evening, we sat in the wings listening to the other nationality people, some of them performing with a full orchestra, their songs as varied and colorful as their costumes. I was entranced. I had never imagined that the world was filled with so many songs.

The hostess broke the spell, thanking the performers and telling the audience that the music was over — it was time to announce the prizes. Mr. Li then walked up on the stage and said something, and before we had time to ask Yisso to translate, we had been called and pushed up on the stage toward him, and we were shaking hands and smiling back. The hostess, also smiling, handed each of us a red diploma and a red envelope. Meanwhile, the audience had stood up, applauding us. My girlfriends waved and bowed and made toward the back of the stage, and the hostess gently pushed me in their direction. I didn’t want to leave just yet. These strangers could not get enough of me.

Next day, when we walked in the streets, people we did not know called out to us and smiled at us. Zhatsonamu and Latsoma hardly seemed to notice. When we had opened our red envelopes, we had discovered that they each contained fifty yuan. We had never seen so much money, and my girlfriends were so excited they could not wait to spend it on gifts for their mothers and their boyfriends. In those days you could buy a lot of things with fifty yuan. For my part, although I was very happy with the money, I especially loved being famous, and I could think of only one thing: I want to see more of the world.

My wish was granted that same afternoon when Mr. Li and Yisso came into our room to announce that we were not going back to Zuosuo as planned. Mr. Li had enrolled us in another contest in Xichang — eight hours away by car, and we had to leave early the next morning. My girlfriends sat back on their beds, almost in tears. I was overjoyed.

Xichang is a much bigger city than Yanyuan. The tallest building in Yanyuan had four stories, the tallest building in Xichang had twelve. The hotel in Xichang also had a red carpet and toilets on the floors that flushed most of the time. The morning after we arrived, Mr. Li took us on a tour of the city and said, “Now I’m going to show you the railway station and a train.” And gazing at the giant centipede, it occurred to me that the farther away from Zuosuo we traveled, the more marvelous the cities became. . . . I would love to ride in this train.

Back at the hotel, the TV people were waiting for us. They were carrying a thing on a stick and what we assumed was a big tape recorder. “It’s a video camera,” the cameraman said. “And that’s a microphone,” he added, pointing at the thing on the stick. Then he pointed at the glass box in our bedroom. “And that’s the TV” — and that annoyed us a bit because we had already worked it out for ourselves and learned to switch it on and off.

When the TV people were done with making us sing and dance and laugh in front of the video camera, the cameraman hooked his machine into the back of the television and turned on the screen. There was a little explosion, and our faces suddenly lit up on the screen. Awestruck, we watched ourselves laughing and singing and smiling on the television. We looked at ourselves inside the TV and then we looked at each other inside the room, and then again we looked at ourselves in the TV. I thought we were so pretty. But on seeing how the TV had captured her face and her songs and her laughter, Latsoma said: “Can this thing steal our souls?”