Leaving Mother Lake (28 page)

I stayed in Beijing only two days, just long enough to complete the recording for the documentary — which incidentally was to win a major prize at an international festival a year or two later, only to be censored by the Chinese authorities and never shown to the Chinese public. I was very sad to say good-bye to Mrs. Ambassador, but at the same time, I could not wait to get back to the dormitory and see Hong Ling’s face when I opened my little suitcase filled with all the wonderful things Mrs. Ambassador had put in there — clothes, books, and music cassettes and exotic Mexican foods.

Almost all students at the conservatory received parcels of food and clothes as well as spending money from their parents. The better off had perhaps one hundred yuan a month. I had only the thirty-yuan stipend that the school provided me, which left me feeling not only inferior but hungry. It was such a small amount that I had usually spent everything on buying meal tickets by the third week of the month. To earn extra meal tickets, I ran errands for my roommates, fetching their mail from the post office and their thermos of hot water for making tea and washing their faces. Still, I never seemed to have enough to eat. I was always hungry, and in the winter, sitting in the unheated dorm, I was always cold. Some mornings, I was so cold that I could not bring myself to get out of bed. I would lie there under my quilt until the last minute before class time, thinking of the fireplace at home, of hot butter tea and roasted potatoes. And then I would think of my Ama’s face in the glow of the fireplace. Was she thinking of me? Did she miss me? Would I ever see her again? But of course, I would see my Ama again. When I was famous. When I could make up for the terrible thing I had done and she could be proud of me again. And that was why I was here, at the best music school in the whole of China. Because I wanted to show my mother that I could have my dream.

On the weekends my roommate Hong Ling went home to her parents’ house, and on Sunday nights she always brought dumplings back to our room. The next morning she would eat a couple and then look at me, sigh, and hand me the rest. “Here, you can have them. I eat this sort of thing all the time!” There was no mistaking her condescension, but I did not know the meaning of the word
full,
and my stomach always won over my pride, if not my resentment.

Sometimes Teacher Cui, our ethnic music teacher, also took care of my stomach, inviting me to his house for all sorts of delicious spicy food. Once he put on a record for me and played it at low volume.

“Hey! What is this?” I shouted with enthusiasm. “It’s so beautiful. Why don’t you turn it up?”

“Shhh, listen,” Teacher Cui hushed me. “It’s from Taiwan. We’re not supposed to be listening to this here. It’s decadent music.”

I liked decadent music. It was so unlike the Communist repertoire we learned, which always had something martial about it, something to raise the collective spirit and send you marching off for the glory of country and revolution. The Taiwanese music was soft and romantic and moved only your heart.

EARLY IN THE SPRING
I was sitting in the dining hall, eating a bowl of noodles and listening to a conversation between two boys at a nearby table. One of them had caught my eye because of the showy way he dressed and a very short haircut that made him look like a foreigner. He was not a student at the conservatory. He was a guitar player, with his own band, making twenty-four yuan an hour playing gigs in restaurants and nightclubs, and he was looking for a singer.

“Hey! I can sing in your band!” I called out to him. “I’m a singer!”

His name was Zhu He, and we became friends immediately. In less than two hours, I was at the restaurant, rehearsing with the rest of the band, singing decadent, fluffy, beautiful Taiwanese pop songs. Most were by Deng Lijun, whose music was officially forbidden but, thanks to the black market economy and the national disregard for copyright, was at the time so popular that cassette tapes were available at every street corner. That year you could hear Deng Lijun’s songs in every Shanghai street, coming out of restaurants, apartment buildings, or small stores, whistled on all the building sites, hummed on everyone’s lips.

From the first day of rehearsal, Zhu He was very pleased with me, and so was the owner of the Four Seasons restaurant, who quickly reckoned that since I was a student, there was no reason to pay me a professional fee. Thus, instead of the twenty-four yuan the other members of the band earned, I got seven, and a small picnic bag with a cup of orange juice, a piece of cake, and an apple. But I was more than satisfied. In the mid-1980s, orange juice and cake were luxury foods in China, and seven yuan for one hour of singing three times a week made twenty-one yuan a week, which was no small supplement to my thirty-yuan monthly stipend. Besides, Zhu He soon had more work to give me. Within a few weeks I was singing in three venues at least three nights a week — starting at 7:00 P.M. at the Four Seasons and ending after eleven at the Cherry Blossom nightclub, just in time for me to cycle back to the conservatory before the old man closed the gates. Meanwhile, Zhu renamed me Yang-yang, which was cute and much easier for customers to remember than Yang Erche Namu, and he taught me to introduce myself by speaking in a sugary Hong Kong accent: “Hello, everyone, my name is Yang-yang! Welcome to you all.” The effect was pure kitsch — so kitsch that I could not bring myself to invite Umbalo (who hated anything cheap and fake) to come and watch me perform. Well, it was fake and it was tacky, but I loved being onstage, and it paid well.

In fact, I was not only eating very well now, I also had a disposable income, and I was not averse to showing off. I asked Umbalo to take me to the Friendship Store and help me buy a new suitcase, lipstick, coffee. I borrowed fashion magazines from the foreign students and had new clothes made, including a bright yellow jumpsuit and a pink miniskirt. One day when I was wearing the miniskirt, an American boy called out to me, “Namu, you have beautiful legs!” I looked at him and I looked down at my legs, not understanding, and he said, in English this time, “Sexy!” Now,
sexy
was one of those English words we all understood, but I felt intrigued. It had never occurred to me that legs could be beautiful or provocative; I had never thought of legs as anything but a means of getting places. I just showed mine to look like the foreign models in the magazines. For us Moso, sexy and beautiful were the same thing, and beauty was a woman’s face, a man’s long graceful hands, a tall gait (for both men and women). “Yes, really sexy!” the American repeated, laughing at the puzzled expression on my face. I too laughed, at the compliment, but then I thought of Geko, who would never have thought to tell me that I had sexy legs.

In the village that was the Music Conservatory, conspicuous consumption and outlandish dress could not fail to set tongues wagging, and since I had kept my work a secret, all sorts of rumors and speculation were circulating about me. It did not take long for the noise to reach my teachers’ ears. When they found out about my work, they were not impressed.

“No student from the conservatory has ever sung in a nightclub,” they said.

But I objected that my stipend was so small, that I had no family support, and that I really needed to earn money — and if they did not want me to earn money, they would have to feed me. The battle went on for a few days but the teachers grew tired before I did. After all, these were the mid-1980s, a time of liberalization, economic and social reforms. Shanghai was fast renewing with its cosmopolitan past, and the young had freedoms their parents had never dreamed of. Eventually I heard no more about it and I assumed I had won the argument.

Next I became an entrepreneur. At this time in China, everybody was crazy for everything made in Taiwan — not only pop music but also books and movies. Things made in Taiwan or even Hong Kong had all the appeal of things made in the capitalist foreign world but with the advantage of Chinese language and culture. At the conservatory, students craved Taiwanese romance novels filled with heart-wrenching individualistic bourgeois sentimentality, and the books were so hard to find that some students had taken it upon themselves to sell handwritten copies, while others were causing huge backlogs at the school’s photocopier. On a tip I had been given at the nightclub, I decided to go to Beijing to buy a supply of books by the two writers most in demand, San Mao and Chong Yao. I had made enough money that I could purchase a plane ticket, so I flew to Beijing one morning (my very first plane trip) and returned that same evening with two huge boxes filled with books, including several dozen copies of
Outside the Window
by Chong Yao. I soon became the most popular girl on campus, renting the books out for five yuan each, and in a short time I had made back my plane fare.

Chong Yao’s novel, however, almost cost me my place at the conservatory.

According to school rules, all lights had to be turned off in the dormitory by 11:00 P.M., so that after eleven, we read by flashlight. One evening Hong Ling, who was reading
Outside the Window
, called out from the bunk above me:

“Hey, Namu, pass me your light for a moment! I’m out of batteries.”

I handed her the light and took the opportunity of the break to put my own book down and go to the bathroom. But when I came back, Hong Ling wanted to keep the light a little longer, just to finish a sentence, then just to finish another paragraph, and another, and then a page. . . .

After fifteen minutes or so, I grew impatient. “Hong Ling! Give me back my light, now.”

But she had no intention of giving me the flashlight. She made more excuses and ignored me, until I pressed her more and she snapped, “Hey, muddy butt, what’s your hurry?” and she turned over on the bed, showing me her back. This was no longer about Chong Yao’s novel. Hong Ling had decided to teach me a lesson, to remind me that I used to fetch her thermos flask and feel grateful for eating her dumplings and that however I dressed and whatever money I made on renting books and singing at nightclubs, I was and would always be a peasant girl who had dirtied her butt in the mud of the fields.

“It’s my torch and I want it now!” I raised my voice. “Get up and get your own batteries!”

“Oh, fuck your mother!”

That was it. I’d heard enough. I’d heard enough the very first day I had walked into the dormitory, three years ago. I grabbed at her blankets, and then at her pajama shirt. The flashlight flew across the room, and at last I got hold of her hair and pulled her off the bed, screaming and crying in terror, and I thrashed her. When I finally let go of her and went to turn on the light, she was whimpering on the floor, her face all red, her hair a mess, her pajamas torn off her back. The other three girls were sitting on their beds looking on, terrified. Still furious, I grabbed everything I could find that belonged to Hong Ling, including her suitcases, and I threw the whole lot out the window. The light had now gone on in the corridor and other girls were at our door. “What happened?” “Hong Ling, are you all right?” And seeing the fear in their faces, I stormed past them, out of the room and into the corridor, where I went banging and shouting at the doors that had not opened yet. “If you want to know what this minority hillbilly, muddy butt, country bumpkin did to Hong Ling, come out of your beds and see for yourselves!”

That night, when everyone had gone back to their beds, I slept very well. Next afternoon, however, I was called to the director’s office, where Hong Ling, her mother, father, and brother and three administrators were waiting for me. I was soundly chastised, reproached, and required to apologize. But I could not apologize. Hong Ling had insulted my mother. What she had done was worse than anything. She could not have hurt me more if she had stabbed me in the heart. I turned to Hong Ling’s mother. “I know I should not have hit her. You’re her mother and she’s your own flesh, but I am also my mother’s flesh. Hong Ling should respect my mother. She should not insult my mother. And she should not insult me because I am a minority and I am from the countryside. Even a rabbit will bite if you taunt it long enough.”

In the end I had to write a self-criticism, and my name and the story of Hong Ling’s beating were put on the disciplinary notice board for everyone to see, and for weeks afterward, I would hear students whisper as I walked past, “This minority girl can really fight.” But it was better than being expelled. And no doubt I would have been expelled if I had been a Han student, because I had committed a very serious offence by thrashing my roommate, and Hong Ling was the daughter of an influential family — but no administrator at the conservatory wanted to risk my lodging a complaint at the Nationalities Institute in Beijing.

Still, the thought that I had almost lost my place at the conservatory sent shivers down my spine. Where else could I go? What would I do if I lost my dream? And how would I ever face my mother again? Because one day, yes, one day, I would go home to my Ama. I would become a famous singer and bring glory to my people, and I would go home to my Ama with my head high, and she would forgive everything. She would have to forgive me.

The experience with Hong Ling left me very nervous and more conscious of the boundaries I should not attempt to cross. Two things had always struck me as especially worth avoiding: politics and sex, my own knowledge of which was extremely rudimentary and almost entirely derived from the compulsory classes everyone was officially subjected to, everywhere in China.

In actual fact, in the mid-1980s no one in China cared about politics, or more exactly, no one cared for politics classes, but in the five years I spent at the conservatory, I never dared miss — because I never felt entirely secure of my own position, at first because of my poor level in Chinese class, and later on, on account of my work at the nightclubs and then the incident with Hong Ling; or perhaps I did not dare miss classes simply because the conservatory was my dream and I would not have risked my place for anything, least of all by breaking a rule no one really cared for. As things were, however, politics classes were mandatory but I was often the only student in the classroom. No one else bothered to come and the few who did usually got so bored that they fell asleep on their desks before time was up. At times I even wondered if they did not just come to class for a nap, for the opportunity to recover from the previous night’s party.