Leaving Mother Lake (31 page)

It had been almost five years since I had run away on the mountain path. And now everything felt so familiar and yet so strange, time-warped, dislocated. Could they even begin to imagine how much of the world I had seen? Or ever understand how much I had changed? Homi and Jiama could not take their eyes off me, but then, they had grown so much, I could not stop looking at them either. They were going to school, and Jiama could already read and write, my Ama assured me. And my little brother Howei had become such a handsome young man! He must have dozens of girlfriends, I thought to myself, because this is the sort of thing you cannot talk about with your own family. My Ama had changed as well, but she was so happy it hardly showed.

Zhema brought me some tea. She too looked different — not just older but just like a Han woman. She had left home a year after me and gone to live and work in Yanyuan. And she had come home again, just as I had, to visit for New Year.

“A lot has changed in the past few years,” Howei said, echoing my thoughts. “There’s even a cinema now. They show movies from Hong Kong and America. Everybody knows what trains and airplanes and telephones look like.”

And Ache, where was Ache?

There was an awkward pause, and then Ama said, “Ache is living in the village . . . like a married couple. Do you want more tea?”

I looked at my mother and felt my heart break. What had become of her dream?

After lunch Ama took out the Sulima wine and all the people in the village, including my brother Ache, came to our house to visit — everybody except Geko.

I had brought three photo albums with pictures from Shanghai and Beijing, the conservatory, the Mexican embassy, Umbalo and me at the Peace Hotel, my Dutch friend and me drinking coffee, me singing at the nightclub, me in the pink miniskirt — at which Dujema burst out laughing. “Is there a shortage of cloth in Shanghai?” And once again I was the center of attention, and once again I was my mother’s pride, and she poured the wine and joked and smiled and showed off the beautiful gold ring I had given her.

When the guests went home late in the evening, I was exhausted from the traveling and the emotion, but before taking my suitcases up to my room, I remembered to take out the can of coffee and place it on the shelf in the pantry, ready for the next day’s breakfast. I did feel a little conceited but I had lived in the world now, and I had changed so much. I would rather have coffee than butter tea for breakfast.

The next morning the winter sun was streaming softly through the window and I noticed that everything in my room was new. The bed, the little side table, my comforter. At first I felt moved at the thought that my Ama had gone to all the trouble and expense of providing a brand-new room for me. Then it struck me as a strange thing to do, since I was no longer living at home, and I suddenly missed my old comforter.

Downstairs, Zhema was drinking butter tea with Ache. I walked over to the pantry to prepare the coffee and found the can filled with water and a beautiful red camellia flower. “Hey? What happened to my coffee?”

“Ask Ama,” Ache said.

My mother was in the pig yard. “Ami, what happened to my coffee?”

“What coffee?”

“You know, the black stuff inside the can!”

“Oh, that stuff! I gave it to the pig. It tasted horrible!”

I looked at the pig. She was scratching and scratching at the ground with her front feet. She had dug a big hole. Then I looked at my mother. She was holding her cigarette in her left hand, and with her right she was twiddling a long bamboo stick into the pig shit.

“What are you doing, Ami?”

“Last night, when I was feeding her, she grabbed at my finger and I think she swallowed my ring.”

I glanced at the pig shit. “Do you think you’ll find it?”

“I hope so. Gold must be very bad for a pig. I am worried she’ll get sick. See, she’s acting very strange.”

“I don’t think it’s the gold,” I said.

The poor pig acted strange all day, twitching, jumping about, scratching at the ground. Thankfully, she survived the caffeine, and my sister found the gold ring under the pig trough.

I was at home for ten days only, and everyone treated me like an honored guest. Every day I was invited out for lunch, and every evening Ama cooked my favorite foods, always serving me first and more than anyone else. And yet I did not dare to look into her eyes, and she avoided mine. We never spoke about what had happened, why I had left, or that we were sorry, or that we had missed each other so much. There were no embraces and no kisses. There were no explanations, no excuses, no making up, no regrets, no affirmations, no pledges for the future. Nothing. Not because we didn’t feel anything but because talking about it was not the way we did things. We said nothing because we wanted to believe that nothing had ever gone wrong, because this is the only way we could truly forgive. We buried the past. We banished it from our talk and from our memory. We remembered only what should have happened. And so for ten days, we would live side by side as though nothing had ever gone wrong, as though I had never left the roof my mother had built for her family, where I had come screaming into the world near the woodstove, where I had burned my little red shoes, and where she had given me her jade bracelet.

“Hey, what happened to your bracelet?” Ama asked the first time she caught sight of my bare arm.

I hesitated. . . . “I sold it to go to Shanghai.”

Ama was quiet for a while. “Do you think we could buy it back?”

“I don’t think so, Ami.”

My mother nodded her head, and she said no more about it. The bracelet had now vanished to the void of memory, together with the smashed-up kitchen stove and the other unspeakable things. The past was done and there was nothing she could do to change this, nothing but to begin forgetting, one wordless moment at a time. One evening I went to sit in Zhema’s room to talk, and to try to make things the way they had always been. I so desperately wanted things to be as they had been. But when was this “always”? When I was living with Uncle and came home from the mountain? When I had come home for my Skirt Ceremony? When I had beaten Geko? And then something occurred to me. “Zhema, why is everything new in my room?”

Zhema winced.

“What is it?” I insisted.

“After you left,” she finally said slowly, looking away from me, “the teachers came and told her what you had done . . . so she knew that you wouldn’t be coming back. One day she took the ax and went into your room. She broke everything up, your bed, the chest of drawers. She threw everything downstairs and made a fire in the yard. She burned all your things, even your clothes.” Zhema paused and looked at me, her eyes filled with tears. She had told me a terrible thing. The precipice on the way to Yanyuan suddenly opened up again in my imagination. I had come so close . . . And my Ama had meant to destroy all traces of me. “Now, do you understand?” Zhema sobbed. “She thought she had lost you forever.”

I stared at my big sister. I felt sick inside. I pictured my mother burning my things, smashing my bed as I had smashed the kitchen stove at the school. . . . But what was I thinking? That I could run away from home and bring disgrace to my family, and my Ama would just get on with life as though nothing had ever happened? Of course my Ama had to do something!

“Yes, I understand,” I said to Zhema.

The next day, when my mother served me the best pieces of meat, I did not protest, and when Zhema gave me a whole portion of blood sausage, we all burst out laughing. And when my father came to visit and handed me two small leather purses filled with deer musk, which he had been saving for a year, I took those gratefully too, my eyes brimming and my heart full of love. “In Shanghai,” my father said, “they’ll fetch a good price. That will help you with your school.” I still felt strange and uncomfortable, and I knew they all felt the same way, but somehow we would have to live with it. Besides, I was home only for a few days. Could we not simply be happy that it was all over, that we were together again, that we would always come together like this, around the fireplace, drinking butter tea, laughing, and forgetting what we did not want to remember?

When it was time for me to leave, all the villagers came to our house to wish me a safe trip. Everyone except Geko. They came with bamboo boxes filled with the same foodstuff: boiled eggs, salted pork, ham, chicken breast. “Take this to eat on your journey.” There were so many boxes I began to worry. According to our custom, each box would have to be returned, filled with other food, and since I could not possibly carry or eat all this, I had to leave everything for my mother to take care of. As for my Ama, she gave me a pot of fresh butter and a leg of ham wrapped in red silk to take to the Living Buddha, for a temple offering. It was not important that the Living Buddha was, like all Buddhist saints, vegetarian.

Ama walked with me all the way to the lake, chanting mantras, counting her prayer beads with her right hand, and holding a cigarette in her left. Every so often she stopped to admonish me to be careful, to take care of myself, to try to get the jade bracelet back, and to write, because Jiama could read the letters, and to come home again soon. You can take the plane, it’s faster. Come home in the summer . . . or else next winter. . . .

My cousins were waiting for us at the boat. They loaded my suitcases, and I stepped into the canoe and took my seat. Then Ache pushed the boat off into the water, and I turned around to say one last good-bye. Zhema waved back. Ama was crying. “Come back soon,” she called. I nodded. We both knew now that I would always come back. I waved again and turned, and I stared through blurry eyes straight ahead of me, toward the other side of the lake, toward Luo Shui and the road back to the city, where the whole world was waiting.

Afterword

I
first heard of the Moso in 1988 when Lü Binghong, my Chinese language teacher, suggested I research a lost matriarchal tribe of the remote mountains of the Tibet-China borderland. He had himself discovered the Moso a couple of years previously when he had written English subtitles for a documentary film entitled
The Country of Daughters.
The Moso, Teacher Lü explained, practiced “walking marriage,” whereby men visited their wives at night, and husbands and wives did not live together; here also women ruled society and people favored daughters over sons.

I was intrigued but also skeptical. Like all other anthropology students, I had learned that contrary to popular conviction, there exists no such thing as a matriarchal society, that what goes by matriarchy is in fact matriliny — a system of inheritance determined by maternal lines. Matriarchy, indeed, implies the opposite of patriarchy, a social and political system where women have privileges and power at the expense of men, and this is not something that maternal inheritance automatically guarantees. As a dear old professor had put it, “The difference between a matrilineal society and a patrilineal one is that in a matrilineal society, women are bossed by their uncles and their brothers rather than their fathers and husbands.” Among the relatively few matrilineal societies of the world, some could perhaps claim to be gender egalitarian but none had as yet satisfied Western anthropologists’ criteria for women’s rule. Listening to Teacher Lü, and peering over the newspaper clippings he had brought out for my perusal, I was not convinced that Moso society was the exception. But just the same, I was interested.

Library research, however, soon turned curiosity into confusion. To begin with, there was not a great deal of information on the Moso, and what there was did not fit with Teacher Lü’s description. Firsthand reports fell almost entirely to three prerevolution writers, renowned East Asian scholars Jacques Bacot and Edouard Chavannes, and an American botanist explorer by the name of Joseph Rock. Jacques Bacot, the first to publish anything of true scholarly interest on the Moso, had passed through Lijiang in 1912, where he had obtained a copy of the genealogical chronicle of the long-deposed Moso kings, which he had then given to Chavannes to translate into French. Chavannes quite rightly described this document as a precious resource for historians, but such as it was, the Moso chronicle showed that the Lijiang kings were actually hereditary feudal lords, vassals of the Chinese emperor who had inherited their position
patrilineally
for centuries. And neither Bacot nor Chavannes made any mention of matriarchal or matrilineal customs.

Joseph Rock, for his part, had done a lot more than pass through Lijiang; he had spent almost thirty years in northern Yunnan, until his expulsion in 1949 following the Communist revolution. He had also published extensively. From Rock I now learned that the people Teacher Lü called Moso were in fact the neighbors of the Moso described by Bacot and Chavannes, and that the “real Moso,” so to speak, lived in Yongning and not Lijiang — where people called themselves Na-khi. By a mystery that puzzled Rock for years, it so happened that for centuries the Chinese had referred to both the Na-khi of Lijiang and the Moso of Yongning by the name Moso.

Yes, of course, Teacher Lü further enlightened me, because the Moso and the Na-khi had once formed a single tribe called Moso. Even today the Naxi (current spelling) and the Moso were still classed under one name, for the Moso were not considered a national group in their own right but a branch of the Naxi nationality, one of fifty-six official ethnic categories that make up the Chinese socialist state. In other words, in the People’s Republic of China, the Moso and the Naxi were once again regarded as a single tribe but now under the name Naxi!

Although I was still confused as to who the Moso and the Naxi were exactly, and as to why they should have had two or one name, thanks to Rock I could at least situate the Moso in Yongning and the Naxi in Lijiang, and I also had access to a wealth of mostly arcane historical and geographical data that he had compiled into a monumental opus entitled
The Ancient Na-khi Kingdom of Southwest China.
And from those I learned that in more recent history, northern Yunnan had been home to a powerful kingdom centered on Lijiang. Beginning with the Mongol conquest in 1253 and ending in 1723 with the annexation of their territory by the Manchu emperor, the Lijiang kings had ruled over a vast territory that, for a period of a hundred years at its foundation, had even included Yongning. So perhaps the confusion between the Moso and the Naxi had begun with Kublai Khan.