Leaving Mother Lake (2 page)

One night when she left me crying alone under the kang, I wriggled my arms free of the goatskin and reached out to the bright embers that had fallen between the cracks from under the stove. My tiny fingers closed around the glowing coal, and I screamed with all the force of my baby lungs. My Ama rushed back into the house, but already my hand was horribly burned. To this day, when she sees the scar on my right hand, my mother’s eyes fill with tears.

After I burned my hand, Ama decided to seek some help. She snipped a corner of my clothing and set off with a large bunch of wild sagebrush to consult with old Lama Ruhi.

The holy man shooed away his chickens and piglets, and my Ama stepped through the wooden porch and into his courtyard, where, as custom requires, she respectfully undid her headdress and kowtowed three times, each time touching her forehead to the cold earth. When she stood up, she straightened her long skirt, picked up her things, and followed Lama Ruhi across the yard into another interior court, enclosed on two sides by the women’s bedrooms and, at the far end, by a little chapel. There Lama Ruhi directed my mother toward a large clay burner next to the chapel wall, where she piled her sagebrush and the old man struck a match.

The twigs crackled and the smoke rose up the chimney and into the sky.

Lama Ruhi stared at the smoke for a while before he led Ama upstairs and into his little chapel cheered by the perfume of sagebrush smoke and burning incense and the glow of tiny flames dancing in the butter lamps on the altar. Again Ama lowered her forehead to the floor, this time to honor the portraits of the yellow Buddhas gazing in serene benevolence from above the altar. When all these formalities were finally over, Lama Ruhi sat himself on a large red cushion while my mother knelt in front of him, on the bare floor, and politely joined her hands together with her fingers pointing up toward heaven and her thumbs touching her heart.

“Uncle Lama, how is your health?” she asked. “How are your fields?”

“And how is your family in Qiansuo?” he replied, smiling. “Do you have news from your mother? And your sisters and brothers?”

“Thank you for asking, Ape,” she said, “but the horse caravan has not arrived and we have no news.”

“There was hail in Qiansuo this summer,” he told her. “Did your family manage to reap a good harvest?”

“Thank you for your concern, Ape. Everyone is well. But I have not come because of my mother or sisters or brothers, or because of the crops. I have come because my third daughter won’t stop crying. I have enough with the noise of the pigs and chickens and cows. I can’t sleep at night. I am so tired. I am afraid I’m going to lose all my hair. She cries and cries. No matter what I do she will not stop.”

My mother undid her hands and reached under her belt for the little piece of my clothing. “Please, Uncle, help me,” she pleaded.

Lama Ruhi leaned over, took the cloth from her, and brought it to his nose. He sniffed it, closed his eyes, and sniffed again carefully, and then he looked at my Ama and asked, “When was the baby born?”

Ama hesitated. “When the rooster crowed.”

“Yes, and what is her zodiacal sign?”

Ama frowned. “Well, it is a horse year, so she must be a horse. . . .”

Lama Ruhi laughed. “What do you mean, she must be a horse? Don’t you know when your daughter was born?”

Ama lowered her eyes. “I know that it’s time she had a name. Maybe she’s more than two months old already. With four mouths to feed and the pigs and chickens and horses to tend and without brothers or sisters to help me, I don’t even remember my own birthday!”

The old monk repressed a smile. He half closed his eyes and began chanting a sutra in a deep, low voice. When he finished, he gazed calmly into my mother’s face and said, “Latso, your third daughter has a very special destiny awaiting her. But to solve your problem, you must first of all find a suitable name for her.”

“But how will I find this name?” my mother asked eagerly, at once relieved to hear that there was a solution and anxious to find it as quickly as possible. “Why don’t you give her a name, Uncle?”

“On the fifteenth day of the month,” Lama Ruhi answered gravely, “you must leave your house before the cock crows and take this baby to the crossroads at the center of the village and you must wait there. You will ask the first person you meet to give her a name. Then she’ll stop crying.”

On the fifteenth day of that month, Ama got up well before sunrise. She wrapped me up tightly and tied me over her back, slung a canvas bag filled with food over her shoulder, and set off down the road. At the crosswalk she spread a goatskin on the ground and placed me on it. She took her food offerings out of her bag and carefully laid them on the ground for the local spirits — a bowl of red rice, a slice of ham, and a whole boiled chicken — all the while thinking that it was so dreadfully cold that no one in his right mind would dare venture out of his house before the sun came up. And what if no one came? Would the baby cry forever? And what would the other girls do if they woke up and found she was gone? And what if the baby caught a cold?

She reached for her prayer beads and worked a swift miracle. For she had chanted only a few mantras when the tinkle of a lama’s bell rang in the nearby darkness. Ama squinted toward the dark shape moving toward her along the road and smiled. It was the old Bonpo monk Lama Gatusa. He was walking very slowly, bent over his wooden cane, his eyes fixed on the ground. He was on his way to the lake to collect water for the morning prayers.

“Uncle Lama! You are so early!” she called out as she kowtowed.

The dear old man looked at my mother prostrate on the hard, cold road and at her offerings and at the whimpering child on the goatskin.

“What’s the matter with this child?” he asked.

“Uncle Lama,” Ama replied, raising her forehead from the ground, “this is my third daughter. She cries too much. I went to see Lama Ruhi and he told me that today was a good day to name her, to come to the crossroads and wait. I never imagined that the first person we would meet would be a lama. My daughter is so fortunate. Please, Uncle, could you give her a name?”

Lama Gatusa bent a little farther toward the ground and reached out to my mother, somewhat shakily, to invite her to stand. He then tried to reach for me but thought better of it and asked my Ama to pick me up from the goatskin so that he could take a better look. “She is pretty as the moonlight,” he said, his ancient face creasing into a kindly smile. He placed his hand on my belly and gave me a long look and began chanting in a low, trembling voice. When he stopped he said, “Her name is Erche Namu.”

Ama nodded. In our language
erche
means “treasure” and
namu
means “princess.” And since, at that moment, I happened to be both awake and quiet, my mother was immediately impressed by the apparent magic of my name. “My Treasured Princess,” she repeated softly to herself. And when the old lama resumed his slow walk to the lake, Ama followed after him, squeezing me in her arms and gratefully checking her own impatient steps in his unsteady wake.

We Moso say that very early in the morning, before the birds drink from it, the water of Lake Lugu is the purest. This is why lamas come to the lake so early to fetch the water for their morning prayers. When Ama and old Lama Gatusa reached the shore of Lake Lugu, the night was still perfectly quiet, but the moon was fading and the approaching dawn already glowed faintly in the darkness above the tall, jagged mountains. We had arrived at the lake just in time, because the birds wake with the sun.

Following the lama’s instructions, my mother dipped her right hand into the lake and scooped up just enough water to wash my face. Then she held me up to the sky under the approving gaze of our great mother goddess, the mountain Gamu.

As for me, I was now thoroughly wakened by the icy water on my face, and I was screaming with all my might.

INDEED, FINDING A NAME FOR M E
, even such a beautiful name, did not stop my crying. In fact, and quite in spite of Lama Ruhi’s prediction, it seemed that my screams grew louder as the days passed by and my body grew stronger from my mother’s milk. So much so that word now went around all the neighboring villages and far beyond that my mother had given birth to a daughter who was supposed to be a son and who would not stop crying. My tears had become legendary.

One day during the summer, Dujema came to our house to visit. She had brought barley cookies and wanted my mother to sit with her near the fireplace and have some tea. As usual, I was crying. So while Ama placed Dujema’s cookies on the ancestral altar and went to fetch the butter and the salt to churn the tea, Dujema took me in her arms and began to pace back and forth, singing to me softly and bouncing me over her shoulder.

When tea was ready, Dujema sat down at the fireplace at the spot reserved for honored guests. Ama sat across from her, on the left-hand side, where the mistress of the house always sits.

“Look at this loud little piggie,” Dujema said, holding me up in the glow of the fire. “Little piggie,” she commanded me, “little potato! Stop crying!” And she gave me her breast. I took it greedily and Dujema concluded: “Look, Latso! She’s not such a bad one after all.” And after a pause, she added, “You really are fortunate. You have three girls now. I have only two boys!”

My Ama did not answer. She chanted the usual incantations and calmly poured several drops of tea over the hearth to honor the fire god Zabbala. Then she poured two bowls of tea and, according to our custom, politely extended a bowl to Dujema using both her hands. After this she placed the plate of cookies on the wooden floor in front of Dujema.

Dujema took a sip of tea and bit thoughtfully into her cookie. “Without girls,” she said, “who will give me grandchildren? Everyone knows that the wealth of a house is its women.”

My Ama watched me gurgling at Dujema’s breast and wondered if perhaps Dujema’s milk was sweeter than her own, but she kept silent and stared at the fire.

“She likes you,” she said at last.

Dujema nodded.

“You can have her,” my mother said.

Dujema smiled. She had expected no less. She looked up at my Ama’s tired face and said, “I will give you Tsili in exchange for this one. He’s already two years old and he’s not much trouble anymore. And you know what people say, Latso. If we exchange our children, the next time you become pregnant, you will have a son for sure.”

Thus, my Ama and Dujema agreed to exchange their children — a daughter for a son.

I, unfortunately, appeared not to like this new arrangement, for I resumed crying as soon as I arrived at Dujema’s house. And now I cried so hard and so long that all the members of the household spent the night holding their hands over their ears. I cried so loud that my Ama said she could hear me through the log walls of our house all night long.

After fourteen sleepless nights, Dujema’s mother ordered: “Give her back! If she continues like this, the whole house will break apart and fall down.”

So Dujema returned me to my Ama, and she took back her Tsili.

A year later, a woman from a neighboring village who had heard that my mother had grown weak from caring for a girl who wanted to be a boy came to our house with offerings of tea, ham, chicken, eggs, and barley cookies. She left with me.

The poor woman had tried for years to have children, but she kept me only two nights. On the third day she brought me home, her eyes red and swollen from lack of sleep. “This little girl has a terrible temper. We tried everything. To have no child at all is better than to have a girl who will not stop crying.”

And so I was back with my Ama.

Weeks passed, and then months. The trees around the lake turned red and orange, and the cranes flew in from above the mountain peaks. Then snow fell on the hills. And then, one day, the cuckoo sang in the forest and spring came again.

One sunny afternoon, a woman who looked just like my Ama appeared in our courtyard. She was holding a little boy by the hand.

“This is your Aunt Yufang,” my Ama said. “And this is your cousin Ache. They have walked all the way from Grandmother’s house to meet you.”

A few days later, Aunt Yufang loaded her little mountain horse, and my mother bundled me up in some warm clothes. We waved good-bye to my Ama and my little cousin Ache and started on the trail back to Grandmother’s house in Qiansuo. But as soon as we reached the last mud wall at the edge of the village, I began pulling on Aunt Yufang’s hand and refused to walk. And when Aunt Yufang picked me up in her arms to sit me on the little horse, I screamed and I kicked and I scratched. We had not gone more than a few miles before she gave up and we turned around. My Ama then swapped me for my older sister Dujelema and she kept Ache. And I became known as the girl who was given back three times.

But certainly there was something fortuitous in this last exchange. For only a few months after she had sent Dujelema to live with Aunt Yufang, my mother gave birth to my little brother Howei — thus proving the truth of our tradition regarding the exchange of children. And that was not all. From the moment my adopted brother, Ache, came to live with us, I became entirely fascinated by him and stopped crying. It was as though, in a matter of a single day, I had become a normal child. Or at least it seemed that way at first. For the strange thing is, after I stopped crying, I never cried again.

According to Dujema, this was because I had shed a whole lifetime of tears in my first three years.

Latso

M
y mother, Latso, grew up in the region of Qiansuo, in the house of her maternal ancestors, a traditional log house with three courtyards, a vegetable garden, and flower gardens. My grandmother loved flowers. She especially loved yellow chrysanthemums because they made the best offerings at the Buddhist temple. But my grandmother grew all sorts of flowers, and because of all the bright colors, you could see her house from a long way off on the mountain road.

In her house, my grandmother was Dabu, the head of her household. As a mark of her status, she wore the key of the granary on her belt and a proud expression on her face. She was the one in charge of planning and organizing work and distributing food and other goods, and everyone in the family owed her their special respect and attention. Still, one should not think of my grandmother as a strict matriarch. In Moso families, decisions are always made in consultation with the other adults, and Dabu do not really rule over anyone. Rather, they are entrusted with responsibility because they are wise. My grandmother was Dabu, not because she was the oldest, and not only because she was a woman, but because among all her siblings, she was the smartest and the most capable. Her sisters also helped run the house and worked in the fields, and they were like all Moso women, hardworking and skillful. They could do anything, from plowing the earth and chopping wood to sewing clothes and butchering animals. As for my grandmother’s brothers, they did what Moso men have always done: they helped in the fields, built houses, and made furniture, and they took care of outside business.