Leaving Mother Lake (21 page)

Except for those who lived in Chengdu, everyone was going home. Nankadroma was also leaving. On that last afternoon, I found her sitting on her bed, alone in our hotel room. She was crying. I thought she was unhappy because we had to say good-bye, but she pointed to a letter lying in front of her on the bed. As I could not read, I asked her, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Nankadroma looked at me as though I were supposed to know the answer, and seeing that I did not, she said, “It’s written in red. Don’t you see?”

“Yes, I see.” But I was puzzled. “Is red bad?”

Red was a beautiful color. It was the color of azalea flowers and of my mother’s vest at festival times. It was the color I had so enjoyed painting on my lips when we had sung on the stage. Why was Nankadroma afraid of red?

Owing to my limited Chinese, Nankadroma found it difficult to explain that the letter was from her lover’s wife, that the wife was Chinese and terribly jealous and that she now wanted Nankadroma dead — which was why she had written the letter in red ink. In China red ink was a curse. Indeed, it was not until a few years later, when I was a student at the Music Conservatory in Shanghai, that I truly understood the terror that red ink could inspire. Strolling in the streets with my teacher and classmates, I came across a large poster with the photographs of two young men and, listed under each picture, their names, their ages, where they had grown up, and last, the words
homosexual criminals.
Each list had been ticked off with a large red stroke. I asked my teacher what it all meant, as this was the first time I had seen the word
homosexual.
Then I asked him about the red strokes and he answered that the men had been executed. Everything inside me turned to ice.

Now Nankadroma had dried her tears and she was desperate to talk to her lover, and as there was no telephone in the hotel, we had to go to the post office. There I waited for her outside the glass booth, and while she shouted down the telephone and cried, I ate a red bean ice cream. I was terrified. I remembered the stories about the Yi chiefs who had wanted to chop off Dr. Rock’s head, but those were stories. I had never before heard of anyone who had cursed someone to die.

When Nankadroma came out of the telephone booth, her mouth was set in a sad but resolute expression. She did not want to go back to the hotel. She wanted to take a walk and calm herself. So we walked on the streets for a while until she said: “Are you hungry, Namu?” and she smiled weakly. “Of course, you’re always hungry. Come, I know a nice place.” And I followed Nankadroma down a few narrow streets to a small restaurant famous for its duck stew.

We sat ourselves close to the street, on square stools at a square table. Nankadroma drew closer to me and lit a cigarette. She asked me what I wanted to drink.

“Tea,” I answered.

“You’ve never drunk wine?” she asked, pointing to a bottle of Erguotuo standing on a dusty shelf.

“Not Chinese wine.”

“Try it,” she ordered me.

I did not know that Erguotuo was a very cheap and very nasty liquor, but even if I had, I would not have dared refuse her. She looked so sad and I did not want to upset her more. Nankadroma called on the restaurant owner to bring her the bottle of Erguotuo. She poured two small glasses and drank hers straight down.

“Go on!” she said, pushing the other glass in front of me. “Bottoms up!”

I took a sip and immediately felt the fire in my throat and the heat rising in my cheeks. This Chinese wine was nothing like our Sulima wine. Meanwhile, Nankadroma helped herself to another glass and downed that one as well. I watched her, feeling at the same time fascinated and afraid.

Nankadroma was so beautiful and she was so famous. Why was she crying for a man? Why did she allow a man to cause her so much trouble? Nankadroma could have anyone she wanted. Why did she need to love a man who had such a nasty wife? It now struck me that marriage was a great source of misery and that love was a very complicated thing outside our Moso country. But, of course, I had known this before going to Beijing. All Moso knew this about marriage. Watching Nankadroma drink her second glass of Erguotuo, I thought of my Yi sister, Añumo, who had run away from her husband, and then I remembered other stories, and one in particular, about a young Naxi couple who had taken their lives in nearby Lijiang.

For all those who believed that love suicide had died with the advent of the Communist Revolution, this was shocking news.

The Naxi were not like the Han Chinese, who, in the days before Communism, had kept their women indoors. In Lijiang girls skipped arm in arm up and down the streets, singing at the top of their voices, teasing the boys. There it was the men who stayed at home, who played cards and smoked tobacco or opium, and who looked after the babies, while the women butchered animals and built houses and went to market. Naxi women carried huge loads on their backs and worked in the fields from morning to night. They were short and squat and strong as mules, and they took orders from no one. But until the Communists reformed their marriage rules, when it came to love, the Naxi were bound by a cruel tradition whereby Naxi girls were promised in marriage at their birth, always to a cousin on their mother’s side, and the rule was so strict that only death could undo a betrothal arrangement. When young people who were pledged to others fell in love, they were honor-bound to commit suicide.

Then, years after the Communists had given the Naxi free-choice marriage, it had happened again. A young couple had committed suicide. For months they had met in secret in the fields and in the pine forest until one day the girl’s stomach had grown too round to hide under her blue tunic and they had walked into the mountain according to the old custom. It had happened very early one morning, while everybody was still asleep. They had left the village, dressed in their best clothes, carrying a food hamper, and they had gone into the forest, looking for a beautiful picnic spot in a clearing where they could live happy loving days — until they ran out of food and wine and they hanged themselves from a tree.

When my Ama had heard about it, her eyes had shone with tears, and Dujema had whispered, “No Moso woman would ever hang herself for a man.”

I wanted to tell this story to Nankadroma. I wanted to tell her about the Naxi lovers and about my sister Añumo, and of how simple love could be in my village if you were not afraid to open your door. But I did not have enough Chinese words. I wanted to say, “In my village, when women are in love, their faces shine like the sun; your face looks like you’ve attended a funeral.”

Nankadroma downed another glass and asked, “Do you know what the Chinese say about women? They say that beauty is a woman’s misfortune.” And she told me her story.

Nankadroma came from Mianing county in the Tibetan part of Sichuan. She was one of three daughters and the most beautiful — which caused her much trouble because everywhere she went, women were jealous of her and men pestered and bullied her. Where Nankadroma lived, men did not always court women with clever songs and pretty belts. Instead they threw stones and shouted ugly things, and when the women turned to shout back, they laughed at them. When Nankadroma was about sixteen, she was walking down the street when two boys ran up to her and tried to grab at her breasts. She was fighting them off the best she could when another man came along and chased the boys away. She didn’t know who he was and she never saw him again, until many years later, when they met by chance at the local bus station. She was a famous singer by then, touring with the Tibetan Opera, and he was working for the local Cultural Bureau. They were about to get on the same bus. They recognized each other immediately and fell in love before the end of the tour. Unfortunately, in the years since he had rescued her on the streets, the man had married, and most unfortunate of all, he had married a Chinese woman. If his wife had been Tibetan, they could have come to some arrangement, but a Chinese woman would never tolerate a rival nor grant a divorce.

“Why didn’t he marry a Tibetan?” I asked.

“She was a beautiful woman, and he loved her when he married her. How could he know that we would meet again? How could he know that she would turn out so mean-spirited?” Nankadroma lit another cigarette and then filled up her glass. By this time I had stopped counting the glasses, but the bottle was more than half empty. “Anyhow, it’s all over. I’m going to break it off,” she continued, tears suddenly flooding her eyes again. “I’m getting more miserable every day, and now I even have to fear for my life. I can’t believe this!”

When the bottle was empty, Nankadroma wanted to go back to the hotel. It was very late and the only other customers were men yelling and playing a drunken betting game. But Nankadroma was herself so drunk that when she stood up, she knocked the glasses off the table, and I had to hold her up while the restaurant owner sent a waitress to call a rickshaw.

My throat was on fire and I had a bad taste in my mouth, but I was not sure that it was all due to the cheap wine. Nankadroma’s story had unnerved me. I had been very jealous of my own sister at times, but the worst thing I had ever done was to steal the blood sausage from her lunch box. A truly terrible story that had my mother laughing for weeks. I had never wished to curse or do serious harm to anyone. And I had never heard of women fighting over a man. As I helped Nankadroma lurch into the rickshaw, I felt relieved that my mother and my sister and my little brothers lived in Zuosuo, where everyone took care of each other, where there were no floods, and where people could love without fear of jealousy or punishment.

Nankadroma leaned on my shoulder, and I stroked her thick, silky hair. I felt very close to her, as I had felt sleeping near Añumo that night, happy in the thought that I was of some comfort. When we were back in our room, I helped her take off her shoes and clothes and put her to bed. I kissed her on the cheek, as though I were her mother.

The next morning she was still drunk, or at least she had a hangover. I gave her a glass of water and said good-bye. She mumbled something but I am not sure that she really noticed I was going. I did not see her again for many years after that, and during that time, I often wondered if she had broken up with her lover and found a man worthy of her.

IT HAD BEEN ARRANGED
that I would return to Yanyuan, where I could join some horsemen and make my way home to Zuosuo. The bustling county town that had taken my breath away only a few weeks before looked very small now, and the colorful bedroom at the local guest house was wanting a carpet. Early in the morning, I went to the Horsemen’s Hotel, where I found Jiashe, a horseman from our village, and four others. They had already saddled the horses, fifteen altogether, loaded with salt, sugar, tea, iron sickles, and rolls of cotton cloth, and within the hour we had set off on the seven-day journey.

I did not feel the fatigue. I hardly saw the mountains, or even noticed that I needed a bath. My thoughts were with Nankadroma, and even as we walked up to the last ridge before Lake Lugu comes into view, all I could see were the places I had been.

“Going to Beijing has made you very quiet,” Jiashe teased.

But it was my village that had gone quiet. So quiet. Mother Lake was of the purest blue, perfectly still, a perfect mirror for the mountain goddess to gaze endlessly at her own reflection. The sky above was large and empty but for the threads of white smoke escaping from the roofs of the houses, which soon lost themselves in the boundless sky. Here was perfect, unspoiled beauty . . .
eternal peace
— the meaning of the name Yongning, our Moso capital. I could not help thinking that the outside world knew nothing about it and that my people had truly been forgotten.

The horse bells announced our return a long way before we entered the village, and soon the children were running toward us, shouting in excitement, and behind them my mother came running to meet me, carrying Jiama on her back, her face white with flour. She had been cooking. And she was smiling from ear to ear and her face was shining as though it were a holiday.

“You’ve come back! I knew you were coming back! This morning the magpie called and I knew you were coming!”

Not knowing what to do with herself, she handed Jiama over to me and untied my bag from the horse. Then we walked home side by side, Jiama on my back and my bundle on my mother’s. And it did feel good to be home at last with my mother and my little sister and Zhema and my brothers, all of us sitting around the fireplace, drinking butter tea, laughing and marveling at my stories.

That same evening, my Ama invited the whole village to our courtyard to celebrate my return and to thank the horse-men who had brought me home safely. There was a lot of dancing and singing and joking. It was just like that other evening, when Mr. Li and Zhang and Zhu had played their tape recorder, when the future was still unknown, a mystery, an adventure waiting for a heroine, but tonight the villagers were feasting the heroine’s return. And the adventure was over. Old Datso, who had once traveled as far as India, stood up to speak. “Everybody listen! We must welcome Namu, who has returned from Beijing. She won prizes and is the pride of the Moso people. I am old and I will never go to Beijing. So let’s be quiet, and let’s listen to what she has to say! Because I want to hear.”

But he sounded so formal, so like a government official, that instead of being quiet, everyone laughed. Undaunted, Datso took my hand and demanded that I make a speech. So I stood up and sang and said a few words, and I brought out the little red bundle I had carried under my clothes all the way back from Beijing. I asked my mother to open it, but her pride was now filling her with shyness, and she only shook her head and pushed the little bundle away from her, telling me that I had to open it myself.

“Two hundred yuan,” I said, holding the wad of notes for everyone to see.

The villagers gasped. They all wanted to touch the money. “It’s from Beijing,” they whispered, as they passed the bundle around, touching their foreheads with it to bring themselves some luck.