Leaving Mother Lake (24 page)

“Anyway, you don’t need to worry about Geko,” Zhema joined in. “There are plenty of girls in the village who will take care of his wounds.”

I glared at my big sister and snarled, “I’m not like you, Zhema. I don’t think all there is to life is a man.”

“Oh, what’s wrong with you!” she snapped back. “Did you swallow gunpowder?”

“Come on, both of you!” Ama intervened again. “Be nice to her, Zhema. Namu’s just arrived home.”

So we were quiet for a while, and then Zhema left the room. “I think I’ll go feed the pigs,” she said.

When she was gone, I asked Ama, “Did I cause trouble between you and Geko’s mother?”

My mother sighed and sat down next to me. There was a dark scowl on her face. “Since you came back from Beijing, you have been very strange. Geko’s mother can see this. Everybody in the village can see this. You are worrying me. I have worked very hard to raise this family. I would like to see you become Dabu when I am too old. I want you to run the family after me. Your sister is a good girl but she is too timid, she can’t stand up as tall as you can. You are special, and you have been special since you were a little baby. Everyone knows this. And everybody likes you, especially the old people. I know that the day you take charge of this family, I will not have to worry about anything.”

This was an astonishing speech. I had never thought my Ama had such high expectations of me — Zhema was such a good girl — but I knew that if I let her continue, she would begin to cry, and I did not want to see my mother cry. “Ami, I have to go back to school. I have to feed the teachers.”

Back at the school, I heated the water and prepared the tea, and I cooked the vegetables and the meat dishes. But I did not go up to each classroom to call in the teachers. Instead I stood on the doorstep and hollered in the rough Sichuan dialect, “Your dinner is ready! If you want to eat, come over and get it! If you’re not hungry, I’ll give it to the pig!”

Minutes later the teachers traipsed into the kitchen, looking sheepish. I greeted them with a dirty look and a gray face.

“What’s wrong with you?” one of them dared ask.

“Full bellies will explode,” I answered him in Moso, and then switched to the Sichuan dialect: “Do you want more food or have you finished?”

EIGHT DAYS HAD PASSED
since I had beaten Geko. It had stopped raining but now the fire had gone out overnight. At sunrise I had hiked into the mountain and brought back a basketful of wood, but it was too wet and the fire would not light. I would get an ember going, and thick gray smoke, and I blew and blew until I was dizzy but the fire just ate the kindling and died out.

Resigned to the fact that I had to build the fire all over again, I went out into the garden to cut a long piece of bamboo — I did not want to blow and get dizzy and get more soot on my face. Back at the stove, I reorganized the charred pieces, added kindling, and threw the match on the wood. I began blowing long slow breaths into the end of the bamboo. I blew until the kindling crackled and began to glow. I blew until a bright flame licked the bottom of the larger pot, and then I blew until another flared up under the middle pot. Then I took another breath and forgot to take my lips away from the bamboo stick, and the fire blew back into my lungs. The heat licked my throat and burned into my chest — that very place where I had been simmering with anger for so long now that it seemed I had wanted to scream since the day I was born. I fell back and rolled on the ground, and I screamed and screamed.

One of the teachers came running in, and when he saw the bamboo stick lying near the stove, he burst out laughing. “How can you be so silly! Here, put the fire out,” he said, handing me an enamel cup filled with cold water. And he went back to his room, to his bed, still laughing, to wait for his breakfast.

I threw the cup against the wall and cursed the teacher. Eventually the pain receded and I stopped screaming, but it took a while before I could get off the floor, and when I did, my anger did not subside. I looked around the room. The breakfast wasn’t made, the fire wasn’t lit. Nothing was done.

I stood up, walked outside, and grabbed the ax. I came back into the kitchen, I lifted the ax as high as I could over my head, and then I brought it down, as hard as I could, crashing over the stove. In three furious blows I smashed the three earthenware cooking pots. Then I smashed my plank bed, and I smashed the low table and the stools and the rice bowls and the drinking bowls. When there was nothing left to break, I ran all the way back to my mother’s house.

She was tidying up the pantry.

“What kind of wind blows you back here?” she asked. “Don’t the teachers want their breakfast this morning?”

“They have diarrhea!” I answered, looking at the wall. “They don’t want to eat.”

“Oh!” She closed the pantry door and pointed to the enamel basin on the floor near the lower hearth. “Why don’t you help me grind these soybeans?”

I followed her into the courtyard and helped her turn the millstone. Every time the dog barked, I imagined that the teachers were already at the gates, that they had arrived to complain about me. I had done a terrible thing. I had broken the whole kitchen. I had smashed the cooking pots that had come by horse caravan all the way from Lijiang. It must have taken at least seven days to bring them back to Zuosuo.

“Have you lost your soul?” my mother asked. “Why are you so quiet?”

And then I said, “I want to go to Beijing.” Just like that. I just blurted it, without thinking, without pretending. I just said it, because that was what I wanted and because I wanted it so badly that there was nothing left for me to want, because

I wanted it so badly that I might as well die. And while I was at it, I might as well say it all. “I want to leave Zuosuo. I can’t stand this place anymore. It’s too quiet for me here. The village has become so boring to me. Everything bores me now.” And I looked straight into her eyes, the rudest way to look at somebody.

My mother opened her mouth, but nothing came out of it. She just stood there, mouth opened, paralyzed, rooted to the ground — until, without any warning, she grabbed hold of the bowl where the soybeans were soaking and threw the lot at me. Then the words came. A lot of words. “Are you mad?” she screamed. “How dare you talk to me like this? Who do you think you are? You think your wings are strong enough that you can fly on your own? You think you don’t need me anymore? You want to become friends with the Han? Is that it? Who will know you in the outside world? Do you think you are so extraordinary? Go! Go live with the Han! Go on! Leave! Go! The farther away from me the better!”

I began to sob. My mother’s anger was terrifying me. If she screamed now, what would she do when she found out what I had done at the school? She surely would do more than shout angry words! She would lock me up. She would beat me. What else could she do? She would have to punish me somehow.

I ran upstairs to my flower room and quickly stuffed the beautiful white skirt and the pink vest I had worn at my ceremony into a canvas bag I had brought back from Beijing. Then I ran back downstairs and into the kitchen. I was hoping to take some cookies and some ham for the road but my mother was standing in my path. Her eyes were black and her mouth set so hard, it looked as though her face would break. But she was not angry anymore. She was afraid. Because a long time ago, she had left her own mother’s house, and when she had come home, it had been too late, forever.

“Don’t go,” my Ama said, her voice breaking. Jiama and Homi started screaming.

But I had to go. I had broken the school kitchen and the teachers would be here at any moment now. “I’m going,” I said. “I am going.” And I took off, through the gates and into the village streets, with my mother running after me, calling for me to stop, to come back.

I ran and ran, holding my little bag against my heart. Past the last house and onto the mountain trail. My mother’s voice grew more distant, but just as I slowed my pace a little, out of nowhere something bit at my back.

I turned around. My Ama was still chasing after me, throwing stones at me. She could not run fast enough to catch me, so she was hunting me down. In her youth my mother had used the bow and arrow as well as any man, and she still knew how to throw. She never hit where she could really have caused damage. The next stone hit my elbow. Another hit me between the shoulder blades and then another hit at the same place. That one broke the skin. More stones. I ran faster and harder up the hill, toward the mountaintop.

At last I reached the edge of the forest. My Ama had given up a long time ago now. When I stopped and turned back, I saw her standing on the trail, very small, looking in my direction, silently pleading for me to come back. I knew that she was crying. I was crying too, without tears in my eyes, but I was crying. And I could not go back. I could never go back. Not after what I had done to the school kitchen. I looked toward the school. There was no smoke coming out of the roof and I wondered if the teachers were still lying in their beds, waiting for me to bring their hot water and to call them for breakfast. “Full bellies will explode!” I wanted to shout, but I was out of breath.

I turned around and ran.

I ran, and when I had no more breath I walked, and then I ran again — for the rest of the day, through the night, and the next day and the next night. I ate nothing and I did not sleep. I was neither hungry nor tired. I was scared. I was so scared that I could not even swallow my saliva. At some point I had thought of singing, but the sound of my own voice alone in the mountains had terrified me. On the third night it began pouring with rain, and I stopped running. The ground was too slippery and I could not see where I was going because it was too dark. I tied my little bag on my back and got down on my knees and began crawling along the path, feeling the slippery ground with my hands — until, after what seemed hours and hours, the mud receded and at long last I could stand up again. By this time, however, I was completely lost.

That night I sought refuge in a Yi village. I was a sorry sight — soaked and muddy and bleeding at the knees where my nylon trousers had torn. But my hosts were very kind. The woman of the house heated some water so I could wash my knees. She gave me some roasted potatoes, and when I had eaten, she spread a blanket on the floor, where I dropped and instantly fell asleep. The next morning I had breakfast and washed my knees again, and gave up on trying to dislodge the little stones encrusted in my flesh. I thanked the Yi family, and I took off.

My hosts had explained that to get back on the road to the cement factory, I needed to backtrack a couple of kilometers. Now, I hated the idea of crawling in the mud on my hands and knees again, but I had to get on the right trail. As instructed, I retraced my steps and then took a turn at the crossroad and walked ahead, until the track began running along the hillside, where it narrowed rather suddenly to only a foot or so in width. Since I had been walking for a long time and still had seen no sign of the muddy grounds, I began to worry that I had lost my way again. I stopped and looked back, and then I looked up the hill and down — and I saw the mud, quite a way below where I was standing on the trail. And I understood that I wasn’t lost. The night before, in the darkness and the rain, I had somehow gone off the main path and ended much too low on the hillside, where there was no trail at all but slippery mud and then a vertical drop, and a long way down at the bottom, the river roaring and churning brown torrential water — and there I had crawled, for a good length of the gorge, on the very edge of the precipice.

Looking down the hill in broad daylight, I could not believe that I had gone for so long without slipping. And if I had slipped, no one would ever have found me or even known where I had disappeared. I began to shake uncontrollably.

I was shaking so hard that I feared falling over, and I had to sit down on my heels for some time before I could regain the courage to scramble on along the path, my knees still giving way underneath me, my heart pounding in my chest. And now I thought of my Yi sister, Añumo, who had run for two days and two nights on her own in the mountains, and how I had worried about her. But Añumo had run to earn the respect of her people. I was running because I had disgraced my family and I could never, ever return to my village. I was running because I had shamed myself beyond forgiveness. But also, I was running because I wanted my dream.

On the fifth day I reached the cement factory, where only a few months before I had stood with Latsoma and Zhatsonamu waiting to see the world. This time there would be no green Jeep. I walked on the asphalt road, resigned to the fact that I would have to make my way to the city on foot, but I had not gone very far before a log truck drove by and pulled up on the side of the road. When I came up to the cabin, the door opened, and I saw with some relief that the driver was Tibetan and no one we knew.

As I was covered in mud, he told me to sit on top of the logs. It was terrible, very painful and very cold, and I began to sing to cheer myself up. I was singing very loudly, as loudly as I possibly could — screaming really — but it paid off. The driver stopped the truck and told me to come down into the cabin and sing for him. It was a perfect arrangement. He loved the singing, and I loved the ride. This time I did not even throw up.

In the evening we stopped in Yanyuan at the Horsemen’s Hotel. The truck driver bought me dinner and I ate like a hungry and terrified dog, constantly looking over my shoulder to make sure that no one in the room was likely to recognize me. After dinner the driver paid for my room, a two-person room where I was the only one sleeping. But now that I was contemplating which bed to lie in, I remembered Nankadroma’s stories about Tibetan men, and I began to worry that the driver might be hoping to keep me company later in the night. Of course, the room did not lock — because in China in those days, the needs of hotel patrons always came second to the wishes of hotel personnel. Only service people could lock and unlock bedroom doors, and only from the outside. So I piled the two beds and every other piece of furniture against the door and crawled in between the sheets, muddy clothes and all. I was so tired I could not have cared less.