Leaving Mother Lake (25 page)

The service woman woke me early the next morning, beating on the door and yelling something about regulations and doing her job, and when she came into the room, she added something about dirty girls and something else about my mother that I was glad I could not understand. Leaving her to curse and tidy up, I picked up my bag and hurried out of the room, where I found the truck driver waiting for me in the corridor.

“You were scared I come in your room last night?” he asked, laughing, showing off the traditional gold tooth at the front of his mouth.

“Why?” I said, trying to fight back the heat rising in my cheeks.

He patted me on the back. “I saw all the furniture! Ah, you’re good! You can take care of yourself.” And he led me to the dining room, where he ordered steamed buns and tea for our breakfast.

A little while later, we were on our way to Xichang. Passing through a village, he took his hand off the wheel and put his fingers to his mouth. “You hungry? You want water-melon?”

“What’s watermelon?”

We stopped and went for a walk through the market to buy a watermelon. When we got back to the truck, he chose a nice flat stone, where he carefully balanced the melon. Then he drew his knife from his belt and halved it in one clean blow. It was red and sweet and it tasted as good as pink ice cream. And the truck driver was so kind, and very handsome. For the first time in almost a week, I was no longer afraid. I felt very happy now; I felt as though I had gone traveling with my uncle.

We arrived in Xichang in the late afternoon, where the driver dropped me off on the main street. “Here,” he said, handing me a couple of notes. “If you don’t find your people, come look for me at the Number Two Hotel. I’ll take you back to your mama. Number Two Hotel. You understand?”

But I had no trouble finding my people at the Cultural Bureau.

Xichang Again

L
uo Juzhang was engrossed in a pile of paperwork. On hearing me enter his office, he lifted his head, and a look of utter surprise came over his face. “Oh, little Namu, what have you done? You’re so dirty!” he exclaimed.

“I rode in a truck from Yanyuan this morning,” I answered.

“Well, it’s nice to see you,” he continued slowly, at a loss to comprehend what I was doing there. “Did you come here by yourself ?”

“Yes.”

“Does your family know?”

“No.”

Luo Juzhang gazed at me for a moment and the expression on his face changed from surprise to worry. He shifted in his seat and pursed his lips, and at last he said, “Wait for me outside. I’ll be about half an hour, then I’ll take you home for some dinner.”

A weight had just lifted from my chest. If Mr. Luo was not turning me out, if he was taking me home to his family, then maybe he could give me a job. I went out to wait for him in the yard. The afternoon sun was still high in the sky and it was very hot. I found the faucet and turned on the water to wash my face, my hair, and my arms and watched with calm satisfaction as red mud poured down through my hands and into the drain. I felt much better, cleaner and in no hurry. I sat on a bench to dry myself in the sun.

We went to Mr. Luo’s apartment in the chauffeur-driven car the Cultural Bureau assigned its most important cadres. Mr. Luo’s apartment went with the car. It was a typical cadre residence, fit for a typical government official: a green-and-white-walled apartment with bare concrete floors, a small kitchen, a flushing, seatless toilet, and a living room and three bedrooms crammed with books, trophies, and photographs glued behind glass. The furniture was neatly arranged against the wall, including, in the living room, a TV and a green refrigerator. There was nothing extraordinary about Mr. Luo’s apartment. In China all modern apartments looked like this, with minor variations in floor size and the number of rooms.

Likewise, there was nothing extraordinary about Mr. Luo. He was graying and balding. He had a paunch, acquired from too many banquets and too little exercise. He wore a gray Mao suit, and except in the hottest weather, he always carried a sweater on his shoulder in imitation of our great helmsman. He even paused for photographs holding his cigarette between two fingers at about shoulder level as Mao Zedong had done. Mr. Luo always called people comrade, teacher, or little So-and-So, and I felt very comfortable in his company. Luo Juzhang was the type of person who found it almost impossible to say no. And you could always tell when that was about to happen because his face went bright red before he even began to speak.

Luo’s three daughters were practicing dance steps in the living room. In their black trousers and white shirts, they made a sharp contrast with their mother, who was dressed in the traditional Yi multicolored skirt. Mr. and Mrs. Luo were both of the Yi nationality, but Mrs. Luo had been born into the slave caste, and she spoke only Yi, while Mr. Luo always spoke Chinese with his daughters. I had a lot of respect for Mr. Luo. He was a dedicated Communist and an idealist, and he had managed to make a good life for himself and his family, working in the local Cultural Bureau. Mr. Luo asked his younger daughter, Xiao Mei, to lend me some clothes and to take me to the public showers to get washed. There was no bathroom in Mr. Luo’s house, although he was a county official.

In the shower I closed my eyes; I did not want to see the look on the other women’s faces when they saw how dirty the water was. After the shower I ate a bowl of noodles, and almost immediately I went to sleep in Xiao Mei’s room. I woke up the next morning, with the other three girls, to a Chinese-style breakfast.

“Aunt Luo,” I asked Mrs. Luo, pointing to the rice porridge, “you eat rice porridge?”

“Aya!
Of course not! But the children love it.”

And she explained that this was the modern way of things. The younger generation spoke Chinese, they wore Chinese clothes, and they ate Chinese breakfast.

I helped Aunt Luo wash the dishes. Then I swept and cleaned the floors, and I cut up vegetables for lunch — doing my very best to ingratiate myself, so that by the time Mr. Luo came home, Aunt Luo was ready to sing my praises.

Over lunch I told my story the best I could, in bits of three languages — how I had run away from home because I did not want to have a boyfriend and I only wanted to sing. Mr. Luo listened and ladled more rice into my bowl.

“How old are you, little Namu?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, vaguely ashamed of my ignorance. Two New Year festivals had passed since my Skirt Ceremony. “Maybe fifteen. . . .”

Mr. Luo cleared his throat. “What’s your zodiacal sign?” “Horse.”

Mr. Luo got up to fetch his almanac. “So, you were born in 1966. And since we are now in 1982, that makes you about sixteen. We’ll have to age you two years if you want to get a job with us. You can’t read Chinese, can you?”

“No.” I could not read Chinese, and I could not read Moso either, since our language has no written form and I had never been to school. But there was a word for this in the city: I was illiterate, and Mr. Luo thought he could do something about it.

The next day I was admitted into the troupe as a singer. It had so happened that a singer had recently left, and since there was no representative of the Moso people, I was a perfect candidate. I was to receive thirty yuan a month and three meals a day, and sleep on a makeshift bed in the meeting room at the Cultural Bureau. Mr. Luo provided me an identity card and a work permit with an official circular red stamp, Aunt Luo gave me a blanket, and the director of the troupe offered some gym clothes. I was overjoyed. I ran directly to the Horsemen’s Hotel to pass word that my mother should not worry, that I had a job in Xichang, and that it paid twice as much as the job at the school.

Life with the performing troupe was very exciting. We were forty performers from the different nationalities of Sichuan: Yi, Tibetans, Lisu, Miao, Hui, and a few Han who could impersonate various ethnic peoples. In actual fact, since we were not a very large troupe, we had to learn something of everything. We all trained in singing and dancing and playing musical instruments, and we all trained in the different nationality styles, and this time, unlike what had happened in Chengdu, and to Mr. Luo’s surprise, I had no trouble learning new songs. All I had to do was listen a few times and I could do it.

My daily routine began a little before nine, when the songwriters came into the meeting room. I got up, rolled up my bedding, got dressed, and went down to the dining room to have breakfast — warm water with steamed buns, and every time I had breakfast, I missed my mother’s butter tea. After breakfast, while the songwriters organized our repertoire in the meeting room, I joined the other artists for the daily practice, learning and rehearsing new songs and dances. Once a week we piled into a big bus and traveled to different towns and villages, where we sang and danced in front of factory workers or schoolchildren. Sometimes we also went on longer tours, staying out for a few days, visiting schools and work units farther afield. My first performance was at a meeting of cadres, and we had to sing “Mother’s love and Father’s love are not as good as Mao Zedong’s love. Mao, Mao, we the poor common people love you.” The music was really heartwarming. It made you feel so grateful and ready to lay down your life for your country, but the words puzzled me.

“How could Mao’s love be stronger than a mother’s love? We Moso believe that nothing is better than a mother’s love.”

“Mao Zedong is a god,” the teacher answered sternly. How could Mao Zedong be a god? I wondered. Mao Zedong was neither a mountain nor a lama. And I had seen him in Beijing, lying in his glass coffin. He had a mole on his chin just like my mother. . . . But my teacher was not in the mood to discuss either Mao’s mole or his coffin. “Let’s get on with the song.” She cut my questioning in the same tone as my Ama had used on a couple of occasions when I had said something improper in front of my brothers.

Besides the music, what I liked best about Xichang was the moon. Another name for Xichang is Yuechang, which means Moon City. The moon in Xichang was more shiny, more silvery, and much bigger than it ever was in Zuosuo. At night I often rode my bicycle to the outskirts of the city and looked at the moon rising high into the sky.

When all was said, however, Xichang was a small place. A few months went by, then New Year, and I began to feel bored.

One spring day I was washing my clothes in the yard, dreaming of all the places I had visited in the world besides Xichang, only half listening to the conversations of the singers who were chewing on sunflower seeds on a nearby bench, when something caught my ear and made me look up from my laundry.

“Why are you showing me this? I don’t want to go to Shanghai!” Xiaolan was laughing. “Do you want to go?”

“Are you dreaming? The conservatory?” Shaga replied, spitting out the shells of the sunflower seeds on the ground.

“But why not? They have a special class for minority students. You won’t have to sit the academic examinations.”

My heart suddenly began to beat wildly. I knew only two things about Shanghai: what Dashe the horseman had once showed us on the label on his sweater — “Made in Shanghai” — and that it was a long way from Xichang and a lot bigger. I dropped my clothes back into the soapy water.

“Xiaolan! Are you going to Shanghai?” I asked.

“Of course not! What would I do there? Imagine if I went all the way there and they didn’t take me! What shame. I could never show my face again.”

“Do you mind showing me the pamphlet?”

Xiaolan paused and looked at me for a moment, and she laughed again. “Here, you can have it!”

I wiped my hands dry and took the pamphlet and asked Xiaolan to show me the characters that said Shanghai Conservatory — I already knew the character for
music.
Then I carefully folded the piece of paper and put it inside my pocket.

“What do you mean, you want to go to Shanghai?” the director of the performing troupe asked, looking at the pamphlet. “Your ass hasn’t warmed up the bench you’re sitting on, and already you have ambitions to outdo all of us. Shanghai Conservatory is the best music school in the country!” But later that week, after he had spoken with Mr. Luo, he came to find me. “If you want to go to Shanghai, you can go. But we won’t pay for it.”

But how could I pay for a train ticket across China? With only thirty yuan a month, I had no savings. And I owned nothing of value. I owned nothing but my identity card, the clothes on my back, the costume I had worn on my ceremony, and another the Cultural Bureau had made for me — and the jade bracelet my mother had given me. The bracelet was very old, it had belonged to my mother’s grandmother. It had to be worth something.

I sold my mother’s bracelet for 140 yuan.

At the end of June, the director of the troupe handed me a letter of recommendation with a red stamp on it, and another piece of paper I was to give to Djihu, a Yi student at the conservatory. “Mr. Luo will be sending a telegram to Shanghai to let them know you’re coming. There’s just enough time for you to make it to the auditions,” he said. And he added with a strange sort of smile: “And you better get in, because we don’t want you back here.”

I thanked him and packed my costumes. The next day I said good-bye to Mr. Luo and my friends and walked to the station, where I took the train to Chengdu. I rode third-class, standing for twelve hours between squawking chickens and peeing babies. This was a very different train trip from the one I had made to Beijing almost a year before.

In Chengdu I had to wait another twelve hours before boarding the train for Shanghai. After purchasing my third-class ticket, I had seventy yuan left. Feeling flush, I went to buy some food for the trip — a whole smoked duck, some oranges, duck tongues, and bread — and came back to the noisy, crowded, outdoor third-class waiting hall to sit and wait out the hours. I soon became very anxious, and I started to pick at the duck, a little bit, then another bit, and before I knew it, I had eaten the whole duck, the oranges, the duck tongues, and the bread. Still, I had sixty yuan left, plenty enough to buy more food from the vendors on the train.