Leaving Mother Lake (26 page)
Riding third-class all the way to Chengdu was bad, but three days to Shanghai was much worse. After a few hours, the train attendants had given up on trying to sweep the overcrowded, foul-smelling carriage, and soon enough I was above my ankles in trash, choking on air thick with tobacco smoke. Next the ninety-degree inclination of the seat got the better of my back, and then my bladder filled. But I did not dare go to the bathroom for fear of losing my seat. I didn’t want to stand up for the next two days. When I couldn’t hold on anymore, I plucked up the courage to ask the woman sitting next to me to keep my seat. It felt good to stand up and stretch, even in such cramped quarters, but when I got to the toilet, it was in such a state that I almost threw up. It was blocked, yet people had continued to use it, and urine was running down the alleyway. Meanwhile, they stood in the overflowing piss, seemingly unaware. “What kind of people stand in their own piss?” I asked myself as I pushed and shoved my way to the equally fouled-up toilet in the next carriage. “And what kind of world is this?” On the second night, an exhausted man shoved the garbage to one side and curled under my feet while people threw wrapping paper and orange and apple peelings and spat out the shells of sunflower seeds over him, so that by the time he woke in the morning, he was almost completely covered in garbage. But he just shook himself and sat up, resting his back against my right leg, until it cramped and I had to tell him to move.
At the end of three long days and two yet longer nights, the train pulled into Shanghai railway station. I was so tired and dazed it took me some time to realize that at last it was over. I looked out the window. The station seemed so gray and rundown compared with Beijing. I couldn’t believe this was Shanghai. I sat on my seat, not daring to move, until the train attendant came to sweep the garbage. She swept high and low, and as I was in her way, I was soon covered in it.
“Hey!” she cried out, looking up at my dirty trousers. “What are you doing sitting here? Everybody’s got off the train.”
“I’m going to Shanghai,” I said stupidly in the Sichuan dialect.
T
he taxi fare to the Music Conservatory was fifteen yuan, and I had to pay the driver before he would let me in the cab. I didn’t blame him.
I could only imagine what I looked like — but as we drove along the wide, shaded, tree-lined streets, I wondered if I had been robbed or if Shanghai was really that expensive. I had only thirty yuan left — one month’s salary — and no job . . . but this was a very beautiful city — and nothing at all like Beijing. It was very hot. I wound down the car window and let the city air flood the taxi. It took my breath away, and for a moment I forgot about the money and the stickiness of my nylon trousers and that I had not washed or slept for three days. I was in Shanghai.
More streets and brick buildings with slanted roofs and shuttered windows, houses unlike anything I had seen in the other places, and then we stopped. “Here’s the conservatory,” the driver said. I looked around, puzzled — I expected a large, tall, square building with lots of glass windows, but we had stopped in front of a double gate in a wall, and there was nothing to distinguish those gates from the others in the street. “See? Music Conservatory! It’s written above the gates,” the taxi driver said, pointing across the street at the Chinese characters.
I did not dare go up to the gates just yet, and so I stood on the pavement and watched the students riding their bicycles, going in and out of the conservatory, waving at the old man who was guarding the gates and who was glaring at me from the opposite side of the street. They looked so elegant, so pretty with their long hair tied in ponytails, their white blouses and black trousers, their hips swaying as their feet pushed on the pedals. One carried a violin case under her arm. “One day I will be just like that. I too will ride through the gates of the music school on my bicycle with my hair in the wind, wearing a beautiful white blouse and clean black trousers.” And I crossed the street.
But the old man would not let me in. I tried showing him the documents Mr. Luo had signed for me, but he would not even look at them and shooed me away like a dirty beggar. “Go! Go!” he shouted in a thick Shanghai accent, his mouth snarling over black teeth. So I moved out of barking range, and he sat back on his stool, sipping green tea from a big glass jar and puffing on one wet cigarette after another, occasionally darting a black look in my direction. And I waited anxiously, trying to think of what to do next, fearing the worst — could I have come all this way only to be turned away at the gates? And with only thirty yuan left in my pocket, not speaking beyond a spatter of standard Chinese, and barely able to read beyond a few basic characters . . . what was I going to do here in Shanghai? At the first opportunity, when the old man had run out of tea and gone into his little room to fill up his glass jar from his thermos flask, I sneaked past his back, through the gates, and kept running.
Inside the conservatory, it was a brand-new world. The buildings, I would learn later, were in colonial style, with white walls and red tiles. Instead of a concrete yard, there was a green lawn shaded by tall leafy trees. I walked around the campus excited, dazzled, and then gradually I began to feel self-conscious, ashamed of myself, of my dirty cheap clothes and my dirty face, feeling so like a dirty country girl. No one had paid any attention to me, but I suddenly felt an irresistible urge to wash and do my hair, and I rushed into the first bathroom I found.
When I had done my best to look like the students strolling on the campus lawn, I approached a couple of girls and showed them the piece of paper the director had written for Djihu, the Yi boy who was to help me. They shook their heads and said something I could not understand and called out to someone who then pointed me toward a building.
“How brave! You made it here all by yourself,” Djihu said.
“You look surprised!” I replied, fishing for a compliment. I was rather proud of the fact that I had made it all the way to Shanghai and to the conservatory all on my own, and that I had even managed to find him.
But there was a simple explanation for Djihu’s surprise. “I was expecting to be called to the gate to meet you. Also, I thought you would be here a bit earlier. Did you know that the deadline to register for the auditions is tomorrow?”
Djihu took me to the student guest house, but all the beds were already taken. Thus I spent my first night at the conservatory on a cotton quilt on the floor in one of the dormitories. And since I was so tired and I knew no one aside from Djihu, I went to bed a long time before the other girls got back to the dorm around midnight, laughing and shouting and eating late snacks as is the custom in Shanghai. As they passed by my bed on the floor, one dropped water over me and another a piece of greasy paper, but I was too tired to fight back.
The next morning I woke up to the inquiring looks of my roommates. Not knowing how to respond, I rolled up my bedding, picked up my bag, and went into the bathroom, where I changed into my white skirt and pink shirt and wrapped a wide black turban over my head. And I went out to meet Djihu, in traditional Moso costume, holding my head high and keeping my eyes on the space ahead, doing my best to ignore the curious faces turning toward me.
Djihu was waiting on the football field. We had to go to the registration office so that I could enroll for the auditions. There was a long line and it was perhaps two hours before we finally stood in front of the clerk’s desk.
“Do you have an ID photo?” the clerk asked.
I gave her my papers and realized with a panic that I could not find my Xichang identity card. I had only two photographs of myself: one was on that card and the other in the newspaper cutting glued on the pantry door in our house. But the clerk was a stickler for the rules, and she would not hear of my enrolling for the audition before she had a photograph. We had no choice but to leave the campus and go to the photographer’s. When we got back to the registrar’s office, the clerk closed the door after us. I was the last student to register.
“Name?” the clerk asked.
“Yang Erche Namu.”
“Strange name,” the clerk said. “What nationality are you?”
“Moso.”
“I’ve never heard of a Moso nationality.” And she began enumerating the names of the fifty-five official Chinese minority nationalities.
“She means Naxi,” Djihu interrupted her.
“Naxi?” the clerk continued, with a frown on her face. “Your costume doesn’t look Naxi. Where do you come from?”
“I am from Sichuan, and I am not Naxi.” I glared at Djihu.
Djihu smiled. “Actually, you’re right.” He turned to the clerk. “In Zuosuo the Moso are classed as Mongols.”
The clerk looked at both of us in turn. “Can you make up your mind? What nationality are you?”
“Moso,” I said firmly.
“Okay, Moso nationality.” The clerk laughed. “Are all Moso girls as pretty as you are? Anyhow, what’s your date of birth?”
“I’m not sure. . . .”
The clerk tilted her head sideways. “You don’t know your date of birth?”
“What about the girl who enrolled before me?” I said, thinking that the girl looked about my age. “What’s her date of birth?”
The clerk looked through her papers. “August 25, 1966.” “Mine, too. August 25, 1966.” And it was about right, since Mr. Luo had said that I was born in 1966, the year of the horse. I handed her my brand-new identity photograph.
Half an hour later I had a new temporary identity card bearing the number 223. And I now had a day on which to celebrate my birthday.
The week of the auditions, a few hundred students, many of them accompanied by their mothers and fathers, sat on both sides of the wide corridors outside the audition halls. Above each door hung the most wonderful signs, announcers of dreams — opera, piano, orchestral instruments, composition, musicology, ethnic music, ethnic singing. The students held their music sheets and the parents carried bottles of water. Every now and then the mothers wiped a trace of smeared makeup off a tearful cheek, and the fathers whispered encouragement. The air was crammed with jittery expectation and the cacophony of stray notes escaping from the audition rooms. Shanghai Music Conservatory was the best music school in China. There could be no greater honor for the winners and no greater disappointment for the losers.
On my appointed day, I took a seat in the corridor. I was alone, without mother or father to encourage me, but I was almost a professional now, having spent so many months with the troupe in Xichang, and I remembered how we had won the competition in Yanyuan, and then in Xichang and Beijing. I could win in Shanghai too. Besides, I had to win. I had nowhere else to go.
As their numbers were called, students stood up and disappeared into the different halls — some almost running, others so slow that the parents had to push them. When they came out again, their eyes were bright and shining, searching eagerly for their parents’ faces, or else downcast, as though they were looking for their parents’ feet.
There were about forty students to audition for the minority music department. Because I had enrolled so late, my number was last. It seemed that I would never be called, and as time passed, the tension permeating the air began to get to me. I shuffled in my seat and rubbed my hands together. I felt very hungry as well. I stood up and began pacing up and down the corridor. For a moment I even thought of pushing in ahead of the others. Instead I peaked through the door into one of the audition halls, where a girl was singing in a weak trembling voice, until her mother tapped me on the shoulder and I went back to my chair.
More students disappearing and then reappearing, eyes bright with hope or shiny with tears. Suddenly a girl — not the girl with the weak voice but another — ran past me. She was covering her face with her hands and sobbing her heart out. And chasing after her was her mother. I couldn’t help thinking of my Ama chasing after me on the mountain path. What would she do if she were here, sitting next to me? And what if I were to fail, like this girl, what would my Ama say then? And what if I couldn’t control the fear that was now coming over me? What if I were so scared that I could not sing?
I can hardly remember how or when my number was called. What I do know is that I walked straight up on the little stage, bypassing the pianist (I had no sheet music to give him), and I began singing immediately, without introducing myself or the song, barely greeting the examiners sitting at the table below me, cups of tea and notebooks in front of them. I also remember that I felt very annoyed at the examiner who had fallen asleep on the table, his white head on his folded arms. My first song was the song of our mountain goddess Gamu, and I wanted to wake that examiner. So my voice rose very high, high as the mountain peaks I had run away from, and loud enough to rattle the windows and for the old man to finally lift his head from his arms and reach out for his cup of tea.
After the song to Gamu, I sang the “Ahabala,” the joyful song of the herdsmen, and then I began to sing “Madami,” the love song, but the chief examiner said: “All right, all right! That’s enough.” And I knew they were pleased with me.
D
uring the five years I spent at Shanghai Music Conservatory, I learned a great deal. I learned to sing and to read music and play the piano. I learned to speak Chinese correctly, and to read and write. Not a day went by when I did not feel grateful for what the conservatory was making of me. Whenever I went out of the school gates, I never failed to wear my student badge right in the middle of my chest for everyone to see that I was a student at the most prestigious music school in China. And every time someone looked at my badge, I felt my mother’s pride, and I knew that at last I was making up for breaking up the school kitchen and running away from home. Every day I thought of my Ama, of my empty room at home, of my little brothers and my little sister, of Zhema. Sometimes I also thought of the teachers. And I thought of writing home. But I never did.