Leaving Mother Lake (27 page)

After the audition results had been posted, all the students had gone home, but I had nowhere to go and no money to go anywhere. The administrators thus considered my case and allowed me to stay in the guest house for the rest of the summer, even providing me with a small stipend. Minority students, I soon discovered, were especially well treated by the school administration. We had our own dining room that catered to dietary restrictions, and we were allowed to take days off on our traditional holidays — which would not be very useful to me because we Moso eat just about everything (though, unlike the Han, we do not eat dogs), and we only have two fixed holidays, New Year and our goddess festival, both of which take place during school vacations. Meanwhile, however, I spent the rest of that first summer staring out my bedroom window, strolling on the green lawn, or talking with the janitor, who had become my only friend and even lent me a small radio to practice Chinese. I did not dare go outside the conservatory, for fear that the old man guarding the gates would not let me come back in, and also for fear of ridicule — because I had only my gym clothes and Moso skirts to wear.

When school began in September, I requested to share a dormitory with Han Chinese students rather than with other minority students. I wanted to keep learning Chinese and speak it as well as I could, and I wanted to learn the ways of the modern world. And now I was walking up the corridor toward my room, my heart beating fast, my hands nervous, acutely aware that I was not only beginning a new life but that here my dream began.

We were five students per room, and in each room were two long tables, five chairs, and three beds, all double bunks. Since there were neither closets nor wardrobes, the bottom bunk nearest the door was used to store suitcases and personal effects. When I arrived, my roommates had not stored or organized anything and the room was in chaos. Each girl had brought at least two suitcases and there was stuff spread all over — clothes, special foods, extra blankets, books, soft toys. I had never seen so many personal effects. Even the gifts I had received for my Skirt Ceremony did not amount to anything when compared with what these girls had brought with them. And as I stood there, on the doorstep of the dormitory room, looking at all these things, a new emotion came over me, a sort of sadness wounded by humiliation, something I had never felt before, not even when I was hugging the yaks to keep warm or when I was too ashamed of my clothes to leave the conservatory. For the first time in my life, I felt poor.

I hugged my canvas bag and stepped through the doorway. My roommates stopped unpacking. They stared at me and then at each other. “Why did they put a minority girl in here?” one of them asked.

Although I was not as yet very familiar with the Shanghai accent, I understood the remark perfectly clearly. I also understood the long looks they were giving each other. The only thing I did not immediately grasp was that, being the last one to arrive, I had been left with the last of the bottom bunks, directly under the girl who had made the comment. Her name was Hong Ling and I was going to sleep under her bunk for the next five years.

Thankfully, during my first two years at school, I did not have much to do with my roommates or, for that matter, other students. I was enrolled in a two-year preparatory program for minority students designed to improve our Chinese language and to bring us up to standard academic level. When it became obvious that I was illiterate, however, my teachers organized to supplement my education with individual tutorials. I gradually moved back into the mainstream minority classes during my second year, although reading and writing remained a huge hurdle for me, and I often got into trouble for copying other students’ work or cheating on my tests. Unfortunately, my teachers’ sympathy did not extend to the effort that even plagiarism demanded of me.

But I truly was hardworking, and I loved student life — the laughter, the chatter and the tears, the mess in the rooms, the communal showers and the noise of the instruments, and of course the classes. My favorite were the ethnic music classes, where we learned songs from all the different nationalities of China. And singing practice was the class I enjoyed least, just as had happened in Chengdu, when I had rehearsed for the singing contest with Nankadroma. Voice training went so much against my own nature, and I proved so resistant and argumentative, that, in my first year, two teachers gave up on me — which says quite a lot because our teachers were almost always kind and very understanding, even if they never failed to voice genuine surprise when any of us performed as well as or better than the Han students.

FROM THE VERY START
of my residence at the conservatory, I sought the friendship of foreign students and other minority students. Foreign students and ethnic minorities had one thing in common — we were not Han. “We Shanghainese don’t do that,” Hong Ling would say whenever she saw or heard of anything beyond her range of experience or when she was really in a bad mood: “Namu, something stinks in here! Did you eat mutton in the minority kitchen again?” Whereas my roommates saw themselves as models for ethnic minorities to follow, the foreign students were curious about our languages, our religions, our foods. They wanted to sing our songs, even try out our clothes and wear our jewelry. Conversely, all of us, including the Han students — even Hong Ling — wanted to know everything about the foreigners. China had been closed to the world for too long and everyone was hungry for everything foreign. But perhaps my own interest in foreigners was just a natural outcome. Now that I was living outside our mountains, wasn’t it my destiny that I should befriend the blue-eyed, blond-haired people of my childhood fancies?

The whole world seemed to live at the conservatory — students from all over China but also from America, Europe, Africa, and Japan. The foreign students’ dormitory was adjacent to our building. Like my four roommates, I envied the foreigners’ living conditions. Whereas we fitted six beds in our dorm, they had one room each, or at worst shared a room between two. Where we had bare floors, they had a carpet — although it was thin and somewhat wrinkly — and their rooms were heated in winter, and they had access to hot showers whenever they wished. But from the very first day, I was also fascinated by the white, pink, and black skins, the strange-colored hair and eyes, the facial features so different from our own, and the loud alien sounds coming out of the rooms, the music and the laughter. Right in front of our window, there lived a Congolese student who spent all his spare time blowing discordant rhythms out of his saxophone instead of practicing the marching tunes his teacher had instructed him in. Next to the Congolese was a Dutch student. She was in China for only a semester, to work on Chinese language and opera singing. She practiced for hours and hours and she sang so badly. Once, when she was doing scales outside in the yard, I could not bear it anymore and leaned out the window to sing back to her. She stopped and looked up at me and applauded.

“You sing so beautifully! What’s your name?”

“Namu.”

“Come down! Come to my room and have some coffee.” I liked the coffee, it was unctuous and simultaneously bitter and sweet, and it had milk in it and looked like butter tea.

“Do you like jazz?” she asked, tapping on her cassette player.

Jazz sounded like the Congolese student’s music, and I was not sure what to make of it, and we could not talk a great deal on account of her limited Chinese, but we became friends immediately. I liked everything about her, the way her green eyes narrowed when she laughed, the way she moved her hands when she spoke, and how she sat cross-legged on her bed. She was very tall, and she had very white skin. One hot sunny afternoon, she lay on the lawn for a couple of hours to try to get a tan, but instead she turned bright red.

“Now look what you’ve done!” I said, laughing at her. “Your face looks like a monkey’s butt!”

She found that funny as well, and from that time on, whenever she wanted to have coffee with me, she shouted under my window, “Namu, come and have coffee with Monkey’s Butt!”

I went to the foreign dormitory as often as I could, in spite of all the obstacles the school administrators put in our way — the registration process, the guard at the bottom of the stairs, and the service people who would glare and follow with their eyes burning into your back as you walked down the corridors. If you visited too often, the administration would ask you to explain why you spent so much time with the foreigners. And there were other risks. That same year, a Chinese student became too friendly with one of the Africans. She loved the way he walked and how he always wore freshly ironed clothes. One night she slipped back into the dormitory and recounted for her girlfriends how it felt to make love with the black man. Within a few days, everybody in the school was talking about it as well, and they were looking at her as though she were dirt. The next week she was expelled.

One Saturday night the Uygur minority students from Xinjiang province had a party and I was introduced to two new foreigners, exchange students at Fudan University in Shanghai. One was Turkish and to my amazement looked just like the Xinjiang students. He spoke Chinese with an accent, of course, but then so did the Uygurs — and he did not shake my hand but instead kissed my cheek. And I found myself recoiling from his thick mustache.

“A kiss without a mustache is like bread without butter!” he said, laughing out loud. Then he turned to the other foreigner and introduced Umbalo.

Umbalo was from Mexico. She was wearing huge glasses and her black hair was cut short, and very messy. The way she was drinking warm beer straight from the bottle truly impressed me. At this time I drank only tea and coffee and right away I thought of Nankadroma and her broken heart, and how close we had been. I felt immediately attracted and the feeling was mutual; we spent the rest of the evening together. After the party, Umbalo came again to visit me at the conservatory, and before long we were going out riding on our bicycles almost every day. Unlike my Dutch friend’s, Umbalo’s Chinese was perfect. Indeed, in those early days she spoke much better Chinese than I did. When we became closer, I found out that her parents were also living in China. Her father was Mexico’s ambassador to Beijing, on his second appointment to the People’s Republic, where he had first worked when Umbalo was a little girl. Umbalo had lived in many countries and she spoke eight languages, although she insisted that she did not speak all of them as well as she spoke Chinese.

Umbalo was the first true friend I ever had. She introduced me to all the people she knew, artists, scholars, musicians, small-business people, money changers, and still more foreigners. Every time we stopped to greet a foreigner, she spoke in another language. Every now and then we also came across somebody she would later describe as “my original boyfriend.” And I would tease her, saying that she sounded like a woman from Lake Lugu. Yet we certainly had very different views of life. Umbalo had been raised with all the comforts in the world and cared for none of them. She wore baggy torn-up jeans and never put on makeup or did her hair, and she liked to talk about politics and the environment. For my part, I could not get enough of the material world and its superficialities. In fact, I had one burning wish at this time — to go into the special Friendship Stores and the hotels where only “foreign friends” were allowed to shop. I wanted to buy nice clothes, a silk dressing gown and silk underwear, and a suitcase and coffee and the other things the foreigners had access to. But then again, my friend Umbalo was a sophisticated world traveler and I was prepared to learn whatever I could from her. So I began to take an interest in the finer things of life and accompanied her to the theater and the museums. And the following November, I met her mother.

My teachers had decided to send me to Beijing to record some music for a documentary about the Moso people. I was very excited, as I had not gone to the capital since the contest with Nankadroma, nearly three years before. But Umbalo was almost happier than I was. She wanted me to visit her parents.

When I told my roommates that I was planning to stay with Umbalo’s family at the Mexican embassy, they were horrified. “You’re crazy! The embassies are full of cameras. All the foreign diplomats are spies. You’re going to get into big trouble.” What they said worried me so much that when I got to the beautiful streets of San Litun, where the embassies were, and I saw the soldiers posted at every gate, I almost turned back. But Umbalo was my friend, and I had spoken to her mother on the telephone only half an hour or so before; I could not let them down now. I took a few deep breaths, tried my hardest to stop my knees from shaking, and moved on. As things turned out, I did not have to test my resolve for too long before I heard someone calling out to me from across the street: “Namu!”

It was Umbalo’s mother. She had been waiting outside the embassy gates, looking out for me, and had no trouble recognizing me from the description I had given her over the phone.

From the moment I set my eyes on her, I forgot my fears. I was spellbound. I had never seen Umbalo dressed in anything but jeans and old sweaters, but Mrs. Ambassador was pure elegance. And Mrs. Ambassador dressed not only better than her daughter, but better than anyone I had ever seen.

She greeted me warmly in very good Chinese and brought me past the guard into the compound, where we walked arm in arm.

Inside the embassy house, everything was comfortable, luxurious, and tasteful in a way that I had never experienced. There was central heating, and colorful rugs were on the floor. The rooms were furnished in Mexican style and the bed where I was to sleep (Umbalo’s bed) had large, square, fluffy pillows and crisply ironed sheets. At dinner I was mesmerized by the chandeliers, the tall wine glasses, the silver cutlery, the way Mrs. Ambassador spoke to her maid, with consideration and respect — and how she ate quietly with her mouth closed, and how she addressed Mr. Ambassador. Mrs. Ambassador was very refined and cultured — there seemed to be books about every subject and in every language in every room. I loved Umbalo dearly, but meeting her mother had the same power of revelation I had experienced when I had stepped out of the Jeep and into the grimy shower room in Yanyuan. Before I met Mrs. Ambassador, I thought that China was the whole world, but now I knew that outside our middle country there was yet another world perhaps as large and as beautiful as China. And I wanted to see that world, to travel. I wanted to be just like Mrs. Ambassador.