Leaving Mother Lake (3 page)

My first great-uncle traveled with the horsemen to trade local products, musk, and medicinal herbs from the forests, and also opium, in exchange for tea, salt, and metal tools. Sometimes the caravans went north to the market towns in Sichuan; other times they went south into Yunnan province, to Lijiang or even as far as Dali, and they also traveled west, into the Tibetan interior. In those days it took almost a week just to reach the Tibetan town of Zhongdian, the first major town in eastern Tibet, and at least four months to reach Lhasa, and the horsemen were often gone for a year at a time.

My grandmother’s second brother was a herdsman. He spent all his time in the mountains, where he took care of our family’s and the other villagers’ yaks and came home once a month to deliver butter wrapped in dark green leaves.

After the older generation had passed away, with her first brother trading in distant places and her second brother herding yaks in the mountains, my grandmother’s household consisted most of the time of her two sisters and the children — all of them her own because, although my great-aunts were beautiful and had many lovers, they never had children. Strange as this may seem, it is not uncommon in Moso families. Many Moso women cannot conceive, though we do not know why. Some people say that it is because we live in high mountains. And according to others, it is often the prettiest women who remain childless. As for my grandmother, she was at least as pretty as her sisters but she had five children: three daughters and two sons.

Following our custom, my grandmother educated her daughters to take care of the fields and the house, and she entrusted to her brothers the rearing of her sons. When Grandmother’s eldest son came of age, he joined the caravans on the long journey to Tibet and left his uncle and younger brother to trade in nearby Sichuan and Yunnan. Whenever her oldest son was away, my grandmother counted the months, and then the weeks and the days, to the time the caravan would return. On one of these trips, she counted and then she waited, but neither the men nor the horses appeared on the mountain road. After a few weeks, she got word that the whole caravan had disappeared on the way to Lhasa. After that there was another rumor, that the horsemen had gone to India. But whatever happened, they never came back.

For years, when she was finished with her chores at the end of the day, my grandmother quietly walked away from her house down the same mountain trail where her son had left. She went some distance to the turnoff, where, if you stop to look back, the houses clinging on the hillside abruptly vanish from view. There, she sat on a rock and listened for the horse bells, and she stared toward Lhasa, into the strip of heaven hovering just above the mountain peaks. She stared and stared but no one ever came. When Grandmother got old, she went blind. The people said that it was from staring into the empty sky looking for her son.

Some months after her eldest son disappeared, Grandmother told her two brothers: “The caravan took one son from me. That’s enough.” So her second son stopped traveling with the horsemen and went to herd the yaks in the mountains with his second uncle.

My mother, Latso, was my grandmother’s third daughter, and she was also her favorite child. Grandmother believed that my Ama had all the qualities needed to become Dabu and to succeed her as head of the family. And because Grandmother had such hopes for her, my Ama says that third daughters are always smarter than the other children. Perhaps she means it. But perhaps third daughters are not only the smartest but also the most troublesome, because my Ama became a great disappointment to her mother — in truth, as I was to be to her.

My mother grew up without toys. Her only prized possession was a small mirror in a pink wooden frame that her uncle had brought back from one of his trips to Lhasa. When she became a young woman, she spent a lot of time looking at herself in this little mirror, practicing pretty faces, dreaming of summertime, when all the villagers would gather at the hot springs for the festival of the mountain goddess. She imagined the young men watching her bathe, standing helpless with love at the sight of her full figure, her smooth brown skin, and her long black hair that graced her perfectly rounded buttocks like a yak’s tail. She imagined the young men falling over each other to offer her the traditional multi-colored belts in token of their admiration. And then she saw herself, at night, coming out to dance in the light of the fires, wearing all her trophies attached to her waist, whirling in the glow of the flames, with the bright-colored belts flying wildly about her waist as though she were stepping through a blazing rainbow.

But my Ama could do a lot more than daydream in front of her mirror. She spoke the language of the Yi tribes and some Tibetan, and she was a hard worker, a good cook, and a skillful horsewoman who could use the bow and arrow as well as any man.

Aunt Yufang says that my Ama was both woman and man. She also says that my Ama was too smart and too beautiful for her own good. Everyone gave her too much attention, and not only the men but also my great-aunts, who could not have children of their own and who spoiled her rotten. “Who in their right mind would ever want to leave their own mother’s house?” Aunt Yufang asks herself as she draws on her clay pipe and blows out a little puff of gray smoke. She stares at the smoke for a while and then she smiles at me knowingly. “Your Ama was a bit like you, really. She was spoiled by all her talents. She was spoiled and she became bored with the life that she knew.”

So, it was boredom that turned my mother into a revolutionary.

TOWARD THE END OF WINTER IN
1956 , the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) left Lijiang town and marched across the mountain to the banks of the Yangtze River. There the soldiers exchanged some shots with a few resisting Moso who were firing their old guns from the other side, then they crossed the river and pushed on over the hills. In less than three days, the Communists had reached Yongning, the Moso capital, where our feudal lords had resided since the Mongol conquest of 1253, when the great Kublai Khan left an officer to rule over our ancestors. In actual fact, we know nothing about this officer, not even his name, but legend has it that he married a Moso woman and that it was not until much later, under pressure from the Qing emperors, that our Country of Daughters came to be ruled by chiefs, who passed their charge from father to son. In any case, when the Communists arrived in Moso country, the Moso feudal lord had already been deposed.

About a month before the People’s Liberation Army marched on Yongning, the Communist authorities had summoned the Moso feudal lord and his younger brother Losan, our greatest saint and Living Buddha, to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. From Kunming, the Living Buddha had been sent to Ninglang, the county administrative capital some days’ walk east of Moso country. The Living Buddha needed to learn to work for his keep like everybody else, the Communists had said. As to our feudal lord, he had died on the way to Kunming. Of natural causes, they said.

On that fateful day when the people heard the approaching Communist army, they ran away to hide in the mountains. There had been reports of bloody fighting in nearby Tibet, and without their chief to organize resistance or to speak on their behalf, the Moso were terrified of the Chinese army. But the Communists had not come to fight. They had come to liberate the Moso and bring about democratic reform — to free the serfs and redistribute the land among the common people and to organize mass meetings, where they encouraged peasants to speak against Buddhist monks and former overlords and aristocrats, whom the Moso had long regarded as a divine class of persons. China had “turned over,” the Communists explained; the old feudal order was dead, and a new era had dawned. The people needed to learn new attitudes and new ideas. This was a period of great confusion and strange new hopes for the Moso.

While they were helping the people of Yongning “turn over,” the Communists dispatched soldiers to carry out the revolution in the rest of Moso country. That was how eight members of the PLA set off on the long trek to my grandmother’s village in Qiansuo, where they changed our family history forever.

FEW OUTSIDERS EVER CAME
to Grandmother’s village, and those who ventured in on occasion were almost always of nearby tribes: Lisu hoping to trade their fertility medicines for Moso butter, or Yi slaves running away from their masters. When the Communist soldiers arrived very late in the afternoon, exhausted and filthy from a seven-day walk across the mountains, the villagers came out of their houses to take a closer look. At first the children hid behind their mothers’ skirts, but the mothers, although they said nothing, were more curious than anyone. Moso women do not travel very far, especially when they are young, because they are responsible for the crops and the house. So most of the women had never gone beyond the mountains of Qiansuo. Very few had ever seen Chinese people before. And no one had ever seen Chinese in the dusty green uniforms of the People’s Liberation Army.

The soldiers smiled and greeted the curious villagers crowding around them. Then one of them crouched before a little girl hiding her face in her mother’s skirt and extended his hand. And the little girl, perhaps sensing her mother’s own interest, took a few steps sideways and crept up toward him, in crablike fashion, until she was close enough to touch the strange cotton clothes, the boots, the cold gun. The soldier stood up and patted the little girl on the head and asked if anyone could speak Chinese. A horseman stepped forward.

“Our point of departure is to serve the people,” the soldier explained. “We are wholly dedicated to the liberation of the people and work entirely in the people’s interest. Do you understand?”

The horseman shook his head. He turned toward the villagers and said that the Chinese were tired and hungry. Soon after, a woman made her way through the small crowd, carrying a tray with bowls of butter tea. After her, another appeared with a plate of barley cookies, and then another with walnuts and pears. The soldiers squatted on their heels and ate and drank gratefully. Meanwhile the villagers looked on and commented on the way they ate, on their soft, pale yellow skin, the short hair that stuck out from under their caps, the shiny guns, the dusty uniforms. Eight soldiers, they agreed, was not a big army. You couldn’t kill a lot of people with only eight soldiers.

And since it was dark already, some volunteered to invite the Chinese into their homes, where they fed them chicken soup and told them to sleep near the fireplace.

The next morning the soldiers were ready to get on with their revolutionary work. With the help of the horseman, they gathered the villagers and began speaking with great enthusiasm about the modern world beyond our mountains — the airplanes, the cinemas, the cars and trucks, and the Communist Party.

“China has turned over,” the horseman said. “Chairman Mao will give you everything you need.”

“Really, he will give me
everything
I need?” a young woman called out with a mischievous smile.

The villagers laughed.

In Grandmother’s village, there were no aristocrats or feudal lords to overthrow, and the people already had their fair share of the land, so the revolution was over quickly. But the Communists did not leave immediately. Instead they hung red banners with large Chinese characters that no one could read all over the village. Then they selected the largest courtyard, where they began to hold daily political meetings in order to reeducate the local masses.

The villagers learned about many new things. For example, they learned that Tibet and Moso country had always belonged to China and that the Moso were no longer Moso but members of the newly established Naxi Minority Nationality, one of fifty-five official Chinese nationalities that made up the People’s Republic of China.
^*
“Oh!” the people said. The Naxi are our neighbors in Lijiang, on the western bank of the Yangtze River, and although we do not speak the same language or eat the same food or dress in the same way, the Chinese had always insisted that we were the same people. Except that, up to the revolution, they had also insisted on calling the Naxi by the name Moso.

“The Chinese have always had strange ideas,” the horseman explained.

The villagers nodded their heads slowly.

Overall, the meetings had a mixed success. The old people got bored, and the horseman soon grew tired of trying to find Moso words that did not exist, but the young people were captivated. The Communists said: “The young people are the most active and vital force in society. They are the most eager to learn and the least conservative in their thinking. This is especially so in the era of socialism.”

My mother never missed a session. When she got up in the morning, she could hardly sit still long enough to eat her breakfast before she gathered her long skirt and, barely taking the time to take one last glance at herself in the pink mirror, flew out of the door. She made rapid progress in Chinese, learning to shout slogans against class oppressors and to sing revolutionary songs. She truly loved the songs. She can still sing all of them today. Their rhythms were so different, so inspiring: they made you feel like marching to the top of the mountains and going to see what was on the other side.

Every night when my Ama came home from the evening meeting, her cheeks were flushed and her eyes shining.

But Grandmother knew that this had nothing to do with love.

Indeed, it did not take long for Grandmother to realize that the class struggle was threatening to undo all the education she had given my mother. Since the Communists had come to the village, my Ama had neglected the crops and the animals. She even refused to do some of the house chores. “China’s women are a vast reserve of labor power. This reserve should be tapped to build a great socialist country,” Comrade Latso lectured Grandmother.

Because custom forbids us to shout at our relatives, Grandmother shouted at the pigs: “What do you think you are saying? You’re just spoiled rotten! Don’t you have any shame? Don’t you have any responsibilities?”