Leaving Mother Lake (4 page)

But the pigs grunted and ran away.

Late at night, when my mother had done enough struggling against feudal oppressors and she had gone to bed, Grandmother pounded her soybeans and sang the words we sing when we conduct rituals for people who have lost their souls.

“Latso, ah! Come back to me. Don’t go into the far mountains, don’t go walking near the rivers far away. You don’t have any friends or family there. Tall trees cannot protect you. When the wind blows, the trees will topple over you. Don’t try to hide at the bottom of the cliff; if the earth shakes, the rocks will crush you. You must not go to the wild side of the mountain, no one there can rescue you. All the gold and silver is at home. Outside, there is only wind and rain. Your sisters and your mother are at home. Listen to your mother’s song. Let your soul come back to me, quickly.”

Everybody in the family knew that a great change had come over my mother. Even the neighbors knew. But no one said anything. My mother’s uncles and her brother kept quiet. Being men, they could not interfere in women’s affairs, and least of all, in a fight between mother and daughter. As for my great-aunts and my aunts, they did not dare talk because my mother was too headstrong for them. So the whole family listened to my grandmother’s song and hoped that my Ama would heed her mother’s words.

But she did not.

One day the Communists announced that they were leaving. They were off to liberate the Moso people of Zuosuo, and everyone in the village was welcome to join them. When Grandmother heard that my mother and her girlfriends had volunteered for the revolution, she pushed my Ama out the front gate, locked the door behind her, and said angrily: “If you want to go with the Chinese, then go!”

That night my Ama went to sleep at some relative’s house.

The next morning she woke early and jumped straight out of bed to find that the sun had risen with a golden glow, that the air was crisp and pure as only mountain air can be, and the sky was cloudless. This, she thought, was going to be a beautiful day. It was going to be a perfect day for singing marching tunes and walking along the mountain path. It was going to be a perfect day to discover the world.

When she arrived at the revolutionary headquarters, however, my mother discovered that of all the volunteers, only two young villagers had come to join the Communists, and that her girlfriends were missing.

“Isn’t anyone else coming?” she asked, as the eleven-strong battalion set off down the narrow mountain road, marching in step and singing in one voice. And when the revolutionaries reached that part of the trail where, if you turn around, the village disappears from view, my Ama fell back and turned to look for her friends, and also to take one last look at Grandmother’s house — the house where she was born and where, one day, she ought to return and die.

And she saw her mother standing outside the gates, looking toward her, silently pleading for her to return.

After the rough way in which Grandmother had pushed her out the gate, my Ama had not expected this. So she stood there, on the mountain path, her eyes fixed upon the miniature stature of her mother, not knowing what to do or feel. She had never thought that her mother could look so small. And then she squatted on the side of the road and hid her face in her hands and cried bitterly, while the Communists kept going, their marching songs growing fainter, slowly fading into the silence of the mountains.

When she could no longer hear the songs, my Ama turned her back on Grandmother and stared through her tears at the diminutive soldiers marching ahead on the distant narrow trail, walking toward the world, carrying away her dreams. And when she turned toward the village again, her mother was no longer standing outside the gates. Then she remembered the harsh words spoken the night before, and once more she hid her face in her hands and cried as she told herself that she could not bear to leave her village, and yet, she could not humiliate herself and return to her mother’s house.

Who knows? Perhaps my Ama would have swallowed her pride and eventually run back to Grandmother — if it had not been for her girlfriends, who, some time later, arrived by her side, hot and out of breath and filled with revolutionary spirit. They had woken late, they explained, and missed the meeting. Then they had lost more time because of Grandmother, who had called out to them as they passed by her gates and asked them to take some food for the road. “Please take this for Latso,” Grandmother had said.

My mother looked at the basket her friend was holding out to her, and the tears came flooding back.

But the girlfriends were in a hurry. “Latso,” they said, “if you’re so unhappy, you should go home.”

And because she hated being told what to do, my mother made up her mind. She repressed her tears, picked up the food hamper, and headed down the path in the direction of Zuosuo with her two girlfriends following after her.

When the sun was high up in the sky, they sat down to take a rest and picnic on the ham and boiled eggs Grandmother had given them. They opened a bottle of Sulima wine and drank a cup to the Communist Party and a cup to the health of Chairman Mao and another cup to the revolution. And when they had finished the whole bottle, they thought of all their relatives and friends who lived in the villages on the road to Zuosuo and who too should hear about the revolution.

They never caught up with the soldiers.

Zuosuo is not very far from Qiansuo: only two days’ walk away, and there are not many villages on the way. But my Ama and her friends managed to stop with so many people and to have such a good time that when they arrived in Zuosuo, the Communists had already left.

“The Chinese can’t stand butter tea, and they can’t take the fleas,” someone said by way of explanation.

“But where did they go?” my mother asked.

“They’ve gone to meet up with the rest of the People’s Liberation Army. They’re on their way to the Cold Mountains to liberate the Yi tribes.”

The three girls looked at each other. The Yi were terrible people who raided Moso villages and stole little children to make slaves of them. If the Communists had gone to fight with the Yi, they would never come back. For no army, Chinese or Tibetan, had ever managed to subdue those ferocious tribesmen. Not even the great Kublai Khan had dared enter the Cold Mountains.

As things happened, the PLA waged a bloody battle in the Cold Mountains and brought democratic reform to the Yi tribes — but it did so without the help of my mother or her girlfriends.

The night they lost the Communists, my mother and her friends went to stay with some relatives who lived in the village of Wuzhiluo, near Lake Lugu. After a restless night spent discussing impossible dreams, they breakfasted on roast potatoes and butter tea, and the girlfriends resolved that, after all, they had been away long enough and it was time to go back to their mothers’ houses in Qiansuo. But my Ama was too embarrassed to go home. Too proud to admit her foolishness to her mother. Too stubborn to change her mind.

My mother stayed with the people of Wuzhiluo, helping with the house chores and the work in the fields. Before long the summer rains began pouring and the narrow mountain path back to Qiansuo turned into a sloshy, slippery, and dangerous prospect, and my Ama decided that it would be best to stay and wait until the people gathered for the yearly festival of the mountain goddess to catch up with her family. She would return to Qiansuo after the festivities.

In truth, quite aside from the problem of the weather and that of her pride, my Ama had begun to enjoy herself too much to want to go home just yet. The young men found her exotic ways from Qiansuo hard to resist, and although she proved equally hard to please and no one had won her heart, she had already amassed an impressive collection of new belts and could not wait to show them off at the festival.

That year, when the people came out to dance under the stars in honor of the mountain goddess, all the men’s eyes were on my mother.

Around the bonfires, the men danced in a group and faced the women, who likewise danced arm in arm, their multicolored belts tied around their waists. My mother’s waist was thick with all her trophies. Stomping the ground with their leather boots, the men moved toward the women, and soon both groups were dancing in one circle, stepping and swaying their hips in a single rhythm. Then the women pushed my Ama to show off in the center, and while she danced, a young man broke out of the circle and snatched a belt from her waist.

But my mother kept dancing by herself and the young man withdrew from the middle back into the men’s group, and he threw the belt to one of his friends, who caught it and then threw it to another. My mother laughed and skipped from man to man, but she did not catch her belt. She would take it back only when a man worthy of her songs caught it. And so the belt flew from hand to hand in one direction and then the other, and still my mother could not make up her mind — until Numbu caught it, and he did not throw it to the next man but stepped into the circle and handed her belt to my mother.

My Ama did not move, but Numbu smiled and stood his ground. My mother hesitated, and then she snatched her belt from his hand and ran back to the women’s group. But the women, who had seen the way she had looked at Numbu, pushed her back into the center.

His hands on his hips, Numbu began the courtship song:

Little sister, you are like moonlight in the middle of the night sky,

But the moon needs a star above it.

And my Ama answered:

Night has not fallen and the moon has not risen,

But the butterfly is already looking for honey.

Then Numbu sang:

The butterfly has found a beautiful flower, and

The moon is already high up above the lake.

She answered:

If the moon is high above Mother Lake, the water is untainted.

Mother Lake is where I wash and comb my hair.

And Numbu sang:

But why do you comb your hair, little sister?

Oh, little sister, for whom do you comb your beautiful hair?

My mother and Numbu danced together in the middle of the circle, arm in arm, until a new song began and another couple took their place. Late in the night, as the fires began to die and couples melted into the darkness, my mother followed Numbu to the shore of Lake Lugu.

AFTER SHE FELL INLOVE WITH NUMBU
, my Ama told herself that she was not ready to go back to Grandmother’s house. Qiansuo was such a long way, two days’ walk away: Numbu might get tired of visiting her there. And when she felt her daughter kicking inside her stomach, my Ama sent news with the horse caravan to let Grandmother know that she was going to set up her own house in Zuosuo, within walking distance of Numbu’s village.

Grandmother sent some small presents in return, and a message: “Tell Latso,” she told the horsemen, “tell her: I can’t hold your heart back.”

At these words my mother again cried bitterly, but she did not return to Qiansuo.

My mother’s decision to start her own family was a shocking one. Dividing the maternal house goes very much against Moso tradition. Nonetheless, all the villagers helped her. Someone gave her a patch of land, and Numbu and his friends went into the mountains to cut the timber to build the house. In those days people did not use money and it seemed natural to get together to help each other. Besides, working together was always an excuse to dance and sing and have picnics.

“Can you sing for us, Latso?” one of the young men asked.

Another joked: “Latso, I hope you won’t mind if my nephew comes to visit your daughter in the evening!”

And another, “Yes, and I hope you won’t close the gates to mine!”

My Ama laughed. “In that case, you better not hinge the gates too tightly!”

So, in less than a year, my mother’s house and all the gods and spirits who inhabited every nook and cranny had been blessed by the lamas, and she was moved in.

Hers was like all the other houses in the village. A log house built around a single courtyard, with a mud wall six feet high forming one side and the outer walls of the house proper forming the other sides. Behind the house, also enclosed by mud walls, was the vegetable garden.

Through the wooden gates and courtyard was the main room, which we call the Mother Room. This was where my Ama cooked and ate and received guests, and where she slept. It was large and rectangular in shape, with a
durami
and a
duraso,
the sacred female and male columns that support the roof of all Moso houses — and by extension, the sky — and two open circular hearths: the high hearth of the god Zabbala on the kang, and the cooking stove on the lower level. Aside from the small ancestral altar that was behind the high fireplace, all the furniture was arranged against the walls on the lower level and consisted of a tall pantry, where we kept dishes and cooking utensils and foodstuff; a large alcove bed built over a grain storage trunk, where my mother slept; and finally, against the far wall, a long bench where various things were stored off the earth floor, including, with his snout pointing eastward, the salted, boneless whole pig we call
bocher.
There were no windows, and the only light came from the openings in the roof above the fireplaces, and the front door.

On either side of the main room was a wing two stories high, with a balcony on the second level. The wing on the right, at ground level, was a chicken coop and a storeroom for tools and animal feed; upstairs there were four bedrooms divided from each other by plank walls, each with a door and a small window that opened straight onto the narrow balcony. Those bedrooms were for the daughters my mother planned to have. As for the other wing, it housed the stables for the horses and the pigs, and above those were three rooms for guests and for my mother’s sons until they became men and could walk to their own girlfriends’ houses in the evening.

My mother did not have any close relatives in Zuosuo but she had many friends — mostly because of her accent from Qiansuo. All Moso speak the same language, but every village seems to have its own dialect and special intonation. People loved my mother’s accent, and they came to visit her just to hear her speak, so that before long she had become the villagers’ favorite confidante. Our beautiful neighbor Dujema came to our house more often than anyone else. She came for a chat and a bowl of tea, and until my Ama’s own garden began producing, she also brought her vegetables.