Leaving Mother Lake (7 page)
Now everyone was crying. Grandmother was about to leave us and it was all right to let her know how much we loved her. All the adults kowtowed, and my great-aunts, my aunts, and my mother wailed and cried very loudly, leading the rest of the mourners. Meanwhile, above all the sobbing and the crying, the Daba proceeded with the last rites. First he chanted the Road Leading Ceremony, when he told the story of the Moso people and explained to Grandmother how to find the road to our ancestral land. Then he led the ceremony we call Washing the Horse, and Ache and I ran after the crowd of mourners who followed Grandmother’s soul as she took her last ride around the village. Grandmother’s soul was made of straw and wearing a beautiful blue dress, and it was sitting on a magnificent horse with feathers and flowers in its mane.
The next day the mourners set off in a long line behind the lamas, Grandmother’s coffin, the Daba, my great-aunts, Great-Uncle, Aunt Yufang, Second Aunt, my Ama, and Uncle. Behind them, just ahead of the rest, was a small group of men. They were Grandmother’s special friends, and perhaps my mother’s father was among them. But perhaps my mother’s father was already waiting for Grandmother in the land of Seba’anawa. And perhaps, as my Ama followed her mother’s coffin to the cremation grounds, she held such thoughts about Grandmother’s lovers, but perhaps not. People of my mother’s generation did not inquire about their fathers: whatever happened in a woman’s room, in the warm light of her own private fire, was a woman’s private affair. If she wished to invite her friends into the house, to drink Sulima wine or dine with her relatives, that was fine, but if she wished to meet her lovers only in secret under the cover of night, that was also fine. And while it was quite all right to talk and joke between neighbors and friends, it would have been worse than unseemly for people of the same blood to discuss these things.
While the mourners walked down the mountain path, crying and wailing and falling backward into each other’s arms and pulling at their hair, I stayed behind with Zhema and Ache and Howei and all the other children because, according to our custom, people under the age of thirteen should not mingle with death or any other business dealing with the ancestors. So we stayed with the pregnant women, who, on account of their unborn children, cannot witness the burning of the dead.
Just a few days after Grandmother departed for the land of Seba’anawa, my Ama returned to Zuosuo. She took my sister Zhema and the horses with her, and she left me, Ache, and Howei at Aunt Yufang’s house. We stayed in Qiansuo for a long time. We ran in the fields with our sister Dujelema and the rest of the children, and we laughed, and we played with the water buffalo. Then one day we washed our hair and took a bath and changed our clothes, and Uncle brought us home, where my mother cooked for us in silence.
A
fter Grandmother’s funeral, we did not see my father very much. For many months Ama was too sad to receive visitors. Then winter came again. Snow covered the mountain roads, and Zhemi stopped traveling west to the Tibetan towns, going east instead, where he traded goatskins and yak tails in exchange for tea and salt. “Because yak tails make the best brooms,” Ama explained. But when the worst of winter had passed, before Zhemi came back to visit my mother, the Red Guards came to Zuosuo.
It began with the banging of gongs coming from over the mountains.
My Ama hitched up her long skirt and climbed up the ladder onto the roof to have a better view, while Ache and I ran out of the house and followed the village children toward the commotion. We ran down the path, under the blossoming apple trees, between the vegetable gardens and the newly planted cornfields, and then we stopped dead in our tracks. Coming toward us was a large group of people with pale skin, all dressed alike in blue uniforms, with blue caps on their heads and red bands around their arms. They were singing at the top of their lungs, a strange alien song that to our children’s ears was not just strange — it was terrifying.
These were not mountain people.
These were not Moso or Yi or Pumi or Lisu.
“Han people,” one of the children said. “They’re Han people.”
We did not need to hear anything more. We ran in the opposite direction back toward the village, screaming for our mothers.
None of us children had ever seen so many Chinese people all at once. We had seen small groups of officials who occasionally visited our villages, and of course, there were the few Chinese who lived among us. But those Chinese were just like us; they spoke our language and sang our songs and their faces were brown from the sun and all the hard work. The Chinese of Zuosuo were no longer Chinese; they had become Moso. But if we never had much to do with the Han Chinese, we heard of them often enough: “If you are naughty, the Han will come and get you,” Moso mothers tell their children.
And now the Han had come to get us.
When the Han reached the village and the adults came out to take a look at their ugly clothes and their sickly skin, we children hid behind our mothers, straining to make sense of the strange words passing above our burning ears. The Han, it appeared, had traveled a long way to get us. All the way from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province.
The Red Guards pasted the mud walls of our village with bright red propaganda banners, and as the Communists had done in the 1950s, they summoned the villagers to one of the larger houses. There they asked our village leader to translate for them as they denounced capitalist roaders, stinking bourgeois intellectuals, venerable masters, and all the other revisionists and running dogs of America. When our village leader was stuck for words, everyone had to sing. There was a lot of singing, although the people did not enjoy the songs this time around as they had done two decades or so earlier. Also like the other Communists, these Chinese did not like butter tea, but they had not come to drink and have dinner, they had come to make revolution — and they did like the apples. They had a strange way of eating apples. No one we knew ate apples in this way. They peeled the apples with their knives, starting from the top and going around and down, so that the whole skin came off in one piece like a ribbon, and we children, who knew by then that the Han hadn’t come to get us, applauded with delight.
It took but a few days for the fleas, the butter tea, and too many apples to get the better of the Red Guards, and they soon left to visit other villages in the valley, where they did more singing and pasting of red banners. There really wasn’t a great deal to destroy in our villages — we were all poor, illiterate peasants living in log houses surrounded by mud walls. In Zuosuo the Red Guards had to content themselves with scratching the eyes and digging out the faces of the gods on the temple murals — until they found Xiao Shumi’s house, where they tore down and burned the gates and at last struggled with the enemy of the people.
Xiao Shumi was our old leader’s wife but she was Chinese, from Sichuan province, and the daughter of an important military family. Our feudal lord had married her in 1942 with a view to securing the protection of the Sichuan warlord. As for our feudal lord, his family name was La, which means Tiger — but by the 1940s these tigers had long lost their teeth and their claws. Almost all the men in the La family were opium addicts, and our feudal lord himself was helpless to protect his people from the Tibetan bandits and Yi tribes who raided the villages whenever the need or the fancy took them — stealing grain and livestock and burning houses, and kidnapping little children to sell into slavery. The situation had got so out of control that in one infamous raid, the Tibetans had almost succeeded in kidnapping our leader himself, and in another, the Yi had set his house on fire.
In 1942 it took a whole month for Xiao Shumi and her retinue to make their way across the bandit-infested mountains to the narrow valley of Zuosuo, where her husband awaited her in his burned-out house. She was only sixteen years old and had been forced into the marriage, and the trip must have seemed awfully long to her, but she accepted her duties with dignity and soon proved very useful to her husband. Although her marriage turned out to be a political disappointment (the Sichuan warlord showed no interest in protecting Zuosuo), she was very smart and well educated, and she became famous on account of her skills with the abacus. After the People’s Liberation Army brought democratic reform to Moso country in 1956, our feudal lord and his wife, along with all the other members of the La clan, became common people. Xiao Shumi took to her new lot without complaint. She soon became friends with many of the people, including my mother, and by the time the Red Guards came to Zuosuo, everyone had grown to respect her.
To the Red Guards, however, our leader’s wife was still a feudal oppressor who deserved to be humiliated and punished for the evils of history. After they burned the gates of her house, they put a big tall hat on her head and paraded her through the villages. Every so often they stopped and shouted at her and rough-handled her. They forced her to kneel and to bow her head to the ground. They yelled in her ears: “Long live Mao Zedong! Long live the Communist Party! Down with the exploiters! Struggle against the bitch!”
At first the villagers followed Xiao Shumi through the narrow village streets and looked on, horrified, not knowing what to do. But when they understood that she was to be put through this humiliation every day, they stopped following.
When the people stopped following Xiao Shumi, the Red Guards took her from door to door and called for everyone to come out of their houses and look.
The villagers came and looked. Then they went back in, and they did not dare come out again. Now only the children went outside — to cut grass to feed the pigs. And this was how my sister and I got to see Xiao Shumi for the last time.
We were by the lakeshore, gathering pig feed, when Zhema said:
“Look! It’s her!” She pointed to a tall white cone covered with Chinese characters that was hovering above the tall grass.
It was. It was Xiao Shumi under the cone. I followed my sister and walked over toward our old leader’s wife. She was bent over, working very hard. Her forehead was shining with sweat. A little way from her, two Red Guards were lying back in the grass, smoking cigarettes.
“Why don’t you run away and hide, Ami Xiao Shumi?” I asked in a low voice.
Xiao Shumi straightened her back and looked at us for a moment without saying anything. Then she touched her hat: “Where should I hide?” And she smiled. “But don’t you worry for my old bones. How is your mother?”
She ruffled my hair and said that she had more work to do, and went on cutting the grass. When she was done, she lifted her basket onto her back. I watched her leave between the revolutionaries, looking very short and wobbly under that tall white thing. We would not see her again for many years.
Some days after we saw Xiao Shumi that last time, we had news that the Red Guards had paddled across Lake Lugu to Yongning plain, where they had joined another contingent of critics of the feudal order — and where they insulted and beat the lamas and took some people away from their homes — perhaps to prison, perhaps worse — and they pounded and they burned the great lamasery and the houses of the old native chiefs, the descendants of the fearless Kublai Khan. In the rubble and the ashes, seven hundred years of our history disappeared.
But even catastrophes cannot last forever. Once the crops are devastated, the locusts move on. Their belly filled with destruction, the Red Guards returned to where they had come from, and after they left, the old oaks turned yellow on the mountainside, and after them the pear and walnut trees in our valley, and then the propaganda banners turned pink on the mud walls, and life slowly returned to normal. The old people dried their tears and comforted themselves with thin butter tea and the thought that they had lived through worse times.
But in our house, my mother went on serving our dinner without speaking. Her heart was cold. Her thoughts were in Qiansuo, where Grandmother was no more and where Zhemi, whom we had not seen in such a long time, was sleeping without her. I searched my mother’s face for an end to her sadness, and then I looked at my big sister, but Zhema had no answer for me. So I looked at the bowl of food in my lap.
I wished we had some meat. It had been a long time since we’d eaten meat.
W
hen we ran into the courtyard, blowing on our cold fingers and wiping our noses on our sleeves, the first thing we saw was that Ama had changed her jacket.
She had swapped her everyday black vest for the red one she wore on festival days, but she was chopping wood, and when she lifted her head up from the stack of wood, her eyes were shining. She put down the ax and walked over to help me take the basket off my back. Then she took Ache by the hand and we went into the house, the three of us together. Ama had not paid us so much attention in a long time.
Inside the house, the fires were burning bright, and our new baby brother, Homi, was sleeping happily in Zhema’s arms. The aroma of pork soup filled the air. It was not fresh pork, of course. Ama had only cut up slices of
bocher,
the salted boneless pig that all Moso keep, like a mattress, on the bench in the main room, and sometimes for so many years that the fat goes dark yellow. No, it was not fresh meat, but it was meat, and it smelled good.
And my father was sitting next to the fire.
“Uncle, you’re back!” I called out.
“And where have you been?” Zhemi asked, smiling.
“Cutting grass for the pigs.”
“That’s good,” he said.
My father got up and poured me and Ache some butter tea. “Make sure you spit out the seeds,” he said, “otherwise you will have a big tea bush growing at the top of your head.”
My Ama laughed.
My father went back to the kang to sit near the fire, with his legs crossed in front of him. His handsome face was black from the mountain air, but now the glow of the flames made it turn to copper. His hair was thick and wavy and he had what we call a yak nose — the noble nose of a bull yak: broad and strong with a high broken bridge and a rounded end. And he had long and graceful hands — the most beautiful hands. He was the most beautiful man. He was also, as people say in English, a man of few words.