Leaving Mother Lake

by Yang Erche Namu

  Because we lived in Zuosuo, I had seen very little of Grandmother during my short life — a few times during the summer festival — and I could not feel true grief. I was also too young to understand what the death of a person meant. The only dying I knew was that of the animals Ama killed for us to eat. Yet, as I stood close to my grandmother sleeping so still in the hazy light, I felt moved by a strange and unknown emotion, and I looked about the room for a place to go to, perhaps to escape. And that was when I saw the pit in the earth floor. I looked at the pit, and I felt chilled, and I felt sick inside my stomach, and then I felt very, very hungry.

  Without saying anything, I walked back into the main room and straight to the pantry, where I helped myself to a plate of rice cookies. Eating made me feel a lot better — at least, until my sister Zhema peeked through the doorway and saw me sitting by the cooking stove. She frowned and rushed over to me.

  “People are dead and all you can do is eat! Namu, you have to show some respect!”

  This scolding, coming after the pit in the storeroom and my mother’s silent tears and the fatigue of the long journey, broke me down. I began to howl in that peculiar tearless way I knew how to cry. And now it was Aunt Yufang’s turn to rush out of the storeroom.

  “Hush,” she said gently. “It’s too early to cry. If we cry now, it will make Grandmother very sad, and she won’t want to leave us.”

  Of course, I did not want Grandmother not to leave us. I did not want Grandmother to become a hungry ghost who would roam forever among the living. I wanted Grandmother to join our ancestors in the land of Seba’anawa and to take care of our family from there.

  Aunt Yufang took my hand, and I walked back into the smoke-filled room, where I knelt in front of Grandmother and then, as instructed, kissed her forehead. Grandmother looked peaceful. She seemed simply to be asleep.

  For the first time since we had set off on the road that morning, Ama turned her attention toward me. “We must go now,” she said in a flat voice. “Uncle and the helpers are going to bathe her.”

  I reached out for my Ama. But she was so distant, and her face was streaming with tears. I was not sure that she knew I was holding her hand. Even as I think of this today, I do not believe that she had noticed my sister Dujelema standing next to her. I squeezed her fingers a little harder. Ama did not look at me, but she took my little hand in both of hers. My mother’s hands were very warm and very strong and very rough from all the hard work.

  In the main room, a young man was waiting with a blue ceramic bowl filled with water and yellow chrysanthemums. And now that we had all left the storeroom, Great-Uncle motioned him in, while his helpers, one of whom was carrying the basket with the white strips of cloth, followed him in and closed the door. Zhema gave me a small push between the shoulders. “You should go in the yard with Ache,” she said.

  I didn’t need to be told twice. I squeezed between the people and went out into the courtyard, but Ache and the other children had left to go and play somewhere, and I did not feel like going to look for them. I felt tired and disturbed. So I sat down on a little wooden bench on the porch and closed my eyes, taking in the warmth of the sun. I stayed there until I got bored and remembered that I was still hungry, and again I went into the house.

  Ama wasn’t there. She wasn’t sitting by the cooking stove, and she wasn’t standing near the kang with the other mourners. She wasn’t in the storeroom either. Only the helpers and Great-Uncle and Grandmother were in the storeroom.

  Great-Uncle was holding Grandmother, supporting her while the other men were binding her body with strips of white cloth — the strips they were cutting up when we arrived. They had folded her knees under her chin and were binding her arms around her legs. Her head was leaning to one side. Her nostrils were filled with butter.

  I didn’t ask why. I knew I should not be there, but no one had noticed me. I squatted on my heels and made myself smaller, and I watched — at once dazed and fascinated — as the three men put my bundled-up grandmother into a big white sack and carried the sack from the table to the pit in the ground.

  But that was as much as I was to see. For just as he was lowering Grandmother into the pit, Great-Uncle lifted his head and looked straight at me. His mouth dropped in surprise, but before he could say anything, I ran out of the room, wiggled through the crowd of mourners, and stepped over the doorstep and into the sun-drenched courtyard.

  When I had caught my breath and my heart had grown quieter, I wondered how Grandmother felt in the hole in the ground, and how she could breathe with butter in her nose, and if she was afraid. Then I thought of how Great-Uncle had bundled Grandmother’s legs against her chest and wrapped her arms around her knees and I understood why Ama always scolded me when I sat at the fireplace holding my knees against my chest.

  AFTER GRANDMOTHER WAS BURIED in the storeroom, everyone was allowed back in again. But now the pit had been covered up and there was in its place a little white clay mound, like a strange termite mound, with two small flags sticking out of the top. In front of it was a small table with some food offerings and butter lamps. When everyone had taken a place around the mound, the Daba came in to sing the song for the dead.

  O Grandmother,

  When you reach the land called Seba’anawa,

  All the ancestors will come to greet you.

  Please tell my ancestors

  That I wanted to bring them gifts

  But the Pumi came down from the mountains

  And blocked my path,

  And I cannot speak their language.

  Please tell my ancestors

  That I wanted to bring them gifts

  But the Han Chinese came down from the mountains,

  And I cannot speak Chinese.

  On the road, the horsemen lead the caravans,

  But they have poor memories,

  And I don’t dare trust them with these precious gifts.

  Please, Grandmother, tell my ancestors

  That I cannot bring them my gifts.

  But you, since you must leave our village,

  Since you must return to the ancestral land,

  You must take my gifts with you.

  These gifts are not heavy.

  And the mountain wind will carry you

  All the way to the ancestral land.

  And when the Daba had finished, Aunt Yufang’s voice rose above the quiet sobbing:

  O my Ama,

  My heart will ache for the rest of my life,

  You brought me up from when I was so little,

  You chewed my food when I had no teeth, and you wiped

  my bottom.

  Now your house is filled with grown children and grandchildren.

  Today even Latso returned with her children.

  Why don’t you open your eyes? How could you just go

  like this?

  O my mother, how will I bring your tea tomorrow morning?

  O my mother, how could you leave like this?

  You promised you would help me finish the blanket,

  Now the blanket is half woven and you have gone!

  How could you leave me like this?

  On hearing Aunt Yufang mention her name, my Ama had let out a cry and begun sobbing uncontrollably. But when her turn came to sing, she held back her tears.

  O my mother,

  I love you from the deepest of my heart.

  I know I did a lot of things that made you sad.

  I know you had a lot of hope for me.

  But I never had a chance to prove myself to you.

  You left me too soon.

  I had never heard anything so beautiful as these songs. I had heard people sing for our mountain goddess, and I had heard them sing for Mother Lake. I had also heard my Ama and Dujema sing the working songs, and I’d heard my mother whisper love songs to Zhemi in secret. But I had never heard people sing from so deep in their hearts. And I had never heard such a beautiful song as my Ama sang for her mother, when she knew that s
he had come home too late. Forever.

  WITHIN A FEW DAYS, we all looked like Aunt Yufang. No one was allowed to wash until forty-nine days after Grandmother’s death, and our hair was covered in mud from all the kowtowing to the lamas and to the Daba and to every arriving guest. My mother’s face was drawn from lack of sleep and black from soot. Her eyes were red and swollen. But she was exhausted not only from sadness but also from cooking, and feeding the guests. Since my grandmother had three daughters, each was responsible for preparing one of three daily meals, which was then served on the banquet tables in the courtyard. Aunt Yufang, who was the oldest, was responsible for the evening meal, the most important. My Ama, being the youngest, had to cook breakfast. But since she was also the proudest and she did not want to be outdone by her sisters, every meal she prepared was a feast, and to do this, she had to get up very early in the morning.

  People were still arriving from neighboring villages. The relatives with whom we had stayed on our way to Qiansuo had also arrived. Perhaps eight entire villages came to my grandmother’s house in those few days. Every guest brought a bamboo box with a gift of tea and salted pork for Grandmother’s family, and my mother and her sisters had not only to cook the meals, but also to make sure that no one went home with empty boxes.

  There was so much food, and so many gifts of grain and pork meat and flowers. I had never smelled so many pungent things or seen so much wealth displayed at once. Inside the main room, my aunts had set up another table with more rice and cooked meats, and chrysanthemums and butter lamps. Above the table they had hung a set of brand-new clothes and two yellow-and-red umbrellas. This was Grandmother’s table. Grandmother should have no regrets. She was about to depart from this world, and she should enjoy eating her last meals with her family, she should wear beautiful clothes, and when she finally departed, she could use the umbrellas if it rained on the way to the ancestral land.

  One afternoon, straight after lunch, my great-uncle and my uncle brought a large square wooden box into the yard. It was very pretty, made of a light pinewood and decorated with flowers and fishes. My uncles took the box into the house and into the storeroom, where the Daba hung yellow chrysanthemums from the rafters. Then they took my grandmother out of the earth and brought the coffin back into the main room.

  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.

  The Cultural Revolution

  After 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 di
d 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.