Leaving Mother Lake

by Yang Erche Namu

  One evening, while sitting around the campfire, a young horseman boasted: “During the war with the Japanese, my father rode with Dr. Rock all the way from Dali to Lake Lugu. It took them almost two months because Dr. Rock stared at the plants for hours.”

  “What could he be looking at for so long?” my uncle asked.

  “He was a botanist. He looked at everything like that.” An old horseman continued, “I knew him well. I was with him when he went to Gonggao Mountain, where the Yi lived. Rock was after a butterfly, and our chief had given him some tents and an escort of thirty men so that he could go wherever he wanted. When we were on our way back to Yongning, there was a terrible hailstorm. No one had ever seen anything like it before. The hail was so big it killed goats and sheep, and in no time it destroyed all the crops. Of course, the Yi chiefs blamed the blue-eyed devil for angering the mountain god. His eyes were like wolf eyes, they said. So they decided to cut his head off. Fortunately for Rock, a small Moso boy who was herding his goats in the mountain near the Yi villages heard the rumors and raised the alarm. As soon as our chief heard the news, he told us to take Rock back to Naxi country. Then the Yi made up for missing out on Rock’s head by raiding our villages. They stole cattle and horses and as much grain as they could carry, and they burned some houses. After that they rode their horses over our fields and trampled our crops. Ah! It was a terrible thing. The next time Rock came to visit, he felt very sorry to see the harm he had caused. So he brought all this glass from America and gave it to our feudal lord to build a little palace on the island. You should have seen it! It was so beautiful. Everybody went to the chief’s house to touch the glass. What a pity the Red Guards destroyed that little glass palace. What a shame! All that glass that had come from so far away! From America! And all of it smashed up!”

  Once they began, the men could go on about Dr. Rock right through the night. For Dr. Rock had done a great deal for the Moso: he had studied our culture and published books about it in English, he had given our chief a pair of binoculars, and he had cured the villagers of venereal disease by writing to America for penicillin. The Americans had sent the penicillin via India and over the Himalayas in a little plane that landed in Lijiang at the foot of the Jade Dragon Mountain, and then Dr. Rock had carried it all the way to Lake Lugu by horse caravan.

  All these stories were so entertaining: they were scary and sad enough, and in the end, Rock and the Moso always won. But what kind of place was America, I wondered, where people have yellow hair and blue eyes? Everyone we knew, everyone we had ever seen, had black hair and brown eyes, even the Han Chinese. Although, now I thought about it, I remembered that when I was very little, someone who spoke Moso and dressed just like us, someone with yellow hair and white skin and pale, colorless eyes, had come to our village. My mother had said: “It’s because he didn’t get enough salt.” But the horsemen laughed and said that he was surely one of the many blond-haired children Rock had fathered with Moso women and that it was a good thing — because in this way Dr. Rock would always live among us. Joseph Rock, who had lived and traveled in western China for the better part of thirty years, hauling a portable bathtub and far too much personal weight for the comfort of his horse, was truly a legend among the Moso people.

  But the horsemen did not only bring us tales of times long gone. They also brought us news of the world and of the Cultural Revolution that was still raging beyond our mountains — which was how we learned of the mass meetings and the criticisms, of the Muslims who had rebelled in the northwest, of the lamas who had been imprisoned in Tibet, and of the former Communist heroes who had been purged in Lijiang, and those who had committed suicide. Then one day the horsemen brought news of our very own world, and for months to come, the news got worse.

  The government had sent special teams of soldiers and officials to our valleys to reeducate the people — because the Moso shared everything, including their lovers, which amounted to a form of primitive communism that was a health hazard and a blight on the face of modern China and that nowhere fitted in with the thought of our paramount leader, Mao Zedong.

  In fact, the people had heard all this before. Almost every year since liberation, government officials had visited Yongning to harangue the people there on the dangers of sexual freedom and the benefits of monogamous marriage. Once, even, they had brought a portable generator and showed a movie of people dressed as Moso, people who were in the last stage of syphilis, who had gone mad and lost most of their faces — and the villagers had set the makeshift cinema on fire.

  But now the officials had held meetings night after night where they harangued and criticized and interrogated. And they had not gone home. Instead they had ambushed men on their way to their lovers’ houses, they had dragged couples out of their beds and exposed people naked to their own relatives’ eyes. Then they had issued orders for the couples to build new houses that no one could afford to build but where the couples ought to live together like married people did everywhere else in China. Finally, they had refused to provide the certificates for extra grain, and for cloth for the children, unless their mothers told the officials the names of the fathers.

  The Moso protested. They spoke up at meetings to explain their way of life and the customs of their ancestors. But the officials did not give up, and the people stopped protesting. The men stayed at home, no longer daring to walk to the women’s houses at night. But still the officials did not give up. They waited for the women to make a decision about the planting and the harvesting, about the grain rations and the other things their children needed that the government provided. They waited a long time, until at last many people agreed to live as husband and wife and to participate in the government-sponsored marriage ceremonies, where they each got a cup of tea, a cigarette, pieces of candy, and a paper certificate.

  “What shame,” Uncle whispered.

  The horseman squashed the tears under his tired eyelids. As for me, I also pushed on my eyelids, although I cannot pretend that I understood how terrifying the events taking place in Yongning truly were. Whatever lay beyond our meadow was to me like the invisible and untouchable world of bygone times, the world of yellow-haired Americans and murderous Yi chiefs — whimsical places filled with strange beings, events I visited in my dreams that vanished as soon as I opened my eyes or when, very late in the night, the camp-fire died.

  But that night, as I closed my eyes to the glow of the campfire and the government officials joined Dr. Rock and the Yi tribesmen in my childish imagination, I made believe that my father had really come to stay in our house forever, that Zhemi and my Ama were living under the same roof as man and wife. And now a deep sadness came over me — as I pictured Zhemi sitting near the hearth, no longer an honored guest, and yet, neither uncle nor brother but just a man living in my mother’s house.

  The Mountain Goddess

  When the Great Cultural Revolution entered its tenth year, the lamasery and the pretty glass palace were gone; the lamas had been humiliated and their books burned; and the festivals were no more. The people too had changed. Many had married, and some had even abandoned their own traditional clothes — among them, my mother was now wearing trousers and a Chinese-style fur hat. But then Mao Zedong died and the winds of change soon blew over China. When they blew over Moso country, the people sighed with relief. Most left their wives and their husbands to live as they had always done, in their own mothers’ houses. They were ready to make up for lost time, to do whatever they could to honor their gods and their ancestors, to dress up and dance and sing again.

  When Uncle took me home in the summer, the village was bustling with activity. Banquet tables had been set up in the courtyards and people were arriving from different villages to compete in wrestling and horse-riding contests, to sing and dance and drink wine and tease each other about their accents:

  “Your voice is beautiful, but your words are garbled!”

  “Maybe your mother did not straighten your ears when you were little
!”

  With so many visitors and so much taunting, Ama thought she should remind us of the finer points of etiquette: “When you go out in public, you must behave. Make sure you don’t fight with anyone and watch out for each other. When you meet an older person, you must show respect. If you see someone drunk, you must help him. If someone offers you food or drink, you must take it with both hands and say thank you.” She told us over and over until she got too busy to notice that we had stopped listening.

  That summer there was a lot to keep my mother busy, and us as well. She had decided that we would walk around Lake Lugu in honor of the mountain goddess, as we had always done until the Red Guards had upset everything. We would go to Yongning to sing and light sagebrush for Gamu Mountain, and we would also go to Qiansuo to visit her family. We had to leave things well organized for Dujema, who would take care of our chickens and pigs. We also had to pack food for ourselves and for anyone who cared to join us for a picnic, and we had to prepare the customary gifts of salted pork, tea bricks, cloth, and tobacco. Finally, we had to wash and mend our clothes because we should look our best during the festival, and also to show off to Aunt Yufang and Second Aunt and all the people of Qiansuo. And for this occasion, my mother took out her white skirt and wrapped her turban around her head.

  And so my mother’s skirt swished to and fro as she shouted orders left and right. Meanwhile, my little brothers ran around in circles and got in everybody’s way, Ache went off to fetch some water and disappeared with his friends, and my big sister Zhema, who seemed to know what to do next, poured rice into sacks, sliced up the pork and boiled the eggs, and counted bamboo boxes. And I felt jealous — because Zhema was so grown-up, and she was so capable, and my mother was going to so much trouble on account of her dress, tying one colorful sash around her pretty waist and then another, adding a string of glass beads to her headdress, and a ribbon here and a flower there — while I was still a child and my hair was too short, and I had to content myself with a clean version of the linen tunic I wore every day. But I held my tongue and tried to make myself useful.

  I was in the vegetable garden cutting up cilantro when Ama called out to me:

  “Namu! Come over here. There’re some people to see you.”

  “Who is it?” I asked incredulously because I was still a child and I had a visitor.

  “It’s a Yi man and his daughter,” Ama answered. And she pulled the garden gate closed behind me and hurried me along.

  He looked much better than the first time I had seen him, with his lips bleeding and his eyes dying, but I recognized him immediately. So he had come back, I thought in amazement. And this time he had come with his daughter, and two horses loaded with big bags of potatoes, wild mushrooms, and wheat flour. In another sack he had three wild hens. And now he was speaking with my mother in Yi, and I could not understand anything, but I heard my mother say my name a few times, and she was smiling and looking very happy.

  As for his daughter, her name was Añumo. She seemed a little older than me. She was very proud but also very shy. No girl in our village, except for Tsilidema and her unfortunate Gu family, was this shy, but then when she smiled, she had a pretty dimple in her right cheek, and when she curtsied, she did so in the most graceful manner. As for me, I felt very proud at being curtsied to, as I knew that all this politeness and all the gifts had come to us on account of my generosity. But I was a long way from guessing what was coming next. Not even in the horsemen’s stories had I heard of such a thing as the Yi man requested, when he explained with grave dignity that he wanted me to become his daughter’s blood sister. Now, I surely did not understand what he meant for us to do, and I cannot say today that I would have done things differently if I had understood, but I do know that I was enjoying myself so much at the center of attention that I accepted his offer without even raising a question.

  The man asked my mother for a bowl and some water and salt. When she came back, he grabbed one of his hens and drew his knife and cut its throat, and as the poor animal flapped and twitched, he poured her blood into the bowl. After that he stirred in the water and the salt, and he told Añumo to drink and then to hand the bowl over to me.

  I had never put anything in my mouth that had been killed and was not cooked, and I took the bowl with as much reluctance as was possible under the circumstances — because I knew that it was much too late to say no, unless I never wanted to show my face again to anyone in the world. The smell almost made me puke, and I held off for a moment. In the end I closed my eyes and held my breath, and I drank the chicken blood. Añumo and I became sisters.

  My Ama took the bowl from my hand, and while Zhema took the hen away to pluck and ready for lunch, she invited the Yi man to follow her into the house to drink some tea. I stayed outside with Añumo, wiping my lips with my hands, and my hands on my shirt, and then my tongue on my lips, and then my lips on my sleeve. But as the briny taste faded, I began to feel rather special at having a Yi sister. She looked somewhat different from us Moso. She had black hair like we had, but large brown eyes and slightly darker skin, long eyelashes and a straight and narrow nose, and beautiful white teeth. I touched her eyelashes over and over. We held hands and smiled at each other. Ama brought us some sweet dumplings filled with raw sugar. Añumo took a bite and her face lit up. She loved the sugar, so I emptied the inside of my dumpling and gave it to her. I loved my mountain sister.

  At lunchtime Ama served us chicken stew and my brothers and I ate with our mouths wide open as we listened to her speaking with the Yi man in his language. Actually, we could not believe our ears, and so much so that we began to laugh uncontrollably — until Ama took us aside and explained in a stern voice that many words in Moso and Yi sounded the same and had completely different meanings. “Kasha nosha opa nozha” meant “Please don’t be shy, and eat all you can!” and not “Please, you may eat my ass.”

  When the Yi were about to leave, my mother packed some slices of salted pork and some rice and bricks of tea, and she gave my mountain sister a scarf and said: “This is a present from Namu.” We accompanied them to the last house in the village with all the regard owed to honored guests. I held Añumo’s hand and swung on her arm and I wished I could have spoken to her but I did not dare. I did not want to offend anyone by speaking the wrong Yi words. I also wished Añumo could have stayed with us forever, or at least that she could have come with us to Yongning for the mountain festival, but my mother said that Añumo had to go back to her own home and live with her own family, and that she was not that sort of real sister.

  WE LEFT QIANSUO EARLY IN THE MORNING . We loaded our little horses and began our walk along the shore of Mother Lake. When the sun was high up in the sky, we hiked on Gamu Mountain amid the spruces and rhododendron and peonies. We came to a nice picnic area, where we met up with other families already engaged in the celebrations. There we lit piles of sagebrush, and the women took off their turbans and the men removed their felt hats, and we all kowtowed to the mother goddess.

  The full name of our mountain goddess is Segge Gamu — the White Lioness — and in fact, from Yongning plain she does look just like a crouching lion, with her front paws resting on the lakeshore. From the lake you see her face, broad and square, and if you lower your eyes, you see her placid reflection mirrored in the water. From the top of Gamu’s head, you can see all of the Yongning plain and all the other mountains, and immediately below, the lake, bluer than the sky, and the little islands covered in spruce and pine trees. Somewhere on the mountainside lies a great treasure of gold and precious jewels that was buried many centuries ago by one of our feudal lords, but no one has ever found it, and probably no one ever will. Then, right at the crest of Gamu, there is the entrance to a huge cave where women come in the hope of conceiving children. This cave is the womb of the goddess — because Gamu is not only a lioness, she is also a woman and the mother of the Moso people.

  Every summer, on the twenty-fifth day of the seventh lunar month, our Gamu must g
o to Lhasa to play games with the gods of Tibet, and the ancient mountain festival, with all the dancing and singing and praying and drinking, was meant to encourage her to win. For Gamu is wrathful as well as loving, and if she were to lose, there would be terrible weather and the crops would fail, the animals and the people would become sick, and they would have no offspring. Thankfully, Gamu is very intelligent and she almost always wins, even without the festival. And naturally, she is also very beautiful and has many lovers, as well as a special companion whose name is Azhapula, who is the mountain god of Qiansuo. Oh, but poor Azhapula! Life with beautiful Gamu can be so difficult that he cannot always control his temper. For example, when he caught her making love with Cezhe, a young man she had only just met, he became so furious that he castrated him. Even today you can see there is a spike missing at the top of Mount Cezhe.

  Sometimes, when Azhapula has had enough, he threatens to leave Gamu and to go look for a new woman, but then she pleads with him and tells him that she loves him, and he always stays. That was how, a long, long time ago, they had a terrible fight and Azhapula, crazy with jealousy, jumped on his horse and galloped away. As could be expected, Gamu could not bear it and she ran after him to stop him. When she caught up to his horse, she reached for his vest, just managing to grasp it, and then she held Azhapula back. The god and the goddess tugged and pulled all through the night until the sun rose on the horizon, when, under the light of heaven, they were turned into mountains. They are still here today, and Gamu still holds on to Azhapula’s vest across the deep ravine that separates them, to remind the Moso that men must always return to their mothers’ houses at the first light of dawn and that our mother goddess and her lover Azhapula should not have made such a scandal.