Leaving Mother Lake

by Yang Erche Namu

  Sometimes Teacher Cui, our ethnic music teacher, also took care of my stomach, inviting me to his house for all sorts of delicious spicy food. Once he put on a record for me and played it at low volume.

  “Hey! What is this?” I shouted with enthusiasm. “It’s so beautiful. Why don’t you turn it up?”

  “Shhh, listen,” Teacher Cui hushed me. “It’s from Taiwan. We’re not supposed to be listening to this here. It’s decadent music.”

  I liked decadent music. It was so unlike the Communist repertoire we learned, which always had something martial about it, something to raise the collective spirit and send you marching off for the glory of country and revolution. The Taiwanese music was soft and romantic and moved only your heart.

  EARLY IN THE SPRING I was sitting in the dining hall, eating a bowl of noodles and listening to a conversation between two boys at a nearby table. One of them had caught my eye because of the showy way he dressed and a very short haircut that made him look like a foreigner. He was not a student at the conservatory. He was a guitar player, with his own band, making twenty-four yuan an hour playing gigs in restaurants and nightclubs, and he was looking for a singer.

  “Hey! I can sing in your band!” I called out to him. “I’m a singer!”

  His name was Zhu He, and we became friends immediately. In less than two hours, I was at the restaurant, rehearsing with the rest of the band, singing decadent, fluffy, beautiful Taiwanese pop songs. Most were by Deng Lijun, whose music was officially forbidden but, thanks to the black market economy and the national disregard for copyright, was at the time so popular that cassette tapes were available at every street corner. That year you could hear Deng Lijun’s songs in every Shanghai street, coming out of restaurants, apartment buildings, or small stores, whistled on all the building sites, hummed on everyone’s lips.

  From the first day of rehearsal, Zhu He was very pleased with me, and so was the owner of the Four Seasons restaurant, who quickly reckoned that since I was a student, there was no reason to pay me a professional fee. Thus, instead of the twenty-four yuan the other members of the band earned, I got seven, and a small picnic bag with a cup of orange juice, a piece of cake, and an apple. But I was more than satisfied. In the mid-1980s, orange juice and cake were luxury foods in China, and seven yuan for one hour of singing three times a week made twenty-one yuan a week, which was no small supplement to my thirty-yuan monthly stipend. Besides, Zhu He soon had more work to give me. Within a few weeks I was singing in three venues at least three nights a week — starting at 7:00 P.M. at the Four Seasons and ending after eleven at the Cherry Blossom nightclub, just in time for me to cycle back to the conservatory before the old man closed the gates. Meanwhile, Zhu renamed me Yang-yang, which was cute and much easier for customers to remember than Yang Erche Namu, and he taught me to introduce myself by speaking in a sugary Hong Kong accent: “Hello, everyone, my name is Yang-yang! Welcome to you all.” The effect was pure kitsch — so kitsch that I could not bring myself to invite Umbalo (who hated anything cheap and fake) to come and watch me perform. Well, it was fake and it was tacky, but I loved being onstage, and it paid well.

  In fact, I was not only eating very well now, I also had a disposable income, and I was not averse to showing off. I asked Umbalo to take me to the Friendship Store and help me buy a new suitcase, lipstick, coffee. I borrowed fashion magazines from the foreign students and had new clothes made, including a bright yellow jumpsuit and a pink miniskirt. One day when I was wearing the miniskirt, an American boy called out to me, “Namu, you have beautiful legs!” I looked at him and I looked down at my legs, not understanding, and he said, in English this time, “Sexy!” Now, sexy was one of those English words we all understood, but I felt intrigued. It had never occurred to me that legs could be beautiful or provocative; I had never thought of legs as anything but a means of getting places. I just showed mine to look like the foreign models in the magazines. For us Moso, sexy and beautiful were the same thing, and beauty was a woman’s face, a man’s long graceful hands, a tall gait (for both men and women). “Yes, really sexy!” the American repeated, laughing at the puzzled expression on my face. I too laughed, at the compliment, but then I thought of Geko, who would never have thought to tell me that I had sexy legs.

  In the village that was the Music Conservatory, conspicuous consumption and outlandish dress could not fail to set tongues wagging, and since I had kept my work a secret, all sorts of rumors and speculation were circulating about me. It did not take long for the noise to reach my teachers’ ears. When they found out about my work, they were not impressed.

  “No student from the conservatory has ever sung in a nightclub,” they said.

  But I objected that my stipend was so small, that I had no family support, and that I really needed to earn money — and if they did not want me to earn money, they would have to feed me. The battle went on for a few days but the teachers grew tired before I did. After all, these were the mid-1980s, a time of liberalization, economic and social reforms. Shanghai was fast renewing with its cosmopolitan past, and the young had freedoms their parents had never dreamed of. Eventually I heard no more about it and I assumed I had won the argument.

  Next I became an entrepreneur. At this time in China, everybody was crazy for everything made in Taiwan — not only pop music but also books and movies. Things made in Taiwan or even Hong Kong had all the appeal of things made in the capitalist foreign world but with the advantage of Chinese language and culture. At the conservatory, students craved Taiwanese romance novels filled with heart-wrenching individualistic bourgeois sentimentality, and the books were so hard to find that some students had taken it upon themselves to sell handwritten copies, while others were causing huge backlogs at the school’s photocopier. On a tip I had been given at the nightclub, I decided to go to Beijing to buy a supply of books by the two writers most in demand, San Mao and Chong Yao. I had made enough money that I could purchase a plane ticket, so I flew to Beijing one morning (my very first plane trip) and returned that same evening with two huge boxes filled with books, including several dozen copies of Outside the Window by Chong Yao. I soon became the most popular girl on campus, renting the books out for five yuan each, and in a short time I had made back my plane fare.

  Chong Yao’s novel, however, almost cost me my place at the conservatory.

  According to school rules, all lights had to be turned off in the dormitory by 11:00 P.M., so that after eleven, we read by flashlight. One evening Hong Ling, who was reading Outside the Window, called out from the bunk above me:

  “Hey, Namu, pass me your light for a moment! I’m out of batteries.”

  I handed her the light and took the opportunity of the break to put my own book down and go to the bathroom. But when I came back, Hong Ling wanted to keep the light a little longer, just to finish a sentence, then just to finish another paragraph, and another, and then a page. . . .

  After fifteen minutes or so, I grew impatient. “Hong Ling! Give me back my light, now.”

  But she had no intention of giving me the flashlight. She made more excuses and ignored me, until I pressed her more and she snapped, “Hey, muddy butt, what’s your hurry?” and she turned over on the bed, showing me her back. This was no longer about Chong Yao’s novel. Hong Ling had decided to teach me a lesson, to remind me that I used to fetch her thermos flask and feel grateful for eating her dumplings and that however I dressed and whatever money I made on renting books and singing at nightclubs, I was and would always be a peasant girl who had dirtied her butt in the mud of the fields.

  “It’s my torch and I want it now!” I raised my voice. “Get up and get your own batteries!”

  “Oh, fuck your mother!”

  That was it. I’d heard enough. I’d heard enough the very first day I had walked into the dormitory, three years ago. I grabbed at her blankets, and then at her pajama shirt. The flashlight flew across the room, and at last I got hold of her hair and pulled her off the bed, screaming
and crying in terror, and I thrashed her. When I finally let go of her and went to turn on the light, she was whimpering on the floor, her face all red, her hair a mess, her pajamas torn off her back. The other three girls were sitting on their beds looking on, terrified. Still furious, I grabbed everything I could find that belonged to Hong Ling, including her suitcases, and I threw the whole lot out the window. The light had now gone on in the corridor and other girls were at our door. “What happened?” “Hong Ling, are you all right?” And seeing the fear in their faces, I stormed past them, out of the room and into the corridor, where I went banging and shouting at the doors that had not opened yet. “If you want to know what this minority hillbilly, muddy butt, country bumpkin did to Hong Ling, come out of your beds and see for yourselves!”

  That night, when everyone had gone back to their beds, I slept very well. Next afternoon, however, I was called to the director’s office, where Hong Ling, her mother, father, and brother and three administrators were waiting for me. I was soundly chastised, reproached, and required to apologize. But I could not apologize. Hong Ling had insulted my mother. What she had done was worse than anything. She could not have hurt me more if she had stabbed me in the heart. I turned to Hong Ling’s mother. “I know I should not have hit her. You’re her mother and she’s your own flesh, but I am also my mother’s flesh. Hong Ling should respect my mother. She should not insult my mother. And she should not insult me because I am a minority and I am from the countryside. Even a rabbit will bite if you taunt it long enough.”

  In the end I had to write a self-criticism, and my name and the story of Hong Ling’s beating were put on the disciplinary notice board for everyone to see, and for weeks afterward, I would hear students whisper as I walked past, “This minority girl can really fight.” But it was better than being expelled. And no doubt I would have been expelled if I had been a Han student, because I had committed a very serious offence by thrashing my roommate, and Hong Ling was the daughter of an influential family — but no administrator at the conservatory wanted to risk my lodging a complaint at the Nationalities Institute in Beijing.

  Still, the thought that I had almost lost my place at the conservatory sent shivers down my spine. Where else could I go? What would I do if I lost my dream? And how would I ever face my mother again? Because one day, yes, one day, I would go home to my Ama. I would become a famous singer and bring glory to my people, and I would go home to my Ama with my head high, and she would forgive everything. She would have to forgive me.

  The experience with Hong Ling left me very nervous and more conscious of the boundaries I should not attempt to cross. Two things had always struck me as especially worth avoiding: politics and sex, my own knowledge of which was extremely rudimentary and almost entirely derived from the compulsory classes everyone was officially subjected to, everywhere in China.

  In actual fact, in the mid-1980s no one in China cared about politics, or more exactly, no one cared for politics classes, but in the five years I spent at the conservatory, I never dared miss — because I never felt entirely secure of my own position, at first because of my poor level in Chinese class, and later on, on account of my work at the nightclubs and then the incident with Hong Ling; or perhaps I did not dare miss classes simply because the conservatory was my dream and I would not have risked my place for anything, least of all by breaking a rule no one really cared for. As things were, however, politics classes were mandatory but I was often the only student in the classroom. No one else bothered to come and the few who did usually got so bored that they fell asleep on their desks before time was up. At times I even wondered if they did not just come to class for a nap, for the opportunity to recover from the previous night’s party.

  Sometimes even the teachers fell asleep. But occasionally they talked from their hearts, mostly of their experiences in the Cultural Revolution. Of course, I too remembered the Red Guards putting up their posters on our village walls, and I had not forgotten the worse details of the stories the horse-men told around the campfire, but I had somehow assumed that this cruelty was something the Han — that imaginary bogeyman our mothers threatened us with when we were naughty — had done to get us. Until I heard my teachers speaking in the politics class, I had no idea that the Cultural Revolution had happened all over China — neighbors spying on neighbors, friends betraying friends, children spitting on their own parents, students beating their teachers. And as I watched my teachers speaking with trembling hands of the ten years of bitterness, all I could think was, these people are mad. These people are mad and dangerous. But as to who “these people” were exactly, I had no idea.

  Sex for its part was entirely devoid of poetry — taught not in songs and clever improvisation but as part of the general curriculum in physical hygiene during which we learned about the various body parts that distinguished men and women and thus enabled the mechanics of procreation. As for sex without procreation, our teacher told us it was a healthy hobby in which married couples could safely engage up to twice weekly. I thought of Moso women singing around the bonfires, making love under the stars, lighting the fires in their flower rooms, not too bright, not too hot, but just right so that their bodies could relax. Perhaps Moso bodies were different from Han ones. When I had first walked into the communal showers at the conservatory, I had found the Han girls so white and their bodies so flat, their breasts so small. No wonder Han people did not need to make love, I now thought, listening to the teacher. For the Han girls had looked at me as well. They had stopped talking and fixed their curious eyes on my dark skin. Then one of them had said, “Why does she have such big breasts?”

  “All minority women are like her. They’re like foreigners. It’s because they eat dairy products,” another diagnosed.

  But a year or so into my schooling, I discovered that it was not Han and Moso bodies that were different but our minds. Students at the conservatory were just as interested in lovemaking as Moso peasants, and eager to take advantage of any dark recess that could offer privacy. And others also took advantage of the dark recesses — the security personnel who seemed to enjoy peering at the couples even more than they did catching them out. Nonetheless, if and when students were caught, there was only one punishment, and it was swift and disgraceful — expulsion from the school, as had happened to the Chinese girl who had fallen in love with the African.

  And now there was another girl everyone talked about, a beautiful Han girl who had fallen in love with one of her classmates. She had taken the train to a country town to have an illegal abortion, and she had come back in such a terrible state that the teachers soon discovered what had happened. When she came out of the hospital, the girl was called by the school’s administration to be criticized and was told to write a confession, to name the father of her baby, and to give all the details of their encounters. But she was not so easily subdued. Instead of writing her boyfriend’s name, she gave the names of eleven teachers — so that when the administrators and the teachers read her statement, they decided to forget about the confession altogether, and she was not expelled. But the school had to make an example of her, and the story of her abortion appeared on the disciplinary notice board for everyone to sneer at. This terrified me.

  When male students looked at me, I looked away, no matter how brightly their eyes shone. I laughed and joked and went to parties, where we danced cheek to cheek to slow, decadent music, but I never danced with the same boy too many times, and I never let anyone walk me back to the dorm late in the night. Yet, before I went to sleep, I often thought of Geko, and as my body grew older, I thought of him more and more often. What was he doing now? Who was loving him? What would he think of me riding a bicycle in the streets of Shanghai? In these sweet waking dreams, I imagined myself alone in my flower room and Geko tapping on my window. I always got up and opened my door now. But this was only in my village, in my imagination. Here in Shanghai, love was the most dangerous thing of all, and I stayed well clear of it.

 
One day a classmate told me that there was a letter for me at the office.

  “Are you sure?” I asked incredulously.

  I had never yet received a letter. I had thought of writing to my mother many times — surely she must be anxious to know what was happening to me. But every time I thought of writing, I decided against it. My Ama could not read. If I wrote, she would have to find someone to read the letter for her, and that would probably cost her at least a chicken. There was no point in making life harder than it needed to be.

  But who could have written to me? Could the letter be from Zuosuo? Could something have happened to my Ama? I ran to the school post office. My classmate was right. My name was on the notice board.

  The envelope was thick. It was not from Zuosuo, but not so far from home either; the sender’s address was in Lijiang. I turned the letter over. The handwriting was very beautiful, so beautiful that I hesitated before tearing open the envelope. Inside there were eight pages, and at the top of each page, a beautiful letterhead saying Camellia magazine. I started to read.

  Dear little sister Namu,

  My name is Lamu Gatusa. Please forgive me for writing to you without a formal introduction. I am from the Moso village of Labei, in the mountains. Last year I graduated from Normal University in Kunming, and I am now working in Lijiang as a writer for the Camellia magazine. Two months ago I went home to my family, and I stopped in Ninglang on the way, to visit our Living Buddha, who has just been reinstated by the government. He told me your story and asked me to write to you because we are two young Moso who are making a name for ourselves and our people in the outside world. Our guru says that we have been isolated by the mountains for so long, our people need scholars and gifted artists. He thinks you are the pride of our people.

  Dear little Namu, I wish I had met you before you left. Everyone speaks so well of you, and I am still a single man. . . .