Leaving Mother Lake Read online

  Ama nodded. In our language erche means “treasure” and namu means “princess.” And since, at that moment, I happened to be both awake and quiet, my mother was immediately impressed by the apparent magic of my name. “My Treasured Princess,” she repeated softly to herself. And when the old lama resumed his slow walk to the lake, Ama followed after him, squeezing me in her arms and gratefully checking her own impatient steps in his unsteady wake.

  We Moso say that very early in the morning, before the birds drink from it, the water of Lake Lugu is the purest. This is why lamas come to the lake so early to fetch the water for their morning prayers. When Ama and old Lama Gatusa reached the shore of Lake Lugu, the night was still perfectly quiet, but the moon was fading and the approaching dawn already glowed faintly in the darkness above the tall, jagged mountains. We had arrived at the lake just in time, because the birds wake with the sun.

  Following the lama’s instructions, my mother dipped her right hand into the lake and scooped up just enough water to wash my face. Then she held me up to the sky under the approving gaze of our great mother goddess, the mountain Gamu.

  As for me, I was now thoroughly wakened by the icy water on my face, and I was screaming with all my might.

  INDEED, FINDING A NAME FOR M E, even such a beautiful name, did not stop my crying. In fact, and quite in spite of Lama Ruhi’s prediction, it seemed that my screams grew louder as the days passed by and my body grew stronger from my mother’s milk. So much so that word now went around all the neighboring villages and far beyond that my mother had given birth to a daughter who was supposed to be a son and who would not stop crying. My tears had become legendary.

  One day during the summer, Dujema came to our house to visit. She had brought barley cookies and wanted my mother to sit with her near the fireplace and have some tea. As usual, I was crying. So while Ama placed Dujema’s cookies on the ancestral altar and went to fetch the butter and the salt to churn the tea, Dujema took me in her arms and began to pace back and forth, singing to me softly and bouncing me over her shoulder.

  When tea was ready, Dujema sat down at the fireplace at the spot reserved for honored guests. Ama sat across from her, on the left-hand side, where the mistress of the house always sits.

  “Look at this loud little piggie,” Dujema said, holding me up in the glow of the fire. “Little piggie,” she commanded me, “little potato! Stop crying!” And she gave me her breast. I took it greedily and Dujema concluded: “Look, Latso! She’s not such a bad one after all.” And after a pause, she added, “You really are fortunate. You have three girls now. I have only two boys!”

  My Ama did not answer. She chanted the usual incantations and calmly poured several drops of tea over the hearth to honor the fire god Zabbala. Then she poured two bowls of tea and, according to our custom, politely extended a bowl to Dujema using both her hands. After this she placed the plate of cookies on the wooden floor in front of Dujema.

  Dujema took a sip of tea and bit thoughtfully into her cookie. “Without girls,” she said, “who will give me grandchildren? Everyone knows that the wealth of a house is its women.”

  My Ama watched me gurgling at Dujema’s breast and wondered if perhaps Dujema’s milk was sweeter than her own, but she kept silent and stared at the fire.

  “She likes you,” she said at last.

  Dujema nodded.

  “You can have her,” my mother said.

  Dujema smiled. She had expected no less. She looked up at my Ama’s tired face and said, “I will give you Tsili in exchange for this one. He’s already two years old and he’s not much trouble anymore. And you know what people say, Latso. If we exchange our children, the next time you become pregnant, you will have a son for sure.”

  Thus, my Ama and Dujema agreed to exchange their children — a daughter for a son.

  I, unfortunately, appeared not to like this new arrangement, for I resumed crying as soon as I arrived at Dujema’s house. And now I cried so hard and so long that all the members of the household spent the night holding their hands over their ears. I cried so loud that my Ama said she could hear me through the log walls of our house all night long.

  After fourteen sleepless nights, Dujema’s mother ordered: “Give her back! If she continues like this, the whole house will break apart and fall down.”

  So Dujema returned me to my Ama, and she took back her Tsili.

  A year later, a woman from a neighboring village who had heard that my mother had grown weak from caring for a girl who wanted to be a boy came to our house with offerings of tea, ham, chicken, eggs, and barley cookies. She left with me.

  The poor woman had tried for years to have children, but she kept me only two nights. On the third day she brought me home, her eyes red and swollen from lack of sleep. “This little girl has a terrible temper. We tried everything. To have no child at all is better than to have a girl who will not stop crying.”

  And so I was back with my Ama.

  Weeks passed, and then months. The trees around the lake turned red and orange, and the cranes flew in from above the mountain peaks. Then snow fell on the hills. And then, one day, the cuckoo sang in the forest and spring came again.

  One sunny afternoon, a woman who looked just like my Ama appeared in our courtyard. She was holding a little boy by the hand.

  “This is your Aunt Yufang,” my Ama said. “And this is your cousin Ache. They have walked all the way from Grandmother’s house to meet you.”

  A few days later, Aunt Yufang loaded her little mountain horse, and my mother bundled me up in some warm clothes. We waved good-bye to my Ama and my little cousin Ache and started on the trail back to Grandmother’s house in Qiansuo. But as soon as we reached the last mud wall at the edge of the village, I began pulling on Aunt Yufang’s hand and refused to walk. And when Aunt Yufang picked me up in her arms to sit me on the little horse, I screamed and I kicked and I scratched. We had not gone more than a few miles before she gave up and we turned around. My Ama then swapped me for my older sister Dujelema and she kept Ache. And I became known as the girl who was given back three times.

  But certainly there was something fortuitous in this last exchange. For only a few months after she had sent Dujelema to live with Aunt Yufang, my mother gave birth to my little brother Howei — thus proving the truth of our tradition regarding the exchange of children. And that was not all. From the moment my adopted brother, Ache, came to live with us, I became entirely fascinated by him and stopped crying. It was as though, in a matter of a single day, I had become a normal child. Or at least it seemed that way at first. For the strange thing is, after I stopped crying, I never cried again.

  According to Dujema, this was because I had shed a whole lifetime of tears in my first three years.

  Latso

  My mother, Latso, grew up in the region of Qiansuo, in the house of her maternal ancestors, a traditional log house with three courtyards, a vegetable garden, and flower gardens. My grandmother loved flowers. She especially loved yellow chrysanthemums because they made the best offerings at the Buddhist temple. But my grandmother grew all sorts of flowers, and because of all the bright colors, you could see her house from a long way off on the mountain road.

  In her house, my grandmother was Dabu, the head of her household. As a mark of her status, she wore the key of the granary on her belt and a proud expression on her face. She was the one in charge of planning and organizing work and distributing food and other goods, and everyone in the family owed her their special respect and attention. Still, one should not think of my grandmother as a strict matriarch. In Moso families, decisions are always made in consultation with the other adults, and Dabu do not really rule over anyone. Rather, they are entrusted with responsibility because they are wise. My grandmother was Dabu, not because she was the oldest, and not only because she was a woman, but because among all her siblings, she was the smartest and the most capable. Her sisters also helped run the house and worked in the fields, and they were like all Mo
so women, hardworking and skillful. They could do anything, from plowing the earth and chopping wood to sewing clothes and butchering animals. As for my grandmother’s brothers, they did what Moso men have always done: they helped in the fields, built houses, and made furniture, and they took care of outside business.

  My first great-uncle traveled with the horsemen to trade local products, musk, and medicinal herbs from the forests, and also opium, in exchange for tea, salt, and metal tools. Sometimes the caravans went north to the market towns in Sichuan; other times they went south into Yunnan province, to Lijiang or even as far as Dali, and they also traveled west, into the Tibetan interior. In those days it took almost a week just to reach the Tibetan town of Zhongdian, the first major town in eastern Tibet, and at least four months to reach Lhasa, and the horsemen were often gone for a year at a time.

  My grandmother’s second brother was a herdsman. He spent all his time in the mountains, where he took care of our family’s and the other villagers’ yaks and came home once a month to deliver butter wrapped in dark green leaves.

  After the older generation had passed away, with her first brother trading in distant places and her second brother herding yaks in the mountains, my grandmother’s household consisted most of the time of her two sisters and the children — all of them her own because, although my great-aunts were beautiful and had many lovers, they never had children. Strange as this may seem, it is not uncommon in Moso families. Many Moso women cannot conceive, though we do not know why. Some people say that it is because we live in high mountains. And according to others, it is often the prettiest women who remain childless. As for my grandmother, she was at least as pretty as her sisters but she had five children: three daughters and two sons.

  Following our custom, my grandmother educated her daughters to take care of the fields and the house, and she entrusted to her brothers the rearing of her sons. When Grandmother’s eldest son came of age, he joined the caravans on the long journey to Tibet and left his uncle and younger brother to trade in nearby Sichuan and Yunnan. Whenever her oldest son was away, my grandmother counted the months, and then the weeks and the days, to the time the caravan would return. On one of these trips, she counted and then she waited, but neither the men nor the horses appeared on the mountain road. After a few weeks, she got word that the whole caravan had disappeared on the way to Lhasa. After that there was another rumor, that the horsemen had gone to India. But whatever happened, they never came back.

  For years, when she was finished with her chores at the end of the day, my grandmother quietly walked away from her house down the same mountain trail where her son had left. She went some distance to the turnoff, where, if you stop to look back, the houses clinging on the hillside abruptly vanish from view. There, she sat on a rock and listened for the horse bells, and she stared toward Lhasa, into the strip of heaven hovering just above the mountain peaks. She stared and stared but no one ever came. When Grandmother got old, she went blind. The people said that it was from staring into the empty sky looking for her son.

  Some months after her eldest son disappeared, Grandmother told her two brothers: “The caravan took one son from me. That’s enough.” So her second son stopped traveling with the horsemen and went to herd the yaks in the mountains with his second uncle.

  My mother, Latso, was my grandmother’s third daughter, and she was also her favorite child. Grandmother believed that my Ama had all the qualities needed to become Dabu and to succeed her as head of the family. And because Grandmother had such hopes for her, my Ama says that third daughters are always smarter than the other children. Perhaps she means it. But perhaps third daughters are not only the smartest but also the most troublesome, because my Ama became a great disappointment to her mother — in truth, as I was to be to her.

  My mother grew up without toys. Her only prized possession was a small mirror in a pink wooden frame that her uncle had brought back from one of his trips to Lhasa. When she became a young woman, she spent a lot of time looking at herself in this little mirror, practicing pretty faces, dreaming of summertime, when all the villagers would gather at the hot springs for the festival of the mountain goddess. She imagined the young men watching her bathe, standing helpless with love at the sight of her full figure, her smooth brown skin, and her long black hair that graced her perfectly rounded buttocks like a yak’s tail. She imagined the young men falling over each other to offer her the traditional multi-colored belts in token of their admiration. And then she saw herself, at night, coming out to dance in the light of the fires, wearing all her trophies attached to her waist, whirling in the glow of the flames, with the bright-colored belts flying wildly about her waist as though she were stepping through a blazing rainbow.

  But my Ama could do a lot more than daydream in front of her mirror. She spoke the language of the Yi tribes and some Tibetan, and she was a hard worker, a good cook, and a skillful horsewoman who could use the bow and arrow as well as any man.

  Aunt Yufang says that my Ama was both woman and man. She also says that my Ama was too smart and too beautiful for her own good. Everyone gave her too much attention, and not only the men but also my great-aunts, who could not have children of their own and who spoiled her rotten. “Who in their right mind would ever want to leave their own mother’s house?” Aunt Yufang asks herself as she draws on her clay pipe and blows out a little puff of gray smoke. She stares at the smoke for a while and then she smiles at me knowingly. “Your Ama was a bit like you, really. She was spoiled by all her talents. She was spoiled and she became bored with the life that she knew.”

  So, it was boredom that turned my mother into a revolutionary.

  TOWARD THE END OF WINTER IN 1956 , the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) left Lijiang town and marched across the mountain to the banks of the Yangtze River. There the soldiers exchanged some shots with a few resisting Moso who were firing their old guns from the other side, then they crossed the river and pushed on over the hills. In less than three days, the Communists had reached Yongning, the Moso capital, where our feudal lords had resided since the Mongol conquest of 1253, when the great Kublai Khan left an officer to rule over our ancestors. In actual fact, we know nothing about this officer, not even his name, but legend has it that he married a Moso woman and that it was not until much later, under pressure from the Qing emperors, that our Country of Daughters came to be ruled by chiefs, who passed their charge from father to son. In any case, when the Communists arrived in Moso country, the Moso feudal lord had already been deposed.

  About a month before the People’s Liberation Army marched on Yongning, the Communist authorities had summoned the Moso feudal lord and his younger brother Losan, our greatest saint and Living Buddha, to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. From Kunming, the Living Buddha had been sent to Ninglang, the county administrative capital some days’ walk east of Moso country. The Living Buddha needed to learn to work for his keep like everybody else, the Communists had said. As to our feudal lord, he had died on the way to Kunming. Of natural causes, they said.

  On that fateful day when the people heard the approaching Communist army, they ran away to hide in the mountains. There had been reports of bloody fighting in nearby Tibet, and without their chief to organize resistance or to speak on their behalf, the Moso were terrified of the Chinese army. But the Communists had not come to fight. They had come to liberate the Moso and bring about democratic reform — to free the serfs and redistribute the land among the common people and to organize mass meetings, where they encouraged peasants to speak against Buddhist monks and former overlords and aristocrats, whom the Moso had long regarded as a divine class of persons. China had “turned over,” the Communists explained; the old feudal order was dead, and a new era had dawned. The people needed to learn new attitudes and new ideas. This was a period of great confusion and strange new hopes for the Moso.

  While they were helping the people of Yongning “turn over,” the Communists dispatched soldiers to carry out the
revolution in the rest of Moso country. That was how eight members of the PLA set off on the long trek to my grandmother’s village in Qiansuo, where they changed our family history forever.

  FEW OUTSIDERS EVER CAME to Grandmother’s village, and those who ventured in on occasion were almost always of nearby tribes: Lisu hoping to trade their fertility medicines for Moso butter, or Yi slaves running away from their masters. When the Communist soldiers arrived very late in the afternoon, exhausted and filthy from a seven-day walk across the mountains, the villagers came out of their houses to take a closer look. At first the children hid behind their mothers’ skirts, but the mothers, although they said nothing, were more curious than anyone. Moso women do not travel very far, especially when they are young, because they are responsible for the crops and the house. So most of the women had never gone beyond the mountains of Qiansuo. Very few had ever seen Chinese people before. And no one had ever seen Chinese in the dusty green uniforms of the People’s Liberation Army.

  The soldiers smiled and greeted the curious villagers crowding around them. Then one of them crouched before a little girl hiding her face in her mother’s skirt and extended his hand. And the little girl, perhaps sensing her mother’s own interest, took a few steps sideways and crept up toward him, in crablike fashion, until she was close enough to touch the strange cotton clothes, the boots, the cold gun. The soldier stood up and patted the little girl on the head and asked if anyone could speak Chinese. A horseman stepped forward.

  “Our point of departure is to serve the people,” the soldier explained. “We are wholly dedicated to the liberation of the people and work entirely in the people’s interest. Do you understand?”

  The horseman shook his head. He turned toward the villagers and said that the Chinese were tired and hungry. Soon after, a woman made her way through the small crowd, carrying a tray with bowls of butter tea. After her, another appeared with a plate of barley cookies, and then another with walnuts and pears. The soldiers squatted on their heels and ate and drank gratefully. Meanwhile the villagers looked on and commented on the way they ate, on their soft, pale yellow skin, the short hair that stuck out from under their caps, the shiny guns, the dusty uniforms. Eight soldiers, they agreed, was not a big army. You couldn’t kill a lot of people with only eight soldiers.