(1953– )
Hailed as the first Chinese postmodernist, Ma Yuan was born in Liaoning. A peasant and factory worker during the Cultural Revolution, he attended Liaoning University from 1978 to 1982. After graduation he was assigned to work for a radio station in Tibet, where he lived for eight years, an experience he often draws upon for his writing, as he does in “Thirteen Ways to Fold a Paper Hawk.” A hardcore avant-gardist known for his use of circular narrative and embedded storytelling, Ma once declared that “the novel is dead.” After a hiatus of twenty years, he resumed fiction writing in 2012 and now lives in self-imposed isolation in the tropical rain forest and monsoon jungle of Sipsongpanna, the southernmost region in Yunnan.
Thirteen Ways to Fold a Paper Hawk
1
March 3 was the Tibetan New Year. My coworkers came over in the morning to wish me Happy New Year, and got me drunk on Tibetan barley wine until I didn’t know up from down, went to bed at noon, and didn’t wake up until dark. When I got out of bed and splashed cold water on my face, I found a little boil on the right corner of my mouth. Just something tiny, I thought.
Half a week later this boil had swollen up incredibly, and started oozing out sickening pus mixed with blood. A scab the size of a walnut formed at the corner of my mouth, my cheek had swollen, and my face was one big mess. Traditional medicine calls the corner of your mouth “the danger triangle.” From there, they say, the pus can run right through your veins straight into your brain. I had no idea if that was true. You can laugh if you like, but I cried from the pain, and not just once either. Now this wasn’t just something tiny anymore.
I started going to the hospital.
In Lhasa, Tibetan New Year is a big holiday. My friends were out celebrating and here I was alone in my work unit’s dormitory, where I’d crawled into bed to read a novel. It’s tough for a man all alone. What could I do to while away the time, doomed as I was to a life of perpetual loneliness? But I wasn’t content with being lonely. I have ways of coping with it. Reading novels is one. Or, for example . . .
At sundown I sometimes walk out onto the street and look at the shattered clay pots and bowls people leave lying all over the street. I watch the long-haired dogs chase each other playing. Sometimes I go to a sweet tea shop, sit for an hour and drink up the last fifty cents in my pocket. Or I take a walk to the south side of Medicine King Mountain to see what Buddhist worshippers have left behind. Little clay Buddhas? Prayer flags with a picture of Sakyamuni?* Stone tablets engraved with lines of scripture?
Or I could draw the curtain (my only spare bedsheet, white with blue checks—you know that pattern), shut the door, turn on the lamp on my little three-drawer desk, and spin you a story.
(Of course it’s a good story . . . at least I hope so.)
It’s times like this my imagination is especially active. I can call to mind things that happened and things that haven’t happened. Before I write a story I always rack my brain—“What should I write? How should I put it?”—the same old problems. If my Tibetan pal Little Kelsang hadn’t come by and told me what his criminal investigation squad was up to, who knows where my imagination might have galloped to?
Little Kelsang asked me if I remembered the turquoise peddler. Sure I did. Little Kelsang had just joined the police department last year—a true raw recruit. This case had him worked up. I told him to unbutton that stiff collar on his uniform, take off that visored policeman’s hat, and relax a little, while I poured him a cup of tea.
Let’s talk a little about the Barkhor. The Barkhor runs in a circle around the famous Jokhang Temple, with streets and alleyways crisscrossing all over the place. You can see people here from almost every country on earth. Somebody reckoned more than thirty thousand people come here every day to do business and to worship Buddha, and it must be at least double that on Sunday. The Barkhor is one big marketplace. The array of goods on sale here puts to shame anything you could imagine. This is China’s greatest antique and jewelry market. Millions change hands here every day. A rare peddler of indecipherable nationality surreptitiously slips a jewel from his sleeve to show a foreign tourist. With a smile neither cringing nor haughty, he holds up his fingers in token of offer or counteroffer.†
It was here that I came across the world-famous alexandrite cat’s-eye gem. From a peddler’s rug on the street’s second corner I bought an emerald-green turquoise, about as big as a couple of peanuts in their shells. It weighed fifty-two grams. Well, actually, I don’t know anything about the quality of precious stones. I just liked its shape and color, so decided to have it. At first he wanted sixty. I offered him thirty. He laid out his rug at this same spot every day of the year. You couldn’t reckon his age. Seventy was as good a guess as thirty-five. I’d been dropping over to the Barkhor for quite a while, so by now we knew each other on sight. From his face I decided he must be from South Asia. Nepal maybe. Or else India or Pakistan. He spoke Chinese clearly enough. We struck a deal at thirty-eight. That was last year, August 12—my desk calendar confirms the date.
2
You remember that little street that runs off the Barkhor’s southwest corner, right?
(In fact I didn’t. Once I’m on the Barkhor I can’t tell north from south.)
You remember how muddy it used to get there in the summer? They’ve been repaving it with concrete paving stones.
(I nodded. This didn’t mean I remembered what it was like. It meant I was listening.)
The street has been repaired.
(I still couldn’t work out what Little Kelsang was driving at.)
They widened it too, so they had to cut into the courtyards on both sides. The City Works Commission tore down the walls of the courtyard houses and then rebuilt them. In one courtyard, where nobody lived but an old lady, they dug up a man’s body, not decomposed yet. Right, it was the turquoise peddler. You’ve noticed there’s a different peddler on that street corner now, a Khampa woman selling sheepskins.
(I didn’t want to tell you I’d really noticed. . . . I didn’t want to interrupt your story.)
The old woman had caved-in cheeks, not a tooth in her head. She said she had no idea what had happened and didn’t know the dead man. She had no children, no regular occupation, but kept body and soul together by selling used clothing on the street. She used snuff, no other unusual habits. The neighborhood committee told us that she’d moved to the Barkhor after the 1957 Lhasa uprising, a little over twenty years ago. They had no precise information about what she did before that. On the Barkhor people are always moving in and out. It is all so confusing that even old neighbors know little about each other. When we started to question her, she just stuck to her story. After we threatened her, she spilled everything.
3
The story of this old lady reminded me of another old lady who lived all by herself near the Barkhor. A guy I work with is one of her customers. She runs an unlicensed wine shop. Her barley wine doesn’t have that sour taste—if you know what I mean. So her business is good. Now, I can’t drink Tibetan barley wine. They brew it with unboiled water and it gives me diarrhea. When I drop in at my friend Big Kelsang’s house he always wants me to follow the Tibetan custom and drink off three cups of the stuff, so the last time I went over there I got out a copy of the doctor’s diagnosis, and told Big Kelsang that I had inflammation of the stomach lining, but he swore the barley wine he bought was made with boiled water, and I wouldn’t get diarrhea from it. So I couldn’t refuse. That was how I learned about this old lady.
When Big Kelsang went out to her shop again to buy wine, I went along. I wanted to find out how she made her wine. I was curious to know why she brewed her wine with boiled water when everybody else used unboiled water.
She was plump, with thick, fleshy hands—a gentle, agreeable person. In my mind’s eye I’d pictured this unlicensed wine shop owner as a shriveled old woman, cautious and reserved, with a thousand secrets lurking in the wrinkles of her face. But she wasn’t like that. She was nothing like any character in my stories. At the time, I was a little disappointed. But anyway let’s go back to Little Kelsang’s story.
4
She said the dead man was her lover. He’d left her all his things to look after. She’d sold them all. She said he had a nine-eyed alexandrite cat’s-eye. (A top-quality gem with just five eyes will bring in better than a thousand yuan.) He kept it on a cord around his neck, never took it off. She’d asked for it more than once, she said, but he always refused. All he’d given her was a few ordinary turquoises. So she got him drunk on liquor, and with the help of two itinerant Khampa peddlers, she strangled him with a cord, buried him, and then, after all, she said, she didn’t get the jewel. The two guys grabbed it and took off. How could she stop them? Cheating an old woman! Her father was Muslim, she said. She’d been a jewel-trader herself.
Three times we asked for a description of the two Khampa men. Each time she gave a different description. We asked her their names and where they came from. She said people in business don’t ask people questions like that. You don’t ask where goods come from, or where they’re going. But she said by the sound of their accents they were from the Tibetan district of Sichuan Province. Well, whether you believe her is up to you. She’d been here in Lhasa twenty years, and nobody knew anything about her. There she sat, not a tooth in her head, her mouth all puckered—her face the portrait of a lifetime of hardship. Not a word of truth in all she said, I reckon.
(And then?)
We went over her statement. We figured she might have made up the two Khampa accomplices to throw us off the trail. Think about it—thousands of Khampa traders up and down the Barkhor, how could we track them down with no description? And on top of that, she said they’d left the Barkhor, left Lhasa! Still, we’re going to dispatch a couple of men to search in the Tibetan district of Sichuan.
5
Little Kelsang was one of the two men they dispatched. He said he was setting off in three or four days. I asked him to let me know what happened when he got back. He laughed, and asked if I wanted to turn it into yet another story. I didn’t say yes, I didn’t say no. The material was pretty flimsy, but who knows how the case might develop? I’m waiting for the outcome.
Suddenly I thought of something else. I asked Little Kelsang if the old lady believed in Buddha. He said there were some copper Buddha statues in her house, even some ceremonial items, but who could tell if they were for prayer or for sale.
That’s about all Little Kelsang’s story.
I’m sure you’d forgive me for not finishing this story. I’m all worn out. I fold my quilt into a pillow, lean back, light a cigarette, and close my eyes. I’m wondering why all old women involved in secrets and intrigues are thin and shriveled, and why, when I heard about the murder, the old lady selling barley wine came into my mind. What’s even more interesting is that my image of the old lady who sells illegal wine should fit in so perfectly with the murderous old woman.
6
A knock on the door.
“Ma Yuan! Ma Yuan!”
It was Xinjian.
“Sitting at home all alone? God, what’s the matter with you?”
“A boil. Must be a punishment for something I did.”
“Dead-on. Have you eaten?”
“There’s hardtack, and some cans.”
“Listen, come on over and stay at my place a few days.”
Xinjian’s a painter. He’s designing the interior of the new museum, and arranging the art exhibition there too. So I moved into his apartment with him, right there in the museum.
His place is roomy enough. As I walked in, my eyes lit on some paper hawks on his design desk. He came to Lhasa the year before last, the same as me. He studied fine art, and he brought along photos of all his murals, his sculpture, his canvases. I’ve seen them.
A couple of bachelors get together, things go better. His place is cleaner than mine, and the reason is a girl who comes over every once in a while, a beautiful girl with a laugh to show flashing white teeth. Her name’s Nima. She’s nineteen. She likes to do her laundry in the Lhasa River.
Xinjian likes to go over to the river too. He paints from life, and he’s always looking for scenes to inspire his art. The Lhasa River in summer is just so enticing, at last he couldn’t resist. He leaped in, and cut his foot on a piece of broken glass. The wound was deep. He grabbed his foot, howling like a devil, and Nima came running from the bank where she was washing clothes.
You can imagine what happened next. She got a bicycle and took him to the hospital, then came to the hospital to visit him, then came again, then . . .
She discovered he was a painter, and that after he shaved his beard he wasn’t so old. (In fact he’s only twenty-nine.) She found out the work studio where he lived was in the worst mess you could imagine. She became his student. She’s been interested in art ever since she was a child. Now they talk about art together for hours on end. He’s sculpted a bust for her too, abstract style. Anyone can see that they have too many romantic illusions about the future. I’m more practical, even if I’m boarding here with Xinjian for the time being. As soon as she came in, I went out. I might as well take a little break, go stroll around the Barkhor.
The Buddha may well be an idol for all eternity, I thought to myself, as I hung around outside the front gate of the Jokhang Temple. I just couldn’t understand all these people prostrating themselves before the Buddha, but somehow I felt a deep respect for them. What I could see as I stood there watching them was their passion and concentration. In the dark expanse of the central hall I ran into her unexpectedly. In profile she still looked plump and kindly. She wouldn’t remember me, but I watched her as she intently stuck four ten-yuan bills onto a Buddha shrine made of yak butter: I recalled that after I drank her wine at Big Kelsang’s house, I didn’t get diarrhea.
Spring is the season for flying paper hawks. Or maybe where you come from you call them kites.
Now, maybe Lhasa’s paper hawks aren’t unique, but a kite’s backdrop is the sky, and there’s no sky anywhere like the sky over Lhasa. On this whole planet it’s the bluest sky to fly your kite in, yes, or just to watch other people fly their kites in—it’s a pleasure. Just now there were three beautiful paper hawks flying in Lhasa’s sky, diving and climbing together with three real hawks off in the distance. The way the kites tugged at the string almost seemed to pull the people who flew them into the sky. Well, Nima had probably left by now, so I thought I might as well go back.
By the time I returned to Xinjian’s place, Nima had left. But there were two visitors. Zhuang Xiaoxiao was Xinjian’s classmate at the fine art institute he attended. I already knew him.
“Let me introduce Liu Yu, from China News Agency. Liu, this is Ma Yuan from the radio station.”
We nodded to each other. Liu Yu told me a friend in Beijing asked him to bring me a book, and when I had time I should go to his place to get it. The Beijing friend is a writer. In the book he gave me was a letter in which he said Liu Yu was a writer too.
Zhuang Xiaoxiao was talking about a problem he had at the exhibit of one of his best portraits. Some fine art official of the party said it distorted the image of the Tibetan people. Zhuang seethed with resentment. The model for the portrait came from the Nagchu pasturelands, and—it turned out to be Nima’s granny. Nima got to know Zhuang Xiaoxiao through Xinjian. When she spotted the portrait at Xiaoxiao’s studio, she stared dumbstruck. The wrinkles in the old woman’s face were like the frost-scars in the bark of an old elm: the weariness of a lifetime. The portrait was called The Years.
Nima asked Zhuang Xiaoxiao how he got to know her granny.
Xiaoxiao told her when he’d been painting up in the grasslands, he’d lived in her granny’s house. The old woman had milked her yak every day to make him yak butter tea, and as she churned the butter she told him legends of the grasslands. When he mentioned that he’d like to paint her portrait, the old woman agreed. At first she kept chatting and laughing, but as Xiaoxiao became absorbed in his work, they stopped talking. The old woman was patient, but obviously she was anxious about the sheep and yaks out in the fields. She sat there, but her thoughts were elsewhere. When Xiaoxiao saw the latent exhaustion take shape in her face, he seized it.
Nima told Zhuang Xiaoxiao her father had often offered to bring her granny to come and live with them in Lhasa, but the old woman had always refused, saying she had to stay and take care of the animals. Granny was over seventy. She’d told Nima that she wouldn’t live much longer, and didn’t want to die anywhere else, she wanted to stay in the grasslands. She was used to the sheep, the yaks, the brown hawks.
Zhuang Xiaoxiao was planning to enter this portrait in the National Fine Art Exhibition in Shenyang this October. What about Xinjian? Nima took part in the discussion of ideas for Xinjian’s sketch.
7
Liu Yu came to Xinjian’s for a chat. I brought the subject of fiction into their conversation. Liu Yu wasn’t much interested in discussing fiction. He was just making a few technical remarks about Zhuang Xiaoxiao’s painting The Years, said he didn’t like the picture’s technique. All he really wanted to talk about was young Beijing painters. Beijing people love to go on about Beijing, just the same as Shanghai people all long to return to Shanghai. Liu Yu started asking Xinjian about his latest sketch. He wanted to know why Xinjian chose the Madonna as his subject. Xinjian told him that from ancient times right up to the present painters all over the world have been painting the Madonna, so there was no reason why he shouldn’t want to paint one too. The Madonna was a Christian subject, and the Madonna was also Mother, or rather mother’s love. Even if he, Xinjian, was a twentieth century Chinese, Raphael’s Madonna evoked the same feeling of awe for the sacred in him.
Xinjian’s sketch showed a woman with a child in her arms, eyes lowered, with two more children crouched against her feet, one on its hands and knees. It was obvious this was a Tibetan mother and her three children. The background was much less concrete: in the vague distance rose a snowcapped mountain, the Potala Palace, the Great Wall, and flocks of sheep. He’d painted the flocks of sheep stretching into the sky so at first I couldn’t tell if they were sheep or clouds.
The conversation came around to the art committee’s censorship. Well, Zhuang Xiaoxiao had strong feelings about this. Some of his best paintings hadn’t made it because of censorship, but now, he said, he’d smartened up. He was going to find a Tibetan collaborator, and put the collaborator’s name in front of his own. That way he’d be better off both in terms of censorship and in getting awards. The fine art committee has to encourage minority artists—it’s government policy—so any way you looked at it the chance of getting his work before the public was better. Zhuang Xiaoxiao talked this way because he has confidence in his work. He trusted his feelings, and he trusted his wholehearted labor.
Now I thought of something else. The model for Xinjian’s Madonna was Nima. Did Xinjian plan to use Zhuang Xiaoxiao’s strategy? Maybe. A writer friend of mine, Hu Daguang, does the same. Her mother is Tibetan. Her father is Chinese, Mongolian, and Manchu, all mixed together. Hu Daguang uses a Tibetan pen name, Phuntsok. She grew up in China, has Chinese habits, and speaks Chinese in her daily life. She can’t speak a word of Tibetan, but now she’s a young Tibetan writer.
Well, I’ve been chattering away, now back to the story.
Liu Yu and his crew came to Tibet to shoot a news film and I heard they were planning to stay a few months. I asked Liu Yu if he’d found any material for a story since he’d arrived. He said he was collecting material for a short story about an old woman who lived near the Potala Palace.
8
They’d killed off the dogs in Lhasa couple of years ago, so I hear. In Lhasa there are just too many dogs. And in the past there had been even more dogs. They say Lhasa’s dogs are a precious species that fetches a good price in London.
This old woman is dead now. She used to live at the foot of the Potala Palace, not far from your radio station. I hear she died a good few years ago, but still I feel an urge to go and see the place where she lived.
She was a devout Buddhist, never married. Every day since she was young she walked three times around the Potala Palace spinning her prayer wheel. The Potala’s outer wall must be at least two thousand meters in circumference. Every day she walked around it three times. People who came regularly to Lhasa to spin their prayer wheels all knew her. She made a living selling clay Buddhas.
Every day she sat in the sun on the same flight of steps down on the Barkhor with a few copper molds, meticulously forming all different kinds of Buddha statues out of fine yellow clay that she brought in from the countryside. There were thousand-hand, thousand-eyed Happy Buddhas, there were figures of Tsongkhapa‡ sitting erect, but most of all there were Sakyamuni Buddhas with the rays of illumination around their heads.
Herdsmen on pilgrimage from the countryside always used to squat down, pick out a couple of clay buddhas, and leave a couple of yuan in her cardboard money-box. Then there were foreign tourists buying souvenirs of Lhasa to take back home. They were her customers too. They’d ask her how much, but she wouldn’t answer, so monkey see, monkey do, they’d imitate the pilgrims and leave a foreign exchange certificate.§ At times like this she didn’t even look up, her attention fixed on the new Sakyamuni she was turning out of her mold.
Usually she didn’t take shelter even when it rained, but just stared blankly at the peddlers as they hurriedly gathered up their wares into their ground cloths, stared at the people bumping and crowding in their rush to find shelter from the rain, stared at the rain washing away the fine yellow clay she’d brought in from the countryside, at the muddy yellow clay flowing from beneath her feet off to lower ground.
She must have made a fair sum. She gave it all to the Buddhas. She went at regular intervals to worship at Jokhang Temple, at Ramoche Temple, at Drepung Temple, at Sera Temple, at the Potala. The money she donated included every denomination of Chinese currency, besides foreign currency exchange certificates, overseas currency remittance certificates, even worthless old Tibetan money that went out of circulation years ago. Every time, she just poured out all she had. You could fairly say her heart and soul belonged to the Buddhas. She hadn’t a single new piece of clothing.
This isn’t the story I’m going to tell.
9
That story didn’t sound true. But I believe it’s true. I hadn’t been in Lhasa two weeks before I’d already heard it from two people. It has made me ponder many questions.
As I was saying a minute ago, Lhasa was full of dogs a few years ago. That was before you came to Tibet. Dogs came and went wherever they pleased, in and out of shops, restaurants, all the public places. You could have called it a plague of dogs. Now Tibetans love dogs, they keep dogs as pets, they couldn’t kill dogs, but back then there were just too many dogs. There were cases of rabies and other contagious diseases that were suspected of being spread by dogs. Besides, the population of Lhasa is only about a hundred fifty thousand. Such a large proportion of dogs to people caused shortages in the food supply. Packs of dogs got into fierce battles with one other. They disrupted the environment of the entire city.
So the Lhasa city government called on the populace to kill off dogs. The officials set up part-time dog-killing squads, and issued a directive forbidding staff and workers of state enterprises to keep dogs.
Most people couldn’t bring themselves to kill the dogs. They just chased the family dog out of the house. All these family dogs simply swelled the numbers of the dog packs in the streets. In a short time there were many more dogs on the streets than ever before. A few young men went out with rifles and small-caliber guns and hunted them down.
This old woman started to keep dogs. She took dogs that had been terrified by all the gunfire back to her home, fed them, let them laze around basking in the sun where no one would come to frighten them.
Dogs must have a language of their own. These dogs told their friends about their good fortune. More and more dogs came to her shelter. A newcomer would slink into her yard with a group of the old tenants, watching her every move with its usual wary vigilance. If by chance she had a wooden stick in her hand, the newcomer turned and ran with its tail between its legs. In a dog’s eyes, there’s no great difference between a stick and a gun, especially in such times as those.
And so her little courtyard became dog-paradise. Every morning she went out the same as always to walk three times around the Potala, she molded the same clay Buddhas on the Barkhor, but she went less often to the temples to pray, and now if someone who took one of her little Buddhas didn’t leave enough money, she no longer kept the same blank expression, but gave the customer a melancholy look, shook her head, and waited for them to take out more.
One of the dogs, a short-legged one with long golden fur, had a puppy again, a golden yellow puppy. When the old woman walked around the Potala spinning her prayer wheel, she carried the puppy at her bosom, with the mama dog trotting along behind to the rhythm of the spinning prayer wheel. People who knew her could see she was getting thin. Her cheeks grew sunken, her eyes hollow, her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose stood out sharply. She started to buy fresh milk every morning.
The kids who sold milk knew she never haggled about the price. They started watering down bottles of whole milk that usually sell for forty cents and sold them to her for fifty. She’d never drunk milk all her life; her neighbors said all the milk went to her puppies. Every day she’d buy four or five bottles of milk, sometimes even more. By now she had four puppies.
Her alley was narrow, just wide enough for two people to pass each other. Her little courtyard was at the very end. With a couple of dozen dogs stealing in and out, the half-lit alley assumed a mysterious air. At dusk the dogs left her courtyard one after another and came single file down her alley. If you closed in on that scene from above with a high-power zoom lens, the effect could be quite something.
(I laughed. Liu Yu was having a relapse of his professional mania. But in all fairness, Liu Yu’s photography isn’t bad at all. I like to hear him go on about the technical details.)
Of course this aroused resentment among the neighbors. With so many dogs living all together, there was plenty of biting and snapping, yelping and growling. The neighbors got no peace and quiet. When they complained, she didn’t say much, just smiled, embarrassed. I think it must have been a bitter smile. After that she spent even more time with the dogs to get to know them better so that they would obey her, no more snapping and biting, snarling and barking, no more disturbing the neighbors. They were certainly tamer and more docile than before, but now she had even less time to spend on the Barkhor.
The old woman’s favorite was the golden yellow puppy, the only puppy born right there in her yard. She treated it as if it had been her own child. When it got a little bigger she let it down from her bosom, tied a little cord around its neck, and the little puppy followed her along just like its mother used to do, trotting in step to the rhythm of the spinning prayer wheel. At night it crept up into her bed on the sly, snuggled up to the old woman’s bosom, and fell peacefully asleep.
Now the old woman often appeared at the grain market. Lhasa is a city with a high cost of living and since Tibet can’t produce enough grain to feed itself, the free market grain prices are high. She was a registered resident so she had grain ration coupons, but it takes a lot of grain to feed two dozen hungry dogs. What could she do? People could see that she was getting thinner and thinner, weaker and weaker. Sometimes she went out pushing a little cart, came back with it stuffed with flour sacks, leaning on the cart as she pushed it forward, the cart barely holding her up.
She didn’t drink yak butter tea anymore, didn’t even eat tsampa,¶ since barley is more expensive than wheat. But now, to everybody’s surprise, she started drinking barley wine. I don’t remember if I told you she didn’t drink or take snuff. Now every noon she went into a canvas tent by the side of the street, contentedly drank off two cups, looked down with bleary, half-closed eyes at the little yellow dog at her feet, and muttered something intimate that only the two of them understood. She’d just about fallen apart, but still every day she went to the Potala to spin her prayer wheel, went to the Barkhor to mold clay Buddhas, every day . . . look, Xinjian’s fallen asleep. We’ve stayed too long. I’ll tell you the rest of this when we get a chance.
10
In those days we often went to a big island in the middle of the Lhasa River. By “we” I mean Xinjian, Luo Hao, and myself. (Luo Hao’s only nineteen, a professional photographer.) It was Xinjian’s idea to go to the river to wash our clothes. I’m sure he wanted to relive sweet memories of his first meeting there with Nima. It was on that island that he told me their story.
I happened to mention Liu Yu’s story, and told Xinjian that he’d fallen asleep before it was over. To my surprise Xinjian gave another yawn, and said he’d heard the same story from Luo Hao a long time ago. He said Luo Hao had lived in Lhasa since he was a kid, so naturally he knew a lot of these Lhasa legends.
On this particular occasion we’d brought a big load of dirty laundry, including everybody’s bedclothes. Besides that, we brought lots to eat, canned food and more besides. Luo Hao brought along the white rooster his little brother had been raising, which he’d cooked into chili-sauce chicken. There was beer too. There’s nothing more luxurious in Tibet than chili-sauce chicken with beer.
Our nearest neighbors were two Tibetan girls, washing clothes down the bank. Since Luo and I had no expectations of a romantic encounter, at first each group just minded their own business.
The Lhasa River is so clear you can see the bottom. First you spread your clothes out on the current, lay some stone pebbles on them to weigh them down in the water, let them soak for a while, then drag one up, lay it out on the pebble beach, sprinkle it evenly with soap powder, and rub it on with your hands, or you can tread it in with your feet if you’d rather. Then do a second one. Then a third one.
The girls started it by laughing—a brazen, unscrupulous laugh. They were laughing at us. It must have been the clumsy way we men wash our clothes. We thought about it and started laughing ourselves.
We were standing knee-deep in the current rinsing out the soap. The water was piercing cold. The waves leaped and sparkled on the stones of the riverbank. We stretched out our clothes and the swift current rinsed them quickly clean with a pleasant swish. The most interesting thing was that our checkered quilts and bedsheets spread out on the current in a decorative effect, trembling with an uncanny rhythm that seemed to remind me of something. Luo Hao had an inspiration—he went off a little way, set up his tripod, pushed the timed-release shutter, then came dashing toward us fast as he could, kicking up spray, and just made it in time to hold up a quilt like the rest of us as the shutter clicked. A souvenir photograph: three he-men washing their bedclothes in the Lhasa River with the Potala Palace in the background.
Luo Hao’s second inspiration came from the girls unbinding their heavy braids to wash their hair. They were sisters—that was obvious—with thick black hair. As the younger one turned her face, her thick black hair still in the water, to say something to her sister, Luo Hao caught the unique scene on film. That was the photo he sent to the Japanese exhibition “Water and Life.”
The sisters weren’t one bit shy. Xinjian and I called in Chinese asking them to pose for some shots from various angles. They were plainly delighted, spoke good Chinese too. They left us their names and addresses and asked us to drop by and give them copies of the photos. They were husky and healthy-looking. I still remember their straightforward talk and their hearty laughs.
As I looked at them, I don’t know why but I couldn’t help recalling Liu Yu’s story about the dogs who found a home with the old woman. For some reason I couldn’t fathom, that story kept running through my head. The two girls brought over some barley wine and invited us to drink with them. We were afraid of getting diarrhea but nobody wanted to say so out loud. We politely turned down their offer and invited them to try what we’d brought. The cold chili chicken clearly delighted them, and after we finished the beer we had a big pot of their warm yak-butter tea.
It was the younger sister who discovered Xinjian’s paper hawk hanging on a bush. She squealed with surprise and bubbled over in expressions of admiration. She asked Xinjian’s permission, then with an expert hand she let the kite fly.
She said there were two paper hawks at home, her father had folded them, her father folded such beautiful paper hawks. Come spring lots of neighbors came looking for her father to fold them a paper hawk. He could fold two completely different kinds. Just then I recalled that when her older sister had given us their address a moment before, she said it was just below the Potala. I thought I’d ask them about the old woman who sheltered dogs. They were natives of Lhasa, lived here all their lives, and they came from the same neighborhood, so maybe they knew more about her.
Too bad, they didn’t. But it turned out Luo Hao knew something. He said the old woman hadn’t only kept dogs at the end of her life, she’d done that for years, and indeed had kept twenty or more. She didn’t really make clay Buddhas. She had no relatives. She was long dead and gone, so the two girls from her neighborhood wouldn’t have even heard of her. Luo Hao said the old woman often saved up her own grain for the dogs until she grew incredibly emaciated. The Lhasa people back then all knew about her. Some gave her grain out of pity, but she wouldn’t eat any of it herself. They say the government even gave her an extra share of grain, but she refused to eat that too, giving it all to the dogs. She was stubborn, wouldn’t listen to anyone. Some say she starved, others say she died of some disease. Anyhow, she lived alone, never had anything to do with the neighbors. They found her dead, and since she was so thin, the rumor naturally spread that she starved. Nobody knew for sure. Living together with so many dogs that roved all over, maybe she picked up some contagious disease and died.
The younger sister’s mind was absorbed in flying the kite, but as the older sister turned away I happened to notice her wipe a tear from her face. I gave Luo Hao a poke and he broke off the story.
Xinjian finally gave the paper hawk to that playful girl.
But what was the matter with big sister? Could it be . . .
11
Before he left Lhasa, Liu Yu finished his version of the story for me. This time there was no interruption, and I listened to the end. I know maybe Luo Hao’s version of the story is more down-to-earth, more authentic. But Liu Yu’s version brings out the meaning better. Liu Yu wants to write a story, so his material is more elastic. Luo Hao’s version is too restrictive on the imagination. Liu Yu doesn’t just want to tell it superficially. I guess he’s most concerned with the story’s Buddhist elements and their deeper impact. This version gives the tale room to soar. I realized how keenly I hope for a chance to read Liu Yu’s story, to discover what this tale had sparked off in another writer’s imagination. That spark is what fascinates us.
Three days after Liu Yu left Lhasa I looked up the two sisters. I found their little alley, narrow and deep. Just the luck! Little sister wasn’t there. I asked big sister why. She answered, “She’s gone to fly her kite.”
(Translated by Herbert J. Batt)
* Sakyamuni: Siddhartha Gautama (ca. 563 B.C.–ca. 487 B.C.), the historical Buddha, founder of the Buddhist religion.
† In such bargaining one finger usually represents 1,000 yuan.
‡ Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) was a monk posthumously regarded as founder of the Geluk (System of Virtue) sect, the dominant sect of Tibetan Buddhism. The Dalai Lama is its leader.
§ Special certificates in Chinese currency denominations that foreigners received in exchange for foreign currency. The practice was discontinued in 1994.
¶ Tsampa is ground roast barley, the Tibetan staple.