by Hua Laura Wu
Khetsun Wangdue. Wang Zheren.
Khetsun Wangdue. Wang Zheren.
Khetsun Wangdue. Wang Zheren.
Khetsun Wangdue was Dawa’s first husband, her former classmate at the tourism school and colleague at the travel company. They worked on the same route—from Taer Temple to the Sun and Moon Mountain and to Qinghai Lake, and vice versa. Wangdue went on the route one week, and Dawa went the alternate week. Their wedding had taken place on October 1st, the National Day, the third year after their graduation. Unfortunately, the bright red marriage certificate lying in Dawa’s drawer was useless since Wangdue never had the chance to be a groom. The coach he rode in had an accident on the way to the Sun and Moon Mountain. Wangdue wasn’t found in the wreckage of the bus. A few days later, people found his body on the riverbank. The Public Security Bureau conducted several investigations but found no good reason to explain why his body was so far away from the coach. Dawa was a bride for eleven days on paper before she became a widow.
Dawa’s second husband, whose name was Wang Zheren, was a Han Chinese teaching at Qinghai University who was interested in minority customs. Wang Zheren had been in Dawa’s tour group once. He had followed Dawa and visited Qinghai Lake. Dawa had sung all the way, and he had listened to all her songs. He fell in love with Dawa, and he was persistent in courting her. Having gone to school with Tibetans and Han Chinese, Dawa had friends in mixed relationships and marriages, so she wasn’t afraid of marrying a Han Chinese. Because of her previous experience, she was frightened by the word marriage. She never mentioned Wangdue, her first husband, to Wang Zheren. But at the wedding, someone got drunk and called Wang Zheren by her first husband’s name. Wang Zheren didn’t lose his temper, but, back in their bedroom, he was very upset. As an educated Han, even though he was angry, his voice was still gentle. “I don’t care about your past, but I do care about your dishonesty.” After he said this, Wang Zheren slept in his clothes at the end of their bed. At dawn, Dawa woke up to the strong smell of urine and found the sheet wet. Wang Zheren’s body was cold. Later, a forensic doctor identified the cause of death as a heart attack.
As a result, Dawa, at the age of twenty-six, became a widow for the second time.
One, two, three….
Dawa counted the Buddha’s toes ten times, and, knowing she’d rolled her tongue over those names over a hundred times, she lowered her head onto the floor and whispered, “Buddha, I beg you to lead them to the safe and peaceful land of light.”
She smelled the stale dust on her nose and lips; she felt her eyes hurt, but not because of tears. The tears lay in the shallow riverbed of her rocky life and they had dried out before they could flow down. Without looking into a mirror, she already knew that those tears had left cracks on her forehead. That day, she clearly heard the noise of her youth wilting in her body.
Slowly she stood up and walked outside. Dust fell from her dress and danced in the mottled sunshine between the buildings. The autumn sun was strong like a knife, forcing her to close her eyes. Dark golden stars danced in front of her eyes, and she almost fell. Then someone suddenly held her waist. After a while, she felt warmth and strength from an arm, a man’s arm.
That arm supported her and led her out of the threshold of the gold-tiled temple. Slowly she walked to the roadside and sat down.
Dawa noticed the head with brown curly hair and the face with a healthy complexion—a face like that of the people from the plateau. “I’m sorry. I … too long.”
Dawa had learned some English for a few weeks in the tourism school, but since her work was with domestic tour groups, the limited English she knew became rusty. The young foreigner finally spoke. “How do you do? My name is Joy. I’m a Canadian.”
The foreigner spoke Chinese, but his tone was strange and didn’t sound Chinese.
“Do you like Taer?” Dawa asked. She knew the questions was trivial, but those were the only English words she could say. She had no choice.
The man named Joy nodded and then shook his head. He had so much to say. His eyes were filled with two oceans of questions, but he could only smile. His Chinese and her English were both stuck in the bottleneck; Joy and Dawa sat on the roadside, desperately looking forward to a breakthrough.
The afternoon sun became strong, gradually thickening the outline of the monastery and the mountains. A group of women in rags knelt down at one step and then moved on to another step along the path leading to Taer Temple. Looked at from a distance, they were like a group of ants carrying bits of mud. In a corner of the temple, a small monk was relieving himself against the wall. His robe was red, and it looked as if blood had been splashed on the rugged, yellow, muddy walls.
Joy pulled a dictionary from his backpack and gave it to Dawa. In a small notebook, he neatly wrote a sentence in English and then tore the page off for Dawa. Dawa checked the dictionary to decipher the words.
“I didn’t come for sightseeing. I came to learn Tibetan medicine.”
In reply, Dawa wrote some words in Chinese and tore the page off for Joy, who then looked through the dictionary and guessed their meaning.
“Why do you want to learn Tibetan medicine?”
“Tibetan medicine and our herbs have something in common.”
The bottleneck cracked, and the water flowed out with difficulty. They both were excited about this strange form of communication. Their faces flushed. Page by page, the notebook got thinner and thinner.
“I’ve been here looking for a doctor for three days, but I can’t find him.”
“Who?”
This time, Joy scribbled the name in Chinese—the name he’d memorized.
“Living Buddha Muchi.”
Dawa laughed aloud. Living Buddha Muchi was a doctor in the Taer Temple Hospital. She’d led groups from medical organizations to the hospital many times. After several visits, she had become friends with the living Buddha.
Dawa grabbed Joy’s book and wrote down in Chinese, “Buddha Muchi is a busy man. You can’t see him without an appointment.”
Disappointment, like clouds, gradually covered Joy’s face. She ignored him, got out her cellphone, and made a few calls. She put down the phone and extended four fingers of her hand in front of Joy’s face. She said, “Meet Living Buddha Muchi at four this afternoon”
Joy suddenly understood. Hesitating for a moment, he hugged Dawa tightly. Dawa felt as if everybody were looking at her. Her head spun and her face flushed. She wasn’t sure if she should push him away. She felt her body become tense, inch by inch.
That afternoon, Dawa took Joy to Living Buddha’s Muchi’s dwelling place. The boy server took them in and said that the living Buddha was meditating and reading the scripture. Dawa gestured for Joy to leave his backpack for the boy to take care of. Joy waited outside the room holding a white-yellow-and-blue khata—a traditional ceremonial scarf used in Tibet. The compound was extremely quiet. The wind was silent; even the fallen leaves seemed to roll over the ground with caution. After a while, some movement was heard, and the boy opened the door to invite them in. They entered the meeting room. In the centre of the room, a middle-aged man sat under a huge butter lamp. His traditional red-and-yellow habit made the place look brilliant. With his palms held together, the man looked peaceful and wise. His face looked like a lotus flower, as though he’d lived in paradise.
Joy bowed deeply to present the silk khata. The living Buddha stretched out his hand to touch Joy’s head for the blessing. Removing a copper bracelet from his wrist, Joy held it in his hand in front of the living Buddha and begged him for opening light —that is, a blessing. Of course, this was at Dawa’s instruction. After a very brief greeting, the two immediately engaged in conversation. The living Buddha spoke fluent English, which Dawa didn’t understand. Every nerve in her body was wide awake and excited, as if numerous tentacles had gently stroked the wonderful door. She felt that the low-pitched voices of the
two men were like two quiet streams joining under the pine trees and occasionally splashing bubbles. Or they were like bees flapping over a field full of rape blossoms. In her vision, it looked as if the entire landscape were covered with golden honey.
At that moment, Dawa completely forgot Wangdue and Wang Zheren.
It was dusk when they left the residence of the living Buddha. The sunset was heavy, as if mountains had pushed the gold-tiled building down. Visitors gradually dispersed. The fall wind carried sand and gravel through the woods. The air felt wet with a trace of frost.
Joy took off the copper bracelet that had been blessed by the living Buddha and put it on Dawa’s wrist. It was very old. The image of a bald eagle was engraved on the clasp. She wore a small personal possession—a Tibetan dagger with an eagle etched on the handle. At that moment her heart warmed. He, like her, was also fond of eagles. But she couldn’t express herself in English, so she took her dagger out and placed his eagle next to hers, trying her best to show her enjoyment by nodding and smiling. Later, when she finally learned his family background, she understood that both her people and his had a deep bond with the eagle.
“Can you tell me your address?”
This was what Joy wrote on the last page of his notebook. After the sheet was torn off, he and she would part. As a tour guide, she met a lot of tour groups and often gave her address to people as they were leaving. It was a touching moment, but she knew that their brief connection could not become a lifelong bond. She didn’t expect anything from him and vice versa.
She watched him gallop down the mountain to catch the last bus. His tall and lanky figure went up and down like an ostrich and gradually disappeared in the thickening darkness. She thought their meeting was like a story, an interesting story. Stories were the background of life, but not life itself. Stories happened every day. They were like clouds floating across the canopy of her life. Her life wouldn’t change because of them.
However, she still looked forward to hearing from him. And two months later, when she’d almost given up, his letter finally arrived.
The letter wasn’t long. It was about his journey and some new pharmacological prescriptions he’d learned. Her answering letter was very brief, not only because of her English, but because she felt like her life was boring and empty. Gradually their letters became longer and more frequent. Besides work and studies, they touched on a number of other areas and Dawa started to consult English dictionaries and the world atlas.
Later, in one of his letters, Joy carefully asked if she was willing to come to Canada and live with him. She guessed that this was his proposal. She was glad he didn’t use the word marriage, and she felt lucky that she could avoid explaining her past due to her poor English. Years later, the truth gradually emerged. Recalling that period of time, she finally understood that she had married Joy because she was tired of struggling in life. But she didn’t realize that, in so doing, she had messed up her whole life.
When she wrote the letter with the words “I do” and dropped it—stamped with overseas postage—into a mailbox, she suddenly remembered something. A year earlier, she had taken a group of government officials on a tour around Qinghai Lake. By the time her tourists had reached the lake, a heavy downpour began. Without any shelter nearby, most of the tourists ran back to the coach. She was behind and had to take shelter from the storm in a gift shop. Only one monk was in the store, also sheltering from the rain. As the monk turned to her, her legs became weak, and her heart jumped in her throat—the monk looked like Wangdue. Looking at her, the monk was also frightened. His eyes closed, and he kept silent for a long time before he breathed a sigh. He said, “Poor woman, you should go. Go as far as your horse can take you.”
A year later she finally flew over half the globe and joined Joy in northern Canada. When she saw him again, she was shocked by two facts. First, Whitefish, where he lived, was such a small town— in fact, the entire town was made up of three streets. Second, Joy had changed significantly; he had become quiet, and he looked much older. She didn’t know that alcohol, like a worm, was chewing through Joy’s guts. She couldn’t see what was inside him; she only saw his skinny outer body. His body was like a tree without roots and its wilting would come sooner or later.
By then, Joy had already developed a reputation as a drunkard in the town. Whenever the bar was open, he drank there. Whenever the bar was closed, he drank at home. At the beginning, he picked on others when he was drunk, and Dawa helped to clean up the mess. Later, Joy began to find faults with Dawa. When he wasn’t drinking, Joy was quiet and even behaved like a gentleman. But alcohol could change everything. There was a very thin line dividing heaven from hell, and Joy couldn’t balance. He either fell down one side or the other.
The first time he was brutal to Dawa was when she was pregnant with Neil. That day, Dawa came home from work and decided to go to the corner store to get a jar of pickled cucumbers. She had a surprisingly good appetite, but she threw up what she ate. Her stomach couldn’t keep any food down; only pickled cucumbers satisfied her empty stomach for a short while. In the closet, she found her ceramic piggy bank, in which she stashed away her pocket money. But when she turned it over, it was empty.
“Where’s my money?” she asked Joy. He didn’t answer. Like a wall, Joy blocked her from going anywhere.
“Who gave you a ride home?” Joy asked, tugging at her hair. Dawa wanted to say that it was her colleague who had driven her home because she was unable to drive after vomiting. But Joy’s fist firmly closed her mouth. He pushed her down the stairs. Like a sack of flour, she fell to the floor. She still could walk afterwards even though her foot was sprained. But later at midnight, she bled profusely and had to go to the hospital. When the doctor saw the bruises on her, he became suspicious, but she insisted she fell down accidentally.
Neil was a really tough baby who had survived his mother’s injured body for five months. Dawa had hoped their child could bring Joy back, but she failed. Neil’s birth softened Joy’s heart, but the change didn’t last. And Joy chose hell.
Everyone in Whitefish knew why Joy’s wife had those injuries, but Dawa remained silent about them and never reported Joy to the police. People guessed the reason for her silence: Dawa hadn’t received her landing papers yet. Separation might lead to her repatriation. But they were only half right. The other reason was that Dawa had a secret, down deep in her heart, and no one knew about it.
Xiaoyue,
A powwow is an Aboriginal outdoor gathering that usually takes place in the summer. Sometimes the powwow season extends into the fall if it isn’t too cold. It’s a bit like Chinese temple fairs, but not exactly the same. Powwows also contains some aspects of prayers to the ancestors and thanks for blessings. When I arrived, the summer was almost over. So I only caught the final powwow at the end of September, which took place at Sioux Lookout. When there is a powwow, people from nearby all come. This usually less-populated northern area suddenly became bustling. I bought you a fan made of eagle feathers, dyed peacock blue, from the market. A wooden sculpture of an eagle head—a very special ornament—hangs from the handle. The eagle has a very special place in the Aboriginal culture because they believe that the eagle in the sky is closest to the creator. Tibetan culture includes a similar belief: the eagle symbolizes bravery. All the traditional battle costumes of Aboriginal men are always decorated with eagle feathers. Many powwow ceremonies start with an eagle feather dance. This dance is performed by four of the strongest men selected from the tribe. When eagle feathers slowly drop from the sky onto the land, the dancers pick them up in different ways to commemorate all their fallen fighters. When they perform the eagle feather dance, everyone in the audience must stand and salute them.
Zhongyue had never heard such sounds. The six or seven drummers were strong men, and their faces were painted in striped patterns. They sat around a huge powwow drum. Nobody was a leader or a follower. They beat t
he drum and paused at the same time. The drumbeat was slow. The drumstick hitting on the drum was only a prelude—the resulting tremor was the climax. That tremor didn’t come from the drums. Instead, it seemed like it muffled thunder rolling over the ground. The sound shook Zhongyue’s heart and made it beat wildly. “Blood-stirring” was an overused word in a certain era in China, but that day Zhongyue thought of that word again and again. His blood had run coldly in his body for half of his life, but on that day his blood was stirred up, like flood water eager to burst the dam.
Their songs were also sung in a way that Zhongyue found haunting. He wasn’t even sure he could call them songs. No lyrics, only a melody of up-or-down cries. The pitch was high, as if it had reached the mountain peak, only one step away from the sky. Then the tune became low, as if it had dropped into a bottomless pit, only one step from the centre of the earth. Like the strong gusts of wind, the sounds travelled between sky and earth, jumping from one water drop to another, from one tuft of grass to another, and from one cloud to another. No musical notations could record this complicated melody; music theory could not sustain its power and freedom. This sound broke the rules of logic. It had nothing to do with the vocal chords, nothing to do with the throat, and nothing to do with the brain. It bounced to the world directly from the heart, without any touch or contamination from any intermediate links. Zhongyue felt an itch on his face. Touching his face, he felt his tears; he knew that this voice and his soul had collided somewhere outside of his body.
Men started to dance. They wore costumes decorated with eagle feathers, their hands holding various weapons and tools. Their dance was a narrative, describing practices carried out by the men of the tribe since time immemorial: worship, expeditions, hunting, burials, and questions about heaven. The movements of the dancing men were strong and wild. The movements of their feet and hands were their words.
The women wore colourful cloaks, embroidered skirts, and jangling bells on their skirts and dresses. The women didn’t like to tell stories. Their dance was related to emotion. Their cloaks spun around like butterflies that swirled all over the place, and their steps teased the dust. The women’s smiles reminded people of harvest, children, of nature, and the beauty of the world.