by Li Juan
Once out the door, I spent a few more hours digging a path to the toilet through the waist-deep snow, then another path to the courtyard gate. But by the time I had cleared the snow that blocked the gate, and opened it (good thing the gate opened inward), I couldn’t believe my eyes—there was a wall of snow taller than me. That gate faced the wind, trapping all the snow that had blown this way.… I gave up, I didn’t have a shred of energy left. In the end, the courtyard gate remained shut for two months. No one in Akehara knew that I was home. They all assumed that behind the snow was an empty house.
Because I was slim, the two paths that I dug were only a foot wide, just enough space for me to pass sideways. But when my mother returned home, she was furious. She was too fat—so she got stuck.
My infinitely resourceful mother just happened to know a road-maintenance worker. So, when the heavy-duty loader passed through Akehara clearing paths, it went out of its way to come to my house to dig me out. As wide and tall as that loader was, it still had to make more than twenty trips (how much fuel must that have required … I didn’t pay a cent). The mound of snow dumped by the loader to the west of the house was almost two stories tall!
* * *
WHEN EVERYBODY HEARD my story, they all gasped. They asked, “Is that something you will write about too?”
I said, “Of course,” before opening my notebook to write it down.
Kama pondered for a moment, then asked me for a sheet of paper and a pen. With a flashlight in hand, she lay on the felt mat on the bed to reflect and write. During evening tea, she held the sheet filled with words and read it to us out loud. Bowls in hand, everyone listened intently. Afterward, everyone said, “Very good.” Then, after a silent pause, Sister-in-law took the paper to read again, quietly holding the flashlight. The light was dim. The solar-powered flashlight was only three watts.
I asked Cuma what Kama had written. He was too lazy to translate. “Whatever you wrote, that’s what she wrote!”
Later, when the party branch secretary from the elementary school visited, Kama brought out the paper once again to read to him. The teacher also said it was well written before turning to tell me in Mandarin that she’d written about her own experiences. It talked about how, after Big Sister went off to school, life became challenging for the family, so she had to drop out from her first year of junior high school and herd sheep. Even though she felt sad about not being able to go to school, what other choice did she have? Then, she wrote about last year’s snow and how much everyone had to endure. There were also some passionate passages about Kazakh herding traditions … it really was just like what I had written!
Anyhow, we were all grateful for how peaceful this winter had turned out. Everyone agreed, “Thank goodness this year’s not bad!” Even though daily life was still a challenge—in the middle of every night, Sister-in-law had to wake up and rekindle the fire for the rest of us, and Plum Blossom was always so cold that he was always trying to burrow under our bedcovers.
The flock braves the snow in the pitch-black of the snowstorm.
30.
What I’m Experiencing
IN ORDER TO RAISE a telephone antenna, Shinshybek brought three ten-foot poles made of pine into the desert. He tied one on top of another and used it to raise an antenna sky-high in the sand next to the burrow. Although it only received a signal once in a while, it always attracted all the cattle to scratch themselves.… Of course, the pole didn’t stand a chance against a big cow belly! So, the two men next door were constantly scrambling to save the antenna pole.
I asked Cuma, “Why do we have a television but no telephone?”
He replied, “I don’t have any wood, so we can’t raise an antenna.”
I said, “So what if you had wood, don’t you see how much trouble it is for Shinshybek’s family? You might as well hang the antenna on top of that metal structure on the sand dune, it’s tall and sturdy!”
He retorted, “But it’s so far away, wouldn’t you need a sixteen-hundred-foot-long phone line?”
I insisted, “Just let the line hang there and when you want to make a phone call, carry the telephone over, plug in the port, and when you’re done, unplug it and carry the phone back.”
He said, “Koychy!” Then he began to contemplate it seriously.
Sure enough, Cuma traveled to Akehara soon after and returned with a wireless landline telephone, which he set up as I suggested. And whaddaya know, our signal was much better than the neighbor’s! And it didn’t require daily maintenance. There was just one catch: we could make calls, but not receive them.…
This was the most helpful suggestion that I ever offered the family.
Come to think of it, it might be the only suggestion I gave all winter.
* * *
OTHER THAN THIS, what else did I contribute to the family? Only things like collecting snow, herding calves, herding sheep, embroidering, mending clothes, explaining TV shows … things that anyone could have done. In other words, the presence of someone like me had almost no impact on the family. On the other hand, I was deeply impacted. Especially when it came to speaking. Before I knew it, I was picking up Kazakh speech habits:
When studying Kazakh, I’d say, “Difficulties so many!” (“This is hard.”)
At mealtimes: “Food to eat!”
Asking for help: “A help give to me!”
Announcing that I hadn’t seen the sheep: “Sheep not seen!”
Meaning to say “neither hot nor cold”: “Cold, it’s not, hot, it’s not.”
* * *
I HEARD THAT AT FIRST, nobody had believed I would be able to persevere; they all thought that, after a few days, I’d call it quits. As time passed, they became more and more amazed. But as more time passed, they simply became used to my presence. They even began to worry about arranging for my return north in the spring—there were no extra horses. They thought of many possible solutions, and thought about my arrangements after the summer, entirely forgetting that I was only there to experience one winter.
In short, I was integrated into their lives and things weren’t going badly. Even though they were never able to understand what I was doing there, neither did they reject my being there. I was a person after all, capable of hard work, capable of picking up social cues, so what was there to complain about? Whatever problems there were to speak of were generally of my own making.
How do I put this … my interest in the nomadic lifestyle is one thing, but the need to understand it and describe it is another matter. The more time passes, the more confused I feel. Here, no matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, it is never enough. No matter what I say, it seems impossible to get to the truth or to my purpose. I am, in the end, awkwardly superfluous.…
Still, though they say sensitive people are destined to suffer, I am more than happy to suffer rather than be any other kind of person.
* * *
CUMA’S MANDARIN WASN’T BAD, and basic communication wasn’t a problem. Had I not been worried about bothering him and had I insisted on getting to the bottom of every question, I could have found out most everything I wanted to. But I did worry about bothering him … because it would have been annoying! Besides, life was already difficult enough, they didn’t need an outsider chewing their ears off all day long, not only being of little use but also a constant distraction—I refuse to be that person. Plus, we had more than just a day or two together, there would be plenty of time and opportunity—better that I rely on my own experiences little by little and slowly try to learn.
I’m not sure if it was a problem with my approach or if Cuma just had trouble comprehending, but our interactions often faced the following obstacles:
I asked, “Some sheep have horns, some don’t. Why?”
He answered, “Because they’re different, so some have horns, some don’t.”
I asked, “When they’re far away, horses, cattle, and camels look so small, they are only little black specks; how is it that you guys can tell
right away which is a camel, which is a horse, and which is a cow?”
He replied, “Because their tails are different.”
I just said they were little black specks—how could he still see their tails?
I couldn’t understand him and he couldn’t understand me. He was always complaining to me—apparently I always took pictures of him on his bad hair days. When he finally got a haircut and looked handsome, I stopped taking photos. In the middle of work, when he was dirty and ungainly, I snuck around with my camera clicking nonstop. But by the time he had washed his face and was sitting in a clean room, I stopped taking pictures. The complaining made me hesitate before taking any more pictures, unsure of what was appropriate.
Sometimes, after chatting for a while, we’d suddenly hit upon something that I felt was a matter of importance. For example, once, he suddenly said, “It’ll snow in one week.” When I asked why, he said, “In five days, the moon will be round and it will climb to the center of the sky.”
I looked up a lunar calendar. In five days, it would be the fifteenth day of the winter month, the eleventh month in the lunar year, and in a week it would be the winter solstice! It couldn’t have been a coincidence, right? Did the Kazakhs use the lunar calendar too? Amazed, I kept asking more and more questions. Seeing how interested I was, he answered many of my questions in earnest. He listed a timetable that had something to do with “eighty-one days,” hoping to explain to me a way of calculating the progress of the cold weather, a tool not unlike the Han people’s “Winter Solstice Table of Nine.” He mentioned a Kazakh saying that went, “The long shortens, the short lengthens,” which seems to have something to do with the Nauryz Festival (vernal equinox), which in turn has something to do with the migration back north. I immediately felt like I was delving into this nomadic people’s traditional lore; it was exhilarating! I grabbed a pen and paper, ready to conduct some serious research.…
Unfortunately, in the end I wasn’t the rigorous type and Cuma was unable to express himself rigorously either. Our discussion quickly fell into a muddle, both sides too tired to function … in the end, I came away with no more than the ideas and fragments I began with. So I gave up. Anyway, I write essays, not dissertations, better to stick to the basics.…
* * *
OFTENTIMES, AS WE CHATTED, our conversation would turn toward criticizing the darker aspects of modern society, for example corruption (the town’s family-planning commissioner collecting bribes), decadent youth (alcoholism), rising prices (mostly targeting my mother).… At this point, Cuma would become indignant, casting me as an agent of the enemy, insisting that I solve the problems immediately! Which left me feeling guilty.
He also had a habit of assigning me grave responsibilities. When Koktokay town’s legend of “Amyrsana” came up, he ordered me to write down the story, then have it adapted into a movie. When he talked about the difficulties of relocating all the time, he told me to relay the situation to the powers that be: herding sheep every day is harder work than going to meetings every day!
* * *
IN REALITY, HE WAS MUCH more curious about me than I was about him. At first, I was thrilled to be living with someone who spoke Mandarin; life would certainly be more convenient. Whatever questions I had, I could just ask. But as it turned out, before I had found out much about him, he had already found out everything there was to know about me. Every time there was a pause in our conversation, he would gleefully put on his clothes, slide off the bed, then walk straight to Shinshybek’s burrow to share his newest findings about me.
And in these reports, he let his imagination run wild. There was no limit to his creativity. As a result, in the eyes of the local herder community, I was by turns an unemployed vagabond out to steal herding secrets, a furloughed reporter from the county TV station, and the child of a high-level official banished to the countryside—I couldn’t imagine what might have seemed high-level about my mother.
It was hard to know exactly where the misunderstandings came from either. Every time I talked about what I did for a living, he always asked for many details, and I always answered in earnest. Yet when all was said, he would always express his sincerest condolences and assure me that things will get better with time before personally adding an extra scoop of butter into my tea.
Cuma always had his own ideas about things. When it came to answering my questions, he was very selective. When it was too complicated, he didn’t reply; too simple, he didn’t bother to respond; too childish, he would make a joke of it. As a result, he hardly answered any of my questions. The worst part about it was that I had no way of knowing in advance if my question was complicated, simple, or childish. To me, they were all questions I didn’t know the answers to … perhaps I was naive.
Slowly, I learned to be clever. Instead of trying to derive information directly from his answers, I paid attention to his reaction, attitude, tone, expression … analyzed them holistically and then came to a conclusion.
Once, I watched him remove the handle from a perfectly good shovel and replace it with a short handle; then, with that tool, a pickax, and a long strip of red purlin from the yurt in hand, he prepared to head out. It all seemed very mysterious. Needless to say, when I asked him what he was doing, I did not get the answer I wanted—and grabbing the horse’s reins and not letting him leave wouldn’t have worked, nor would taking his short-handled shovel away, nor would stomping my feet and whining. He only offered one answer: to dig a bear cave! When I asked, why dig a bear cave? He replied: for fun. It was like he was teasing a three-year-old child! How aggravating.
Once I calmed down, I made the following deduction:
A short-handled shovel only had one purpose: to dig pits; specifically, a narrow but deep pit. The pickax also served the same purpose. As for the thin purlin, when in association with a “pit,” its use seemed clear: to erect a post!
But what was the purpose of erecting a post in the open desert?
To tether horses? No, it was too thin.
A marker? Possible … yes, it must be a marker, or else why use a purlin? Because it was bright red!
As for what kind of marker—that remains a mystery.… But since he rode a horse there, it must have been in a faraway place. A marker for a distant place, a boundary perhaps? Or a landmark for the lost …
Thanks to Cuma, I quickly became Sherlock Holmes.
Though more often than not, there weren’t enough clues to deduce from—
When I asked why he added a ladle of water when rendering fats, he replied: to disinfect it.
When I asked where Sister-in-law went, he replied: Kazakhstan!
When I asked why he let the sheep out at seven that morning, he simply said: who knows!
Sometimes I wondered whether he was mad at me. But what had I done wrong? Likely, my mistake was endlessly asking him what he felt were inane questions.…
During a conversation with my big sister Yerkex Hurmanbek, she told a story. Someone once asked the wife of a family of Kazakh herders, “Since all your family sleeps together, is ‘doing it’ just a casual thing?” The woman replied, “Of course, we make love with whoever we want and whoever happens to be there.” The person was both appalled and secretly pleased, repeating the story everywhere. But even an idiot should be able to tell that such a response was given out of contempt! Such boring, asinine, uncivilized questions don’t deserve serious answers.
While Sister-in-law was rolling dough once, I asked, “What are you making?”
Cuma said, “Fried baursak.” When I checked in again, it was clearly baked nan.
Perhaps this was what Cuma was driving at: What are eyes for?
* * *
SO, I EXERCISED CAUTION while observing life around me. I tried to be conscientious about my own ignorance and kept my mouth shut as much as possible. Anything I said might seem pointless, idiotic, or absurd.
For example, when Sister-in-law dyed felt, she completely ignored the instructions on the back of the package
of the chemical dye (not that could she read them). All the stuff about “soak first in warm water for thirty minutes” and “dissolve dye and assisting agent in a large bowl, stir until a paste forms” and “gradually bring mixture to boil over thirty minutes” … was ignored. Instead, she poured the dye directly into a large aluminum pot (the instructions specifically noted to avoid using aluminum utensils …), stirred a few times, then started to drop in the felt pieces. I really wanted to correct her but it occurred to me she had probably dyed several tons of wool over the past few decades; she must have known what she was dyeing. I didn’t need to be like the egg teaching the hen.
And of course, it turned out great! Whereas for me, when I tried dying old clothes at home, it was rarely successful—although I had scientifically followed the instructions every step of the way.
* * *
THE WINTER PASTURES were always too quiet. Whenever there were footsteps overhead, followed by the door swinging open, and strangers stepping inside the burrow with their greetings, in those moments, I too felt a genuine, happy surprise. But all I could do was examine our guests in silence. I didn’t even have the courage to take out my camera to photograph them. Suppose I really was as important as Cuma had made me out to be, I could have used a professorial tone to ask them their names, where they lived, how far it was from here, the number of mouths in their family, the number of sheep, cattle, camels … except I wasn’t stupid, I knew that these high-minded questions were actually quite silly. Had I asked them, they would’ve answered diligently out of politeness, but deep down, they would have found my naivety and pedantry contemptible.