by Yunte Huang
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 regula
r 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 o
ne 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.