离开母亲湖
When I first began reading Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood at the Edge of the World, I did so with a certain amount of reluctance. I was unsure as to what sort of book this was. On the face of it, it seemed a "typical" book: young girl living in a remote area of the world decides there's more to the world than hers, runs off and makes good, forgets where she came from, breaks her mother's heart. Not my cup of tea. I broke one of my cardinal rules: Never make assumptions before finding out the truth about something, it always leads to misunderstandings or misconceptions. I had made an assumption based on what I read on the inside jacket, thus prejudicing my mind before I had even begun reading.
The Moso, as Yang Erche Namu's people are known, are a matrilineal society whose women are farmers and the men are traders and yak herders, working the land collectively, trading by barter, bound by traditions and customs that define how they relate to one another, how sexual relations are viewed, how boundaries are drawn and respected. Gossip, negative feelings of jealousy or envy are frowned on; those who indulge in such feelings publicly and openly lose face before the entire community. While life was hard, the impression I got from Namu's narrative was of a great appreciation for life, for what the land yielded up, for what was seen as normal and part of living: giving birth, having sex, working, playing, and the people relatively content, kindly and giving.
The first few pages of the book did nothing to dispel my bias, but as I continued to read, I noticed something extraordinary. This story of a girlhood spent growing up in remote area of Yunnan Province in China the Chinese called "The Country of Daughters" was unusual. It was unusual because daughters were favored over sons. Women took on many lovers who fathered their many children, but there were no formal marriage contracts. Women made decisions such as when to set up house, when they would take on a lover, where their children would be sent to be of most help to other relatives. The anthropologist in me became intrigued, and I read on.
In any society, there are always one or two who think beyond the pale, who want to know what lies beyond the narrow confines of their world. Yang Erche Namu was just such a one. She realized she was different from other women when, shortly after her Skirt Ceremony, she knew that she did not want to follow in the tradition of the Moso females: taking on a lover to impregnate her and begin her own household of children and a life in breakbacking work. The Skirt Ceremony took place when a young Moso girl reached puberty and began her menses. Namu was approximately thirteen years old at the time of her Skirt Ceremony. Her transition from girl to woman was solidified by gifts, feasting, and finally, the public showing of her naked body and the formal dressing up into a woman's clothes: shirt, jewelry, long, full skirt, and a beautiful belt which she would give to a man of her choice. To a Moso woman, collecting such belts from various admirers was a mark of pride and status as a desirable woman. She chose her lovers; the men were mere cogs who flitted hopefully around her.
Yang Erche Namu did not want a lover. She did not want children clinging to her skirt. She did not want a lifetime spent farming, cooking, and cleaning. Her chance at a different life came when she and two others from her village were chosen to go to Beijing to sing in a national contest. The descriptions and her reactions to seeing a modern city were fascinating and so realistic, I could see myself in her shoes as she walked intrigued and delighted through the streets of Beijing, overwhelemd by the Mandarin Chinese language, the sights, the sounds, the smells. Once the door to such worlds are opened, for an ambitious one, there is no turning back. And for Namu, she knew she had to have more and she was determined to find a way back to the world outside of hers.
The rest of the book gives a descriptively poignant narrative of how Namu finally, literally, ran away from her village, from her people, to train first in Xichang, Sichuan Province with a local troupe, then to go to the presigious Shanghai Music Conservatory under a special program for China's minorities. Through all her experiences, Namu viewed each accomplishment as a step towards showing her mother and, by extension, the villagers of her mountain home, that she had made good on her ambitions. When she finally returns home for the first time after five years, she is greeted as a star, an honored guest, but the pride in her mother's eyes are what makes Namu the happiest.
While some would view this book as a story of the oft-told tale of the universal mother-daughter conflict bound by a mutual great and deep love, I would argue for a broader view than that. This book is about not only one girl who finds fame as a singer and later, a fashion model, but it is a telling tale about a people with their own unique way of life that, like so many before them, comes under threat of being subsumed by a larger, conquering force -- in this case, the Han Chinese under Mao Tse-Tung and later, the more liberalizing, capitalistic central government -- and their resilience in trying to preserve an unusual way of life in the face of encroaching 21st century modernity. This book is Namu's way of showing the beauty and relevance of the world she came from, to the wider, global world.
