Leaving Mother Lake Read Online Free PDF Page A

did not take long for Grandmother to realize that the class struggle was threatening to undo all the education she had given my mother. Since the Communists had come to the village, my Ama had neglected the crops and the animals. She even refused to do some of the house chores. “China’s women are a vast reserve of labor power. This reserve should be tapped to build a great socialist country,” Comrade Latso lectured Grandmother.
    Because custom forbids us to shout at our relatives, Grandmother shouted at the pigs: “What do you think you are saying? You’re just spoiled rotten! Don’t you have any shame? Don’t you have any responsibilities?”
    But the pigs grunted and ran away.
    Late at night, when my mother had done enough struggling against feudal oppressors and she had gone to bed, Grandmother pounded her soybeans and sang the words we sing when we conduct rituals for people who have lost their souls.
    “Latso, ah! Come back to me. Don’t go into the far mountains, don’t go walking near the rivers far away. You don’t have any friends or family there. Tall trees cannot protect you. When the wind blows, the trees will topple over you. Don’t try to hide at the bottom of the cliff; if the earth shakes, the rocks will crush you. You must not go to the wild side of the mountain, no one there can rescue you. All the gold and silver is at home. Outside, there is only wind and rain. Your sisters and your mother are at home. Listen to your mother’s song. Let your soul come back to me, quickly.”
    Everybody in the family knew that a great change had come over my mother. Even the neighbors knew. But no one said anything. My mother’s uncles and her brother kept quiet. Being men, they could not interfere in women’s affairs, and least of all, in a fight between mother and daughter. As for my great-aunts and my aunts, they did not dare talk because my mother was too headstrong for them. So the whole family listened to my grandmother’s song and hoped that my Ama would heed her mother’s words.
    But she did not.
    One day the Communists announced that they were leaving. They were off to liberate the Moso people of Zuosuo, and everyone in the village was welcome to join them. When Grandmother heard that my mother and her girlfriends had volunteered for the revolution, she pushed my Ama out the front gate, locked the door behind her, and said angrily: “If you want to go with the Chinese, then go!”
    That night my Ama went to sleep at some relative’s house.
    The next morning she woke early and jumped straight out of bed to find that the sun had risen with a golden glow, that the air was crisp and pure as only mountain air can be, and the sky was cloudless. This, she thought, was going to be a beautiful day. It was going to be a perfect day for singing marching tunes and walking along the mountain path. It was going to be a perfect day to discover the world.
    When she arrived at the revolutionary headquarters, however, my mother discovered that of all the volunteers, only two young villagers had come to join the Communists, and that her girlfriends were missing.
    “Isn’t anyone else coming?” she asked, as the eleven-strong battalion set off down the narrow mountain road, marching in step and singing in one voice. And when the revolutionaries reached that part of the trail where, if you turn around, the village disappears from view, my Ama fell back and turned to look for her friends, and also to take one last look at Grandmother’s house — the house where she was born and where, one day, she ought to return and die.
    And she saw her mother standing outside the gates, looking toward her, silently pleading for her to return.
    After the rough way in which Grandmother had pushed her out the gate, my Ama had not expected this. So she stood there, on the mountain path, her eyes fixed upon the miniature stature of her mother, not knowing what to do or feel. She had never thought that her mother could look so