Leaving Mother Lake Read Online Free PDF

small. And then she squatted on the side of the road and hid her face in her hands and cried bitterly, while the Communists kept going, their marching songs growing fainter, slowly fading into the silence of the mountains.
    When she could no longer hear the songs, my Ama turned her back on Grandmother and stared through her tears at the diminutive soldiers marching ahead on the distant narrow trail, walking toward the world, carrying away her dreams. And when she turned toward the village again, her mother was no longer standing outside the gates. Then she remembered the harsh words spoken the night before, and once more she hid her face in her hands and cried as she told herself that she could not bear to leave her village, and yet, she could not humiliate herself and return to her mother’s house.
    Who knows? Perhaps my Ama would have swallowed her pride and eventually run back to Grandmother — if it had not been for her girlfriends, who, some time later, arrived by her side, hot and out of breath and filled with revolutionary spirit. They had woken late, they explained, and missed the meeting. Then they had lost more time because of Grandmother, who had called out to them as they passed by her gates and asked them to take some food for the road. “Please take this for Latso,” Grandmother had said.
    My mother looked at the basket her friend was holding out to her, and the tears came flooding back.
    But the girlfriends were in a hurry. “Latso,” they said, “if you’re so unhappy, you should go home.”
    And because she hated being told what to do, my mother made up her mind. She repressed her tears, picked up the food hamper, and headed down the path in the direction of Zuosuo with her two girlfriends following after her.
    When the sun was high up in the sky, they sat down to take a rest and picnic on the ham and boiled eggs Grandmother had given them. They opened a bottle of Sulima wine and drank a cup to the Communist Party and a cup to the health of Chairman Mao and another cup to the revolution. And when they had finished the whole bottle, they thought of all their relatives and friends who lived in the villages on the road to Zuosuo and who too should hear about the revolution.
    They never caught up with the soldiers.
    Zuosuo is not very far from Qiansuo: only two days’ walk away, and there are not many villages on the way. But my Ama and her friends managed to stop with so many people and to have such a good time that when they arrived in Zuosuo, the Communists had already left.
    “The Chinese can’t stand butter tea, and they can’t take the fleas,” someone said by way of explanation.
    “But where did they go?” my mother asked.
    “They’ve gone to meet up with the rest of the People’s Liberation Army. They’re on their way to the Cold Mountains to liberate the Yi tribes.”
    The three girls looked at each other. The Yi were terrible people who raided Moso villages and stole little children to make slaves of them. If the Communists had gone to fight with the Yi, they would never come back. For no army, Chinese or Tibetan, had ever managed to subdue those ferocious tribesmen. Not even the great Kublai Khan had dared enter the Cold Mountains.
    As things happened, the PLA waged a bloody battle in the Cold Mountains and brought democratic reform to the Yi tribes — but it did so without the help of my mother or her girlfriends.
    The night they lost the Communists, my mother and her friends went to stay with some relatives who lived in the village of Wuzhiluo, near Lake Lugu. After a restless night spent discussing impossible dreams, they breakfasted on roast potatoes and butter tea, and the girlfriends resolved that, after all, they had been away long enough and it was time to go back to their mothers’ houses in Qiansuo. But my Ama was too embarrassed to go home. Too proud to admit her foolishness to her mother. Too stubborn to change her mind.
    My mother stayed with the people of Wuzhiluo,