Leaving Mother Lake Read Online Free

then she waited, but neither the men nor the horses appeared on the mountain road. After a few weeks, she got word that the whole caravan had disappeared on the way to Lhasa. After that there was another rumor, that the horsemen had gone to India. But whatever happened, they never came back.
    For years, when she was finished with her chores at the end of the day, my grandmother quietly walked away from her house down the same mountain trail where her son had left. She went some distance to the turnoff, where, if you stop to look back, the houses clinging on the hillside abruptly vanish from view. There, she sat on a rock and listened for the horse bells, and she stared toward Lhasa, into the strip of heaven hovering just above the mountain peaks. She stared and stared but no one ever came. When Grandmother got old, she went blind. The people said that it was from staring into the empty sky looking for her son.
    Some months after her eldest son disappeared, Grandmother told her two brothers: “The caravan took one son from me. That’s enough.” So her second son stopped traveling with the horsemen and went to herd the yaks in the mountains with his second uncle.
    My mother, Latso, was my grandmother’s third daughter, and she was also her favorite child. Grandmother believed that my Ama had all the qualities needed to become Dabu and to succeed her as head of the family. And because Grandmother had such hopes for her, my Ama says that third daughters are always smarter than the other children. Perhaps she means it. But perhaps third daughters are not only the smartest but also the most troublesome, because my Ama became a great disappointment to her mother — in truth, as I was to be to her.
    My mother grew up without toys. Her only prized possession was a small mirror in a pink wooden frame that her uncle had brought back from one of his trips to Lhasa. When she became a young woman, she spent a lot of time looking at herself in this little mirror, practicing pretty faces, dreaming of summertime, when all the villagers would gather at the hot springs for the festival of the mountain goddess. She imagined the young men watching her bathe, standing helpless with love at the sight of her full figure, her smooth brown skin, and her long black hair that graced her perfectly rounded buttocks like a yak’s tail. She imagined the young men falling over each other to offer her the traditional multi-colored belts in token of their admiration. And then she saw herself, at night, coming out to dance in the light of the fires, wearing all her trophies attached to her waist, whirling in the glow of the flames, with the bright-colored belts flying wildly about her waist as though she were stepping through a blazing rainbow.
    But my Ama could do a lot more than daydream in front of her mirror. She spoke the language of the Yi tribes and some Tibetan, and she was a hard worker, a good cook, and a skillful horsewoman who could use the bow and arrow as well as any man.
    Aunt Yufang says that my Ama was both woman and man. She also says that my Ama was too smart and too beautiful for her own good. Everyone gave her too much attention, and not only the men but also my great-aunts, who could not have children of their own and who spoiled her rotten. “Who in their right mind would ever want to leave their own mother’s house?” Aunt Yufang asks herself as she draws on her clay pipe and blows out a little puff of gray smoke. She stares at the smoke for a while and then she smiles at me knowingly. “Your Ama was a bit like you, really. She was spoiled by all her talents. She was spoiled and she became bored with the life that she knew.”
    So, it was boredom that turned my mother into a revolutionary.
    TOWARD THE END OF WINTER IN 1956 , the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) left Lijiang town and marched across the mountain to the banks of the Yangtze River. There the soldiers exchanged some shots with a few resisting Moso who were firing