Leaving Mother Lake Read Online Free Page A

their old guns from the other side, then they crossed the river and pushed on over the hills. In less than three days, the Communists had reached Yongning, the Moso capital, where our feudal lords had resided since the Mongol conquest of 1253, when the great Kublai Khan left an officer to rule over our ancestors. In actual fact, we know nothing about this officer, not even his name, but legend has it that he married a Moso woman and that it was not until much later, under pressure from the Qing emperors, that our Country of Daughters came to be ruled by chiefs, who passed their charge from father to son. In any case, when the Communists arrived in Moso country, the Moso feudal lord had already been deposed.
    About a month before the People’s Liberation Army marched on Yongning, the Communist authorities had summoned the Moso feudal lord and his younger brother Losan, our greatest saint and Living Buddha, to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. From Kunming, the Living Buddha had been sent to Ninglang, the county administrative capital some days’ walk east of Moso country. The Living Buddha needed to learn to work for his keep like everybody else, the Communists had said. As to our feudal lord, he had died on the way to Kunming. Of natural causes, they said.
    On that fateful day when the people heard the approaching Communist army, they ran away to hide in the mountains. There had been reports of bloody fighting in nearby Tibet, and without their chief to organize resistance or to speak on their behalf, the Moso were terrified of the Chinese army. But the Communists had not come to fight. They had come to liberate the Moso and bring about democratic reform — to free the serfs and redistribute the land among the common people and to organize mass meetings, where they encouraged peasants to speak against Buddhist monks and former overlords and aristocrats, whom the Moso had long regarded as a divine class of persons. China had “turned over,” the Communists explained; the old feudal order was dead, and a new era had dawned. The people needed to learn new attitudes and new ideas. This was a period of great confusion and strange new hopes for the Moso.
    While they were helping the people of Yongning “turn over,” the Communists dispatched soldiers to carry out the revolution in the rest of Moso country. That was how eight members of the PLA set off on the long trek to my grandmother’s village in Qiansuo, where they changed our family history forever.
    FEW OUTSIDERS EVER CAME to Grandmother’s village, and those who ventured in on occasion were almost always of nearby tribes: Lisu hoping to trade their fertility medicines for Moso butter, or Yi slaves running away from their masters. When the Communist soldiers arrived very late in the afternoon, exhausted and filthy from a seven-day walk across the mountains, the villagers came out of their houses to take a closer look. At first the children hid behind their mothers’ skirts, but the mothers, although they said nothing, were more curious than anyone. Moso women do not travel very far, especially when they are young, because they are responsible for the crops and the house. So most of the women had never gone beyond the mountains of Qiansuo. Very few had ever seen Chinese people before. And no one had ever seen Chinese in the dusty green uniforms of the People’s Liberation Army.
    The soldiers smiled and greeted the curious villagers crowding around them. Then one of them crouched before a little girl hiding her face in her mother’s skirt and extended his hand. And the little girl, perhaps sensing her mother’s own interest, took a few steps sideways and crept up toward him, in crablike fashion, until she was close enough to touch the strange cotton clothes, the boots, the cold gun. The soldier stood up and patted the little girl on the head and asked if anyone could speak Chinese. A horseman stepped forward.
    “Our point of departure is to serve the