Free Leaving Mother Lake by Yang Erche Namu, Christine Mathieu Page B

to sit in the warmth of the fire while I waited. But I was very tired, and before I knew it, I was asleep.
    The smell of burning cotton woke me up.
    I did not cry.
    I just sat on my cracked heels and looked at the big ugly hole in my beautiful red shoe. The left shoe.
    In the morning my Ama stuffed the lining with straw and patched the hole with black cotton, and when she was done, we set off to visit Lama Ruhi because, according to our custom, it is good luck to touch a lama’s head on New Year. So I wore my red shoes again, but now all I could see was the black patch. And when my friends came to try their feet in my shoes, that was all they saw as well. That ugly black patch. They laughed. “Silly girl!” they cried, and they ran home.
    I threw the red shoes in the pigsty.
    Sometime after New Year, my father came back to visit us, with some yak meat and yak sausages. When he saw my naked feet, he asked:
    “Didn’t you like the shoes?”
    “Don’t talk about the shoes,” my Ama said. “She’s been sad for too long.”
    “They burned,” I answered.
    My father said: “Don’t worry, I’ll bring you another pair.” But he never did.
    For a while I tried my sister’s old green cotton shoes. Shoes badly worn at the heels and patched with bark and leaves, and much too big for me, which soon became hard and viscous from the damp and the cold. I threw those away as well, by the side of the mountain path, and after that I walked barefoot again.

Two Chicken Legs and a Starving Man
    V illage life, in general, is uneventful. Tradition spins the eternal return of the seasons according to well-known expectations and well-worn habits. Every generation follows in the footsteps of the previous one, the routine of everyday life broken only by calamity — a hailstorm, a drought, a plague of locusts, an earthquake. Or a revolution. Sometimes also, but much, much more rarely, the rules are broken by stubborn individuals. And then there may even be a scandal. Now, my Ama had broken the rules by setting up her own house in Zuosuo, and she had also broken her mother’s heart, but there had been no scandal. In the end, Grandmother had refused to fight and she had given in to my mother’s will. Grandmother was a very wise woman.
    In fact, it is very hard to make a scandal among our people. We live close to one another but we don’t cultivate the stuff that makes for public outrage in other places. To begin with, Moso women are not sullied by sexual shame — for sex, as I have now discovered, is a much-favored source of disgrace in the world. But quite aside from this sexual freedom, which has proved so fascinating to revolutionaries, journalists, social scientists, public health officials, and in more recent years, international tourists, we Moso abide by rules of honor that forbid us the dubious pleasures of malicious gossip.
    We must not speak ill of others or shout at people or discuss their private affairs. When we disapprove of someone, we must do so in halftones or use euphemisms or, at worst, mockery. Although we feel such passions, we must repress jealousy and envy, and we must always be prepared to ignore our differences for the sake of maintaining harmony. All this possibly sounds utopian, but it is absolutely true. In Moso eyes, no one is more ridiculous than a jealous lover, and short of committing a crime such as stealing, nothing is more dishonorable than a loud argument or a lack of generosity. So much so that nobody in Moso country today can recall either murder or beating or robbery, or a truly ugly fight between neighbors or jilted lovers. Under these circumstances, it should not be surprising that among us, people who develop bad tempers and fight with their own relatives are rare, although such was the fate the gods had intended for my mother’s family. But my mother had not made a scandal. No. Scandal was to be my special destiny. But more of this later.
    Growing up in Zuosuo, I had a lot of freedom. We