Book Review/Recensione: Leaving Mother Lake, by Namu and Christine Mathieu, *****

Recensione italiana di seguito

Synopsis

The Tibetans refer to Moso country as "The Country of Daughters" because of their unique matrilineal society. In Moso culture, daughters are favoured children. There is no word for father, marriage is considered a backward practice and property is passed on from mother to daughter. This book is the haunting memoir of a girl growing up in a remarkable place. In her village, Namu was known as the girl whose mother tried to give her away three times because she would not stop crying...

4. - 27 APR: Lijiang, Jade Dragon Mountain, Baisha, market

Up early and off to a bus ride to the mountains of Yulong Xueshan (Jade Dragon Mountain), where we leave the bus and buy some tickets. To do so, one must go through a weird sort of hangar, with a whole series of stands selling anything from oxygen bottles (in case of mountain sickness) to T-shirts, to traditional Chinese medicine, to dried frogs... I end up buying some CDs of local music.

A chairlift takes us up to the “yak meadows”. The view of the peaks from the top is stunning, and the white snow against the blue sky provides a perfect frame for the Buddhist gompa on top of a hill that we reach with an easy 20 min walk. The gompa is not the most impressive I have ever seen, still, it's good to see it here, open for business.

A few yaks graze around, it is all by the book! Not enough time to savor the atmosphere unfortunately, time to go back. I detest fixed schedules when traveling but today I have no choice, I am in the hands of the local guides. To make things worse, some of my clients, especially 50+ single Italian ladies, complain to me! Oh boy...

Lunch is in a typical restaurant in Baisha, the capital of the old Naxi kingdom and still one of their major centers, where murals from the Ming dynasty were once world famous, before, yes you guessed it... the Cultural Revolution did irreparable damage to them. Some of my companions begin to display uneasiness with Chinese food. (Figures...) I, on the contrary, find the fare fed to foreign groups to be too edulcorated, its taste made way too plain to adjust to the wimpy palates of Western tourists. Therefore, after making sure everyone has his plate full, I go and eat with the driver and the guide, who get REAL Chinese food: hearty, sometimes spicy, sometimes VERY spicy, and sooooo good! As of today this will become my standard operating procedure for the rest of the trip.

After lunch off to town for a visit of the food market, with impressive displays of all kinds of delicacies, clearly a successful farmers’ market that may not be very communist but has all its shelves full. Very colorful cabbages and other greens are on display next to bright red chili baskets that will spice up local dishes. Southern Chinese cuisine is known for being generally more spicy than the rest. In a semi-dark covered pavilion a number of butchers are busy chopping and skinning all kinds of animals, but especially pigs and cows as I can tell. No refrigeration system is in sight but the meat looks very fresh, I suppose there must be a high turnover.

I bought a red mahjong set, kind of old looking if not necessarily that old. Nearby, a palace that used to belong to an old pre-revolutionary governor exudes some ancient charm. I especially appreciate its old wooden doors. Many frescos all around, we are told by our local guide, were destroyed by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, but these doors survived because local farmers painted them over with portraits of Mao.

We then move on to the park of the Black Dragon Pool. It is a stunning location, with lots of history, art and architecture which we only have time to taste in part.

There is an old and very big camellia tree. It has its own guardian, who is well known because he has had this job for over 50 years. He says, through our guides, that the Red Guards wanted to cut the tree down as it was an "old thing" but he stopped them and told them they would have to kill him first, and they gave up. Who knows what really happened but the tree is here!

Dinner tonight brings a new guest: Baiju, the rice liquor that will accompany most of the rest of our dinners in this trip. Sort of similar to grappa (very sort of) it can be made with rice or sorghum. It has a rather coarse taste but can go down very well after a hearty Chinese meal.

3. - 26 APR: Fly from Chengdu to Lijiang, Yunnan. Naxi concert

Alalalei! (Hello!) is the first word in Naxi language I learn from our guide upon arrival in this small but pretty and efficient airport in Yunnan province. Zhubaysay (Thank you!) is the second. Swallow, (the name of our guide) welcomes us in this peculiar province, where most of all the minorities of China live.

In Yunnan province, forty-five million people live in 400,000 square kilometers, an area  almost one and a half times the size of Italy, and of them, one third belong to national minorities, i.e. non-Han peoples. Twenty-five of China's fifty-six national minorities are represented in Yunnan.

The number of Naxi is small, less than half a million people, but Swallow thinks it's probably set to rise a bit since national minorities are not bound by the one-child policy of China. She, however, married a Han Chinese and therefore is stuck to one kid! :-( She says there are quite a few who break the rule. In this case they have to pay 300,000 Rmb (about 30k euro) for a fine. Alternatively, some couple just don't declare their second born. This can be difficult in a city but is relatively easy in the countryside. A third option is to sell the child to couples who can't have any. Finally, quite a few end up aborting their second child.

She takes us around town, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Black Dragon pool park is a serene spot, and very clean... everyone comes here to have their picture taken, and for good reason. A place to be savored for a few hours. A typical Chinese garden, with pagoda, lake, bridge, tower...

My most interesting meeting is with a ninety-something year old man at the Yufeng temple. He is a gardener, and has been tending to an extremely old camelia tree for many decades. He sort of sits there by the wayside, but says that during the Cultural Revolution the Red Guards came up the hill and wanted to cut down the tree, seen as some sort of decadent symbol or whatever... but he stood up and told them they would have to cut him down first, at which point they gave up and left. Not sure what to make of the story, but the obesssion with the damage inflicted by the fanatic Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution is a recurring refrain in this trip.

Dongba pictogams

We also have a chance to visit the Dongba Research Institute, where the old Naxi language is still studied and preserved. It is perhaps the last pictographic language in the world, composed of some 1400 pictograms, ie little drawings, unlike the Chinese ideograms which are composed of graphic symbols that don’t necessarily have any resemblance with the object of their representation.

At 20:30 we get a chance to listen to a concert of traditional Naxi music in the town's concert hall. This is no tourist trap, but an amazing group that resurrected an old musical heritage that had been destroyed to near extinction during the 1950s after the repressions of the "One Hundred Flowers" campaign in 1957.

The musicians are almost all octogenarians, with a few exceptions, among them a lady harpist and an amazing lady singer. They are led by Xuan Ke, who was imprisoned for twenty-one years (until 1978, after Mao's death) for his key role in founding the orchestra. He was allowed to restart it in 1984, and today the ensemble plays some original instruments which were saved from destruction at the time of One Hundred Flowers and then during the Cultural Revolution by some brave locals who hid them from the Red Guards at their own risk.

I talk to Xuan Kue after the concert, he has no bitterness, just an incredibly strong will to keep Naxi musical tradition alive, and he is sorry that it is difficult to find young people to learn how to play it. He claims this is China's oldest music and must be preserved for posterity. So at 81 y.o. he keeps performing with his group every night to packed audiences of locals and tourists.

Leitoto (goodbye in Naxi)!

2. - 25 APR: Chengdu, Sichuan province, China

It is pleasantly warm, about 25 °C. Passport control is fast, and customs officers could not care less to check my bags. In fact the only person they seem to be interested in checking thoroughly is a pitch black man who was sitting next to me on the KLM plane. Maybe it's a coincidence, random checks. Maybe not, and it's racial profiling. I don't know. They scan his luggage repeatedly with the X-ray machine, then let him go.

The airport is brand new and very functional, like many in China today. By the time we reach the luggage carousel all our bags are already there, spinning slowly around and waiting to be picked up. It reminds of Rome where a half hour wait is good reason to consider oneself lucky!

1. - 24 APR: Depart Italy via Amsterdam to Chengdu, Sichuan, start of the trip

I am again leading a group of Italian tourists to Asia. I am quite excited, have not been to China for some time, and it's my first visit to the western part of the country. The focus of the trip will be Yunnan, but we'll also spend some time in Chengdu and along the Yangtse river.

Uneventful flight with KLM via Amsterdam nonstop to Chengdu, a "medium size" city of 12 million people in Western China, capital of the Sichuan province. "Provinces" in China are in fact huge regions, this one is about one and one half times the size of Italy and weighs in at 80 million people, as many as live in all of Germany.

Chengdu is a lively city, if not a most charming one. Much of the older treasures have been destroyed in wars and revolution. It will be up to this generation to make up by creating a new Chengdu that won't replace the old one, for that is impossible, but will allow the world to miss it less.

Keeping Chengdu windows clean