The film is based on the true story of an American pilot who parachuted here in the 1940s after his plane was shot down by the communists. The Yi found him and made him their slave, and it was nine years before they let him leave their mountain enclave and return to America. They would never have imagined that the ‘foreign monkey’ they released would one day bring them such fortune. The Hong Kong director is at his wits’ end. ‘This is a nightmare,’ he says. ‘The Yi charge us for everything, and their prices go up every day.’
Money has changed these people’s lives and their way of thinking. What would I do if I came into some money now? Would I still be wandering through these mountains? My poverty allows me to move as freely as a leaf in the wind, but sometimes I wish a stone would fall on me and pin me to the ground.
The American pilot was able to stay here all those years because he had a goal in life: he wanted to go home. I have no such goal, so I must keep walking.
I check my compass, head south and a week later arrive at Yunnan’s capital, Kunming.
8. Life at the Border
Old Shabalu
On 2 June, two hours after leaving Baoshan, the long-distance bus stops at a small hamlet, halfway up a steep mountain valley. The driver jumps off and says he needs to find some water for the engine. The passengers start lighting cigarettes. The baby next to me wakes and screams. His mother lifts her vest and stuffs her left nipple into his mouth. The bus is hot and stuffy.
This is my second month in Yunnan. Six weeks ago, I gave a lecture on modern poetry at Kunming University which attracted a small audience. The next day the students told me their university’s propaganda department had issued a warrant for my arrest. The alleged crime was ‘disseminating liberal propaganda to impressionable youths’. I ran away to the border region of Xishuangbana, but on my second day in the capital, Jinhong, the poet who was hosting me said the local writers’ association had received notice that an officer had been sent to Beijing to investigate my case, and that pending the results, they should have nothing to do with me. He gave me a nervous glance and said, ‘Please, if they catch you, tell them we’ve never met.’ I left town and headed into the mountains, and have been racing through the borderlands since then like a hunted animal.
The baby has fallen asleep again. I open the window, take out my notebook and read through the last few entries.
28 April. Still wandering through the Jinuo mountains in the Xishuangbana region of southern Yunnan. The landscape is green and tropical. I have seen oil palms, papaya trees, pineapple trees, tropical orchids, climbing wisteria, fire flowers blazing on rotten wood, leafless bachelor trees and chameleon trees with leaves that change from yellow to green to red. The slopes cleared twenty years ago by city youths to make way for rubber-tree plantations are now dry and barren. By the banks of the Pani River, I saw the graves of fourteen youths who died in the fires. Two of the tombstones bore the inscription: POSTHUMOUSLY AWARDED MEMBERSHIP OF THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY.
The Jinuo village I am staying in has a long bamboo house that is shared by 29 families who belong to the same clan. The families live in separate rooms, but cook their meals on a communal fire in the long central corridor. The house is cluttered with farm equipment, baskets and stools. There is little attempt at decoration.
Jinuo custom allows members of the same clan to fall in love, but not to marry. When the time comes for a clan couple to separate, they exchange gifts with each other as pledges of undying love. The girl gives a leather belt and the boy gives a felt bag. These gifts are then taken to their new marital homes and displayed on the wall. When the clan lovers die, they carry their gifts to the mythical Nine Crossroads, meet up and travel together to the underworld where they can marry each other at last. For the Jinuo, husbands and wives in this world are mere companions of the road, true love must wait for the afterlife. I have seen these belts and bags hanging on the walls of several village huts. When a girl gets married, her clan lover splashes her with water from a dirty washing-up bowl as a show of jealousy. It is considered a great humiliation for a bride not to be drenched at her wedding. Jinuo women wear white, peaked hats and long black skirts.
. . Last night I visited the folk singer’s hut. He was out, but his son sang for me instead. Two of the songs were about lovers who yearn for the day they will meet again at the Nine Crossroads.
Our driver has been away for an hour. He has obviously had a drink with a friend. He clambers back on to the bus and flings a bag of live chickens under his seat, takes a quick swig of tea, mumbles ‘What a life!’ and switches on the ignition. As the engine heats up, the chickens kick frantically inside the darkness of the cloth bag.
I remember seeing the little girl called Meina crouched in a doorway of that Jinuo village. She had stepped on a rusty nail the week before and her foot was swollen with pus and blood. She could hardly walk. I washed the wound, smeared it with antiseptic cream and covered it with a clean bandage, and she didn’t flinch once. When I finished, she hobbled inside and fetched me a banana. Her mother was sitting by a loom, ears pricked. An older woman was smoking in the dark corner behind. All I could see were her silver earrings. That evening, Secretary Li told the children to take me into the hills to see Shabalu, the old shaman who had spent eighteen years in prison for cursing an innocent man. In the 1950s, he was the richest man in the village and owned more rice than he could eat.
Shabalu wore an old army cap that night. When he looked up there was sadness in his bloodshot eyes.
‘I am a journalist, but a Buddhist too,’ I said, ‘so you can speak freely.’
‘Mmm, is that so? Some government officers visited me last month. Asked me lots of questions for a religious survey. I let them record my answers.’
‘I am writing a story about the Jinuo and would like to know more about your religious customs. Can you tell me about the sacrifices? How often do you perform them?’
‘We hold sacrifices all year round. Before we sow the seeds, cut the corn, hunt, build a house.’ He bowed his head when he spoke.
‘And funerals?’
‘When someone dies we kill a pig and hang the head and trotters on a tree above the grave.’
‘I saw a grave hut on the fields today. There were bones inside. I suppose the dogs must have dug them up.’
‘No, it wasn’t the dogs. Most families can only afford one grave so they must dig up the old bones before they can bury the new.’
‘What if two people die in the same week?’
‘Mmm, that hasn’t happened yet. A year after the funeral, families stop putting food in the grave hut and perform a ceremony to send off the soul. After that they can remove the bones.’
‘What do you chant in that ceremony?’ The oil lamp was too dark for me to see my notebook, so I switched on my torch.
‘Mmm, I have forgotten most of it.’ He began to chant in Jinuo, translating some words for me as he went along. ‘Valley path. . twin boulders. . Hill of the Parting Stream. . horsegrass, brushwood. . White Ghosts’ Lair. . Cave of the Spirit Lovers. . It describes the route the soul must take on its journey home. At the end of the ceremony I say: "Go! It is time for you to leave and return to the land of our ancestors. We have killed a chicken to see you off. Go! You will not miss us." Then I repeat the details of the route.’