The glass shade above the oil lamp was encrusted with burnt mosquitoes. We sipped the rice wine I had bought in the village store, and chewed on some raw spring onions. Shabalu looked down and stroked his enamel cup. His tall shadow on the grass wall behind made him look very small.
‘The villagers say they come here when they are sick and you drive the demons from their bodies.’
‘Most illnesses can be cured by eating some food from one’s uncle’s mouth. If the sickness is serious, relatives bring me rice, salt, eggs and ginger, and I recite from the scriptures. For very severe cases I kill a pig, but I need some help with that.’
While taking photographs that morning, I had seen two small boats made of plantain leaves set on a mountain path. The Jinuo believe these ‘spirit boats’ carry diseases away from their villages. There were spells written along the sides and incense sticks burning on the prows.
‘Sometimes it is necessary to take medicine though,’ I said. ‘Little Meina’s foot is gangrenous. She will lose it if it isn’t treated. Whatever her family smeared on the wound didn’t seem to be working. I hope it wasn’t food from her uncle’s mouth.’
‘Mmm, surely not. No one comes to me for cuts and bruises. I too believe in pills and injections.’ He glanced up nervously.
‘I’ve heard you can speak to the spirits. What do they look like? What do they say to you?’
‘I never went to school. My father taught me everything. He could see the ghosts, I think. The teachings have been passed through my family for generations. I don’t really understand them. I’ve forgotten a lot.’
Finally I asked him why he placed a curse on the village teacher. Apparently, when Shabalu drew lots and announced the teacher was possessed by demons, the villagers beat the poor man to death and chased his wife into the jungle. She was found a few months later hanging from a tree.
‘Mmm, I still don’t know why I said that. I have done my time in prison for it though. I won’t make that mistake again.’
He was released from prison a while ago, but the trauma of his years behind bars was still etched on his face. He missed the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution and the hordes of city youths who flooded the village to eradicate feudalism and superstition. By the time he got out, the village had four Party members, nine league members and the head of the Jinuo Autonomous Region was a graduate from Beijing Nationalities Institute.
The white enamel cup and grey mosquito net were the only bright objects in the hut. Everything else was buried in darkness.
When the unexpected happens, people seek answers in rocks, trees and stars. The fear of things we can see diverts us from the fear of things we cannot. When I was lost in the mountains at night and a bright light appeared before me, my first thought was that my grandfather had come to rescue me.
Into the Jungle
All afternoon the long-distance bus trundles into the mountains up a narrow, twisting road. I am lucky to have a seat. Although the plastic seat-cover sticks to my sweaty thighs and my headrest is torn and filthy, at least I am not squashed among the passengers in the aisle. I close my eyes and remember how green the air was during my trek through the jungle to Bulangshan. When I entered the rainforest at Menglong, the air smelt of green sap, and huge pineapple trees towered above me. I crawled like a mouse between fallen trunks and through chinks in the walls of leaves. My feet seldom touched the ground. The long, musty lianas hanging from the canopy made the jungle look like a deserted cathedral. Insects stuck to my hands and face and bit ferociously.
That area of primeval forest is still inhabited by the Bulang, Lahu and Ake tribes. An hour into my trek the path petered out. I pushed through the leaves and found a track of broken branches and followed it for three hours until I came to a clearing on a mountain top. Someone had died in Menglong, and their family had come here to fell a mahogany tree for the coffin. The track I had just followed was the path the trunk had made. The cut branches lying on the ground were over ten metres long and the tree stump was big enough to sleep on. Sunlight poured through the hole in the canopy. A circle of mushrooms rotted among the leaves on the ground. Looking through the trees I could see more mountains in the distance and a river in the east.
I climbed down and discovered the river emptied into a huge swamp, enclosed on three sides by tall mountains. Branches and weeds floated on the surface and a buffalo carcass protruded from the reeds. I had no choice but to retrace my steps and loop round through the jungle. The forest was dark now. Thorns and brambles ripped my clothes and dug into my skin. I thought of Zhao Lan who spent five years in these forests during the Cultural Revolution. Her watercolours are always huge and green.
My two compasses were giving different readings, so I split the difference and headed towards what I hoped was north-west. As dusk fell, birds swooped back to their nests and small animals croaked in the undergrowth. Insects suddenly filled the air and swarmed into my mouth when I coughed. I chose a tall tree and climbed to a branch halfway up. I stuck my knife into my belt, tied myself to the branch with a length of rope and doused myself with tiger lotion. After draining the last drops of beer from my water bottle, I tied a chiffon scarf around my face and looked up. In the fading light, I saw a patch of white flowers above, but when I touched them they transformed into a swarm of white ants. I pulled my hand away and shook them off. Some hours later I heard a loud cracking of branches. It sounded like a family of bears. The moon was out but I could not see beyond my hands. It was long time before the noises stopped. I sat on my perch, terrified and exhausted, counting the hours till dawn.
The following day I reached a small village of grass huts, asked directions, downed a bowl of bitter tea and continued on my way. Before dusk I came to a Lahu settlement in a remote fold of the mountains. A naked child sunning himself on the balcony of a bamboo hut saw me and screamed. His mother came out and leaned over, her breasts tilting up like the eaves of her roof. When she realised a stranger had arrived, she shrieked and ran indoors, leaving her son to cry on his own. Soon, heads peeped out from every balcony. Two men smoking in a doorway watched me pass. A half-naked woman with a shaved head sat with one breast in her baby’s mouth, the other drooping towards her thigh like a courgette. A skinny chicken stared at me then jumped onto the village fence. A dog barked at the stick in my hand. A girl stood in the high grass chewing a stick of bamboo. Her cotton tunic was missing a sleeve, and her bare arm hung down like a peeled twig. A man crouching on a balcony stared at me blankly. He was wearing an old army suit and had a blue bag over his shoulder.
The Lahu believe all paths are evil. When the Han tried to build roads through the jungle in the 1950s, the Lahu waged a bloody attack. The few members of the tribe that survived the battles retreated deeper into the hills and refused to have any contact with their ‘liberators’. The woman with the shaved head must have just married. Before their wedding day, Lahu women shave their heads and throw away all their jewellery. As I left the village I decided to hide in the mountains and loop back to spend the night in the valley behind. I suspected the Lahu might pursue me. They never kill on home ground. When I passed through the village again the next day, they took me for a ghost and ran away in terror.
A Han woman with long hair stood by a path, wearing a shirt, trousers and shoes. I ran up to her and said I was travelling to Bulangshan to interview the village head, but was afraid I would not make it before dark. She told me she taught in a school nearby and invited me to spend the night in her bamboo outhouse. Her husband examined my introduction letter under the oil lamp. He was having difficulty reading the handwriting so I told him he could take it back to his room and read it at his leisure. I asked them about their lives and they went blank for a second. The man said he worked on the fields and grew cabbages on their private plot. The woman said she had eleven students, and taught them writing, arithmetic and domestic chores. ‘Is it safe for the Han to live here?’ I asked. ‘Yes, but the villages are a little backward. Some parents refuse to send their children to a Han school. They say, if you want to teach them to speak your Han language, it is you who should be paying us! Only five or six children stay to the end of the year.’