Soul Mountain (19 page)

If you shoulder a basket to cut vegetables,

The vegetable flowers will be heartbroken.

If you are pledged to a girl who loves you,

Don’t fancy another,

If you fancy another,

The girl will be heartbroken.

He tells me that marriages are still fully arranged by parents among the Yi people. Young people who fall in love can only meet secretly in the mountains. If they are found out, the parents must bring them home. In the past they were put to death.

A pigeon and a chicken search for food together,

The chicken has an owner but the pigeon does not,

If the owner of the chicken takes the chicken home,

The pigeon is left all alone.

A girl and a boy play together,

The girl has an owner but the boy does not,

If the owner of the girl takes her home,

The boy is left all alone.

He can’t sing these love songs in front of his wife and children at home and comes to the hostel where I am staying in the county village. With the door of my room closed, he softly sings these in the Yi language and translates them for me.

He wears a long gown with a wide waistband and has a thin face and sad eyes. These are his translations of the songs into the Han-Chinese language and the sincerity of the words flow straight from his heart. He is a natural poet.

He says he’s old but there is little difference in our ages. He says he can’t hope to achieve anything for himself which I find surprising. He says he’s the father of two children, a twelve-year-old daughter and a seventeen-year-old son and that he has to work for his children. Later, I go to his home in the mountain stockade. The pig pen is connected to the main room and they keep two pigs. The open hearth is in the middle of the house and the bed in the inner room is covered with a grimy, thin, tattered and old cotton-wadding quilt. His wife has some illness so life for him is a heavy burden.

He also takes me to see a
bimo
, an Yi priest. We pass through several dark, narrow passageways and arrive at a small courtyard with a single gate and a single leaf door. He pushes open the gate, calls out and, when a loud male voice immediately answers, he opens the door and tells me to go in. A man in a long blue gown at the table near the window stands up. He is wearing a wide waistband and a black turban.

Speaking in the Yi language, he introduces me to the
bimo
, then tells me about him. The
bimo
is from a big clan in a place called Kele, high up in the mountains. He was brought down to perform ritual practices for the Yi people living in the county town. He is fifty-three. His eyes look unblinkingly at me. They are bright and clear but there is no communication. While fixed on me what they see is somewhere else, some other forest or a spiritual world.

I sit down at the table opposite the
bimo
and the singer explains why I have come. He is copying out an Yi scripture and is writing with a brush just like the Han Chinese. He nods after listening, wipes the brush in the ink box, puts the cap on the brush and covers the ink box. Then, placing squarely in front of him the book of brush-written text on yellowing fibre paper, he turns to the beginning of a chapter and suddenly begins to sing in a resounding voice. His voice is too loud for the small room. He starts on a high even pitch, then fluctuates between three to five on the scale, which instantly transports one to the flat embankments of the highlands. His voice must really carry a long distance.

Behind him, outside the window of this chilly room, the sunlight is bright and produces a glare on the dirt ground of the courtyard. A rooster cocks its head, as if listening attentively, but getting used to it is no longer startled and puts its head down to peck on the ground again. It seems that chanting scriptures should be like this.

I ask the singer what the priest is singing. He tells me it is a funeral dirge written in the ancient Yi language and he doesn’t understand it too well. I had asked him earlier about marriage and funeral practices, and especially if there would be an opportunity for me to see a funeral such as he had described, as nowadays to see the splendour of such an event is quite difficult. The sustained rising and falling crescendo of the high pitched singing of the
bimo
rises from the throat, hits the back palate, passes through the nasal cavity causing it to resonate, and then charges out through his forehead. His
qi
energy is fully developed but is showing signs of aging. Listening to him sing, I seem to see the crowds of a funeral procession: people beating gongs and drums, blowing the
suona
, carrying flags on poles, paper people, and paper horses. The women are riding on horses and the men have rifles which they fire along the way.

And I see the spirit house of woven bamboo pasted with coloured paper on top of the coffin and the surrounding wall made of branches. At the grave site a number of pyres are burning and each of the families of the clan of the deceased sit around one of these. The flames burn higher and higher as the sound of the dirge cuts through the night air. The people there leap and dance, beat drums and gongs, and fire rifles. People come weeping and wailing into the world. That they should make a big commotion before leaving, actually, is in keeping with their innate nature.

These practices are not unique to the Yi people in the mountain stockades of this highlands. Vestiges of these rituals are still to be found throughout the vast delta of the Yangtze but, generally, they have become vulgarized and have lost the original meaning of this great commotion. Fengdu, in Sichuan province, is known as the City of Ghosts and is the original location of the ancient Ba people. Recently, at the funeral of the father of the manager of a department store in the county town, they had a spirit house decked with strips of paper on the coffin. The bicycles of people who had come for the funeral lined one side of the gate and the other side was piled with wreathes, paper people and paper horses. By the road three tables of musicians took turns playing right through the night but the grieving relatives, friends and associates didn’t sing the dirges or do the funeral dances and instead played poker at the card tables which filled the courtyard. When I tried to take a photograph of these contemporary funeral practices my camera was seized by the manager who demanded to see my credentials.

There are still plenty of people who can sing the dirges. In the Jingzhou and Jiangling regions where the Chu people originate, the dirges have been transmitted to the present. They are known also as tub-beating songs and are performed with wine libations by village Daoists. Documented evidence of this can be found in the
Zhuangzi
. When Zhuangzi was in mourning for his wife he beat on a tub and sang, treating mourning as a joyous event. His singing, I expect, was very loud.

Recent research on the Yi people has advanced evidence that Fuxi, the first ancestor of the Han people, had the tiger totem of the Yi people. There are vestiges of the tiger totem everywhere among the Ba people and in the Chu region. A Han Dynasty brick excavated in Sichuan province has an engraving of the Queen Mother of the West which is definitely a tigress with a human face. In this Yi singer’s mountain stockade, by the fence of woven chaste tree branches, I saw two children crawling about and playing. Both were wearing cloth hats embroidered with red tiger heads similar in style to the tiger head hats which I saw on children in the mountain regions of southern Jiangxi province and southern Anhui province. Even the clever and intelligent Jiangsu and Zhejiang people, who originate from the ancient Wu and Yue kingdoms in the lower reaches of the Yangtze, retain a fear of tigresses. Could it be that the totem worship of the tiger in matrilineal societies exists in people’s subconscious memory? History is bewildering: it is only the singing of the
bimo
which is loud and clear.

I ask the singer whether he can give me a rough translation of the text. He says it points out the way to the nether world for the spirit of the dead person, tells of the deities of Heaven and the deities of the four directions, tells of the deities of the mountains and the deities of the rivers, and finally tells of where our ancestors have come from. By following the route indicated, the spirit of the deceased will be able to return to his ancestral land.

I also ask the
bimo
how many rifles were used at the largest funeral he had conducted. He stops to think, then, with the singer translating, says one hundred. However, he has seen a funeral with as many as twelve hundred rifles. This was the funeral of a chieftain’s family: his father had conducted the funeral. At the time, he was only fifteen and had gone with his father to help. They are a hereditary
bimo
family.

A Yi cadre from the village enthusiastically secures a small jeep to take me to Yancang to see the enormous ancient “facing heaven” grave of a Yi king. It is a fifty-metre-high circular mound with a concave top.

During the time when people all went crazy about bringing land under cultivation for the sake of the revolution, they tore down the stones from the three-storey grave surrounds and reduced them to lime. They even dug up and smashed all the earthenware urns containing the remains and planted corn at the top of the bald mound. Now all that is left are a few desolate stunted bushes and the wind. Yi scholarship has shown that the graves of the ancient Ba kingdom documented in the Han Dynasty work
Record of the Kingdom of Huayang
are similar to these “facing heaven” graves of the Yi people. In both cases they originate in the practices of ancestor worship and the observing of celestial phenomena.

In his opinion, the ancestors of the Yi people come from the Aba region of north-west Sichuan province and share a common ancestry with the ancient Qiang people. This was where Yu the Great was born and he was a descendant of the Qiang people: I agree with him. The skin, facial features and stature of the Qiang and Yi people are very similar, I have just come from that region, I say, and I can testify to this. He pats me on the shoulder and immediately invites me home to drink and we become friends. I ask whether the Yi people have to drink blood in liquor when they form a friendship. He says yes, that a rooster has to be killed and its blood dripped into the liquor. However as he already has the rooster cooking in the pot you will have to wait for it to cook, then eat it with the liquor. He has a daughter who’s just gone to Beijing to attend university and he asks me to help look after her. Also, he’s written a film script based on an ancient orally-transmitted Yi epic: of course, it’s a tragic story. He says if I can help him find a filmmaker, he can organize a team of Yi horsemen for the film. I hazard a guess that he is a Black Yi: the Black Yi used to be the slave-owning aristocracy. He doesn’t deny this. He says last year when he was in the Daliang Mountains a local Yi cadre turned out to have a common ancestor ten or so, or several ten, I’ve forgotten which, generations ago.

I ask him whether in the past clan classifications of Yi society were very strict, for example, if men and women of the same clan married or had a sexual relationship were both parties put to death? If maternal cousins married or had a sexual relationship were they punished by death? If a White Yi slave and a woman of the Black Yi aristocracy had a sexual relationship, was the man put to death and the woman forced to suicide?

He says, “Yes, but didn’t you Han people ever have these sorts of things?”

After thinking about it, yes.

I’ve heard that the death by suicide sentences were hanging, taking poison, slitting the stomach, drowning and jumping over a cliff, and that the death by execution sentences were strangulation, beating, being tied to a rock and drowned, being pushed over a cliff, or being killed with a sword or spear. I ask if this was the case.

He says, “That’s more or less correct, but wasn’t it the same with you Han people?”

As soon as I thought about it, in fact, yes.

I also ask him whether there were cruel punishments such as chopping off the heels, chopping off fingers, gouging out the eyes, piercing the eyes, slicing off the ears and spiking the nose.

He says, “We had all these, but of course in the past. They aren’t much different from what happened during the Cultural Revolution.”

I think this is in fact the case and I cease to be shocked.

He says that in the Daliang Mountains he met a Nationalist officer who said, “I am a graduate of the Huangpu Military Academy, of such and such a year and from such and such a class, I was field officer of such and such a unit, of such and such a division of the Nationalist Army.” He was taken prisoner by a chieftain forty years ago and made a slave. He escaped but was recaptured, taken in manacles to the marketplace, and sold to another slave owner for forty taels of silver. Afterwards when the Communist Party came, he already had slave status and no-one knew of his former background, so he escaped several political campaigns. It is only now when they are talking about cooperation between the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party that he has spoken about his past history. The county officials wanted to give him the title of committee member for political cooperation, but he declined.

He’s already over seventy and has five children borne to him by the two slaves his master allocated him when he was a slave. He fathered nine children but four died. The man still lives in the mountains and doesn’t want to find out what happened to his former wife and children. He asks if I write fiction – he can give me the story for nothing.