Thursday, January 14, 2010
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Galapagos - Birds (1)
More birds are coming ...
诗一般地···
鹈鹕 (brown pelican)
螃蟹好吃···
Hawks
？？Boobies
母子
诗一般地···
鹈鹕 (brown pelican)
螃蟹好吃···
Hawks
？？Boobies
母子Monday, January 11, 2010
“大龟岛”和达尔文 Galapagos and Darwin
Darwin Finch
Mockingbirds
Giant Tortoise
Marine Iguanas
Land Iguanas
大龟岛，或巨龟群岛，是我给起的名儿。正规的译名应该是“葛拉帕格斯”群岛。它原本是中古西班牙语“马鞍”的意思。当初西班牙人“发现” 这些小岛时曾看见很多巨大的甲龟，甲壳看上去像是一具具马鞍，所以外号叫它们马鞍甲龟。久而久之，外号也就特指这里独有的大乌龟了。我则又给这个西语名称删繁就简，取其意，叫大龟岛。
大龟岛位于太平洋东部的赤道上，距离赤道之国厄瓜多尔本土1000多公里，从首都基多（Quito）飞到那里需要三个半小时。它由大约二十多个大小岛屿组成，相互间隔不很远，有些只有二、三十公里。这里原生态环境保护比较完好，除了两三个大一点的岛屿有居民居住外，其他岛屿都不允许住人，甚至不可以随意上岛。游客基本上吃、住在游轮上，每天乘小橡皮艇去不同的岛屿观光。
去那里游玩，自然有好多理由。比如赤道上的海岛毫无疑问风光特殊，而且一个岛一个特点；又比如这里仍然保留有不少独特的动、植物：笨拙可爱的蓝脚布布鸟（Blue-footed Boobies），红脖子Frigate鸟（居然没有中文翻译!），丑陋吓人的大蜥蜴，尤其是赫赫有名的大甲龟（Giant Tortoise）等等。当然，最主要的还是因为查理斯·达尔文曾经到过那里，并且由于在那里的观察而受启发写下了跨时代的《物种起源》宏论。我们虽然无缘做最早的探险发现者，但至少可以步前人后尘，游历群岛，长点知识，留下“到此一游”的脚印。
达尔文是在跟随英国小猎犬号（The Beagle）船长在南美大陆沿海地区考察三年后，回返途中在大龟岛屿短暂停留的，在那里的时间总共不过三十多天，而且只有一半的时间上岸观察和采集标本。是什么神奇独特的东西使他发现了生物世界的奥秘、并由此改变了人们对自然界的认识和科学研究的进程？
不去那里，我可能一辈子也不会对那些叽叽喳喳的小杂鸟感兴趣。它们看起来不过是一群小麻雀。谁会注意它们的小嘴壳是尖的还是钝的，是长的还是短的？可是达尔文就发现这里的“小麻雀”不仅跟南美大陆的“小麻雀”即相像又不同，而且每个小岛上的“小麻雀”跟相邻几十公里外的小岛上的“小麻雀”也是即相像又各有不同。他在整理自己的标本时发现，有一种Mockingbird（模仿鸟）全部来自同一个小岛，第二种Mockingbird又全部来自另外一个小岛，而第三种又来自第三个小岛。后来，在鸟类学家的协助下，他们又分辨出13种各异的、大龟群岛独有的、以他的名字命名的Darwin Finch （达尔文雀）。按照以往“上帝造物”的说教，每个物种都应该是被造物主单独创造出来的，可是这些远离大陆的小鸟却明显地和南美大陆的小鸟来自同一个大家族，然而又有区域性的区别。为什么？又是如何发生的？
在后来几年的研究中，达尔文又注意到，这些雀鸟的不同主要表现在它们的喙部，有些宽厚，有些尖长，有些介于中间-不尖不钝；而这种不同则是由于这些雀鸟在不同的岛屿受当地不同食物种类的局限，吃食不同食物而造成的；也有是它们偏食某种食物造成的。比如，短嘴的喜吃仙人果的肉，也喜爱硬壳果核类；尖嘴的喜欢叨啄仙人果的果心和小虫子；如此等等。自此，他找出了物种演变的奥秘：“自然选择”（Natural Selection）法则。
在考察大龟群岛期间，达尔文巧遇当地的英国殖民总督。这位总督向他夸耀自己如何有本事根据甲壳的不同形状准确无误地辨认出来自几个不同岛屿的大甲龟。达尔文当时并没有在意总督的炫耀，而且还和船员们共同享受了当地人捕捉送上船的五十多只大龟，一路作为佳肴极品煲汤吃喝掉了，甚至连龟甲都没有保留。后来反应过来，已经是后悔莫及。他们离开后的仅仅十年间，群岛之一的Santa Maria岛上，大甲龟消失。
大龟群岛的巨龟（Giant Tortoise）之所以有名，主要在于它们是生活于陆地的大甲龟，形体巨大而且长命百岁。大海龟比较普遍，但是几百斤重量的陆地旱龟只有在这里和非洲某个海岛上才有发现。它们虽然生活于狭小的海岛上，却从来不下海，和海里的大海龟既是近亲，又从不来往。达尔文后来自然回想起这些特殊的大甲龟。它们和那些“小麻雀”一样，由于生活在不同的小岛上，为适应当地的地形、气候，及食物来源，而生长出不同形状和纹路的龟甲来，衍化为不同的种类。不幸现在只剩下屈指可数的几种。
达尔文也注意到各个岛上多得“讨人厌”却很温顺的大蜥蜴 — 鬣（lie4）蜥（Iguana）。这里有两大类大蜥蜴：陆蜥或旱蜥（Land Iguana），和海蜥（Marine Iguana）。旱蜥不下海，而海蜥却有两栖习性，海里陆地来回跑。这里的海鬣蜥是世界上独一无二的生活在大海里的蜥蜴种类。它们无疑最早和旱鬣蜥也是一家。在大龟岛屿的不同小岛上，由于食物来源的不同，它们身上的颜色也显出不同。一般的海蜥都是黑色，但在“西班牙” 小岛（Espanola Island），岸边地形陡峭，海蜥需要深入海中很深的地方才能吃到附在岩面的海藻，而海底的海藻由于岩石的矿物成分（含铁量高？）而呈红色，所以这里的海蜥吃了红色的海藻，身体也变成了红黑相间的颜色。
大龟群岛的植物也表现出同样的适应能力。我们在群岛之一的小岛Baltra下飞机，那里长有很多的粗壮的仙人掌类植物，高的有一人多高，引人注目。第二天去了另一个小岛，突然发现这里同样的仙人掌高大如树，完全进入另一个级别。惊讶之际心里在发问：同样的植物，怎么会产生如此大的区别？是温度？湿度？土壤？原来达尔文也早已注意到，并且做了调查研究和解释。仙人树长得低矮的地方，一般没有旱鬣蜥；而旱蜥多的岛屿，仙人树都长得很高，并且树干很长，掌叶和果实都离地面很远。原来，旱蜥的主要食物是仙人果。由于它们不断地侵犯攫取低处的仙人果，仙人树们不得不拼命往高长，身下的树干也变得光秃秃的，让鬣蜥们采不到任何果实，从而保护自己。
大龟群岛丰富多样的动物植物和它们众多奇异的演变形式给了达尔文最初的启发和最有说服力的实例，成就了他对不同物种起源的解释。他的科学贡献在于他发现并论证了生物是如何、并且为什么进化的问题，也就是进化机制（Mechanism）问题。其核心便是“自然选择”法则。
大龟岛位于太平洋东部的赤道上，距离赤道之国厄瓜多尔本土1000多公里，从首都基多（Quito）飞到那里需要三个半小时。它由大约二十多个大小岛屿组成，相互间隔不很远，有些只有二、三十公里。这里原生态环境保护比较完好，除了两三个大一点的岛屿有居民居住外，其他岛屿都不允许住人，甚至不可以随意上岛。游客基本上吃、住在游轮上，每天乘小橡皮艇去不同的岛屿观光。
去那里游玩，自然有好多理由。比如赤道上的海岛毫无疑问风光特殊，而且一个岛一个特点；又比如这里仍然保留有不少独特的动、植物：笨拙可爱的蓝脚布布鸟（Blue-footed Boobies），红脖子Frigate鸟（居然没有中文翻译!），丑陋吓人的大蜥蜴，尤其是赫赫有名的大甲龟（Giant Tortoise）等等。当然，最主要的还是因为查理斯·达尔文曾经到过那里，并且由于在那里的观察而受启发写下了跨时代的《物种起源》宏论。我们虽然无缘做最早的探险发现者，但至少可以步前人后尘，游历群岛，长点知识，留下“到此一游”的脚印。
达尔文是在跟随英国小猎犬号（The Beagle）船长在南美大陆沿海地区考察三年后，回返途中在大龟岛屿短暂停留的，在那里的时间总共不过三十多天，而且只有一半的时间上岸观察和采集标本。是什么神奇独特的东西使他发现了生物世界的奥秘、并由此改变了人们对自然界的认识和科学研究的进程？
不去那里，我可能一辈子也不会对那些叽叽喳喳的小杂鸟感兴趣。它们看起来不过是一群小麻雀。谁会注意它们的小嘴壳是尖的还是钝的，是长的还是短的？可是达尔文就发现这里的“小麻雀”不仅跟南美大陆的“小麻雀”即相像又不同，而且每个小岛上的“小麻雀”跟相邻几十公里外的小岛上的“小麻雀”也是即相像又各有不同。他在整理自己的标本时发现，有一种Mockingbird（模仿鸟）全部来自同一个小岛，第二种Mockingbird又全部来自另外一个小岛，而第三种又来自第三个小岛。后来，在鸟类学家的协助下，他们又分辨出13种各异的、大龟群岛独有的、以他的名字命名的Darwin Finch （达尔文雀）。按照以往“上帝造物”的说教，每个物种都应该是被造物主单独创造出来的，可是这些远离大陆的小鸟却明显地和南美大陆的小鸟来自同一个大家族，然而又有区域性的区别。为什么？又是如何发生的？
在后来几年的研究中，达尔文又注意到，这些雀鸟的不同主要表现在它们的喙部，有些宽厚，有些尖长，有些介于中间-不尖不钝；而这种不同则是由于这些雀鸟在不同的岛屿受当地不同食物种类的局限，吃食不同食物而造成的；也有是它们偏食某种食物造成的。比如，短嘴的喜吃仙人果的肉，也喜爱硬壳果核类；尖嘴的喜欢叨啄仙人果的果心和小虫子；如此等等。自此，他找出了物种演变的奥秘：“自然选择”（Natural Selection）法则。
在考察大龟群岛期间，达尔文巧遇当地的英国殖民总督。这位总督向他夸耀自己如何有本事根据甲壳的不同形状准确无误地辨认出来自几个不同岛屿的大甲龟。达尔文当时并没有在意总督的炫耀，而且还和船员们共同享受了当地人捕捉送上船的五十多只大龟，一路作为佳肴极品煲汤吃喝掉了，甚至连龟甲都没有保留。后来反应过来，已经是后悔莫及。他们离开后的仅仅十年间，群岛之一的Santa Maria岛上，大甲龟消失。
大龟群岛的巨龟（Giant Tortoise）之所以有名，主要在于它们是生活于陆地的大甲龟，形体巨大而且长命百岁。大海龟比较普遍，但是几百斤重量的陆地旱龟只有在这里和非洲某个海岛上才有发现。它们虽然生活于狭小的海岛上，却从来不下海，和海里的大海龟既是近亲，又从不来往。达尔文后来自然回想起这些特殊的大甲龟。它们和那些“小麻雀”一样，由于生活在不同的小岛上，为适应当地的地形、气候，及食物来源，而生长出不同形状和纹路的龟甲来，衍化为不同的种类。不幸现在只剩下屈指可数的几种。
达尔文也注意到各个岛上多得“讨人厌”却很温顺的大蜥蜴 — 鬣（lie4）蜥（Iguana）。这里有两大类大蜥蜴：陆蜥或旱蜥（Land Iguana），和海蜥（Marine Iguana）。旱蜥不下海，而海蜥却有两栖习性，海里陆地来回跑。这里的海鬣蜥是世界上独一无二的生活在大海里的蜥蜴种类。它们无疑最早和旱鬣蜥也是一家。在大龟岛屿的不同小岛上，由于食物来源的不同，它们身上的颜色也显出不同。一般的海蜥都是黑色，但在“西班牙” 小岛（Espanola Island），岸边地形陡峭，海蜥需要深入海中很深的地方才能吃到附在岩面的海藻，而海底的海藻由于岩石的矿物成分（含铁量高？）而呈红色，所以这里的海蜥吃了红色的海藻，身体也变成了红黑相间的颜色。
大龟群岛的植物也表现出同样的适应能力。我们在群岛之一的小岛Baltra下飞机，那里长有很多的粗壮的仙人掌类植物，高的有一人多高，引人注目。第二天去了另一个小岛，突然发现这里同样的仙人掌高大如树，完全进入另一个级别。惊讶之际心里在发问：同样的植物，怎么会产生如此大的区别？是温度？湿度？土壤？原来达尔文也早已注意到，并且做了调查研究和解释。仙人树长得低矮的地方，一般没有旱鬣蜥；而旱蜥多的岛屿，仙人树都长得很高，并且树干很长，掌叶和果实都离地面很远。原来，旱蜥的主要食物是仙人果。由于它们不断地侵犯攫取低处的仙人果，仙人树们不得不拼命往高长，身下的树干也变得光秃秃的，让鬣蜥们采不到任何果实，从而保护自己。
大龟群岛丰富多样的动物植物和它们众多奇异的演变形式给了达尔文最初的启发和最有说服力的实例，成就了他对不同物种起源的解释。他的科学贡献在于他发现并论证了生物是如何、并且为什么进化的问题，也就是进化机制（Mechanism）问题。其核心便是“自然选择”法则。
能看见这只小 Finch 吗？
Mockingbirds
Giant Tortoise
Marine Iguanas
Land Iguanas
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Flashes at the End of the Sky (3)
My Personal Khotan on the Silk Road
The Desert
To many people who have never been there or who have only tasted it a little, the desert can be romantic. To most people who live next to it, it can be annoying or dangerous. But if you truly understand it, and therefore deeply love it, it is beautiful and sublime. Classical Chinese poems about the western frontier always describe the desert as vast, barren, harsh and lonely, a place where Chinese soldiers fought against “barbarians,” a place to which good guys were exiled. Only when heroism, loyalty, life and death were involved with the vastness, extreme hardships and loneliness did the poems raise the desert to the level of a tragic beauty and a manifestation of the sublime. I am sometimes disappointed to find so few poems about the desert that express something other than sad feelings or violent death. It is a pity we have not found poems written by people who lived in the desert all their lives or by caravan travelers who walked through the desert countless times.
I have traveled along the rim of the desert several times by bus, once – that first time - by truck, from Khotan to Urumqi, and then by train, from Urumqi to Xi’an to visit my grandparents. It took eight and a half days, one-way, by bus, and four days by train. I do not know if I was fortunate or not in never having traveled by riding a camel; that seems so romantic. So, I had passed through most portions of the Silk Road east of the Pamir mountain range. On these trips, perhaps because I had lived in the desert for too long, I was not really sensitive to it or inspired by it. When jolted in the bus with your stomach turning upside down for eight days, you cannot and do not enjoy the scenery. After all, there is only one scene – the endless, dull-colored sand, sand, and more sand. However, the desert’s infinite space, the blurring of the sky and earth, and the mysterious mirages that follow one after the other on the horizon, did leave strong impressions on me that remain till today.
My real understanding of the desert only occurred when I had my “re-education” years on a farm deep in the desert. Although it is as far away from metropolitan areas as it is, Khotan did not escape the “Great Cultural Revolution.” Upon high school graduation, the government sent us all deeper into the countryside to be re-educated by farm workers. The idea was to let young people learn and share the feelings of poor farm workers by living and working with them, and, at the same time, help them to improve their fieldwork and living conditions, and ultimately to realize the Communist Ideal. The idea was noble. And it was the call from Chairman Mao and Party. Although no one knew it then, we were the last ones who had to go into the countryside. The Cultural Revolution was near its end. I did not have to go because my brother went down to a farm two years earlier and was still there, and by then there was a new policy that each family could keep one child in town. However, I felt it would be shameful if I did not go. I was so naïve and idealistic. In a public speech I gave at the farewell meeting in the town I vowed that I would “take root” in the countryside and do what farm workers do for the rest of my life. I declared that from bottom of my heart. So there we were, about thirty graduates from high school and middle school, sent to a small farm west of Khotan.
The place we settled in was called Happiness Farm within Happiness Commune in Pishan County, one of the seven counties in the Khotan District. The farm was located beside a little seasonal stream twenty kilometers from the headquarters of the commune. There were about twenty or so families of Han Chinese who some years earlier had fled from the big famine in Gansu Province and managed to settle here. We were given an adobe building with one single row of rooms. Six girls shared one room, with a single adobe bed that stretched from one end of the room to the other. It was just big enough for the six of us to lay down our bedding next to each other (each space was no more than a twin size). Each of us had a wooden chest for clothes and other belongings, and two basins for washing. Water was a thirty-minute walk away in the stream.
The first room on one end of the building was the kitchen. We took turns cooking for the whole group. Because of the scarcity of water, we did not grow vegetables and therefore did not have vegetables to eat. The meals were always the same: plain corn gruel and steamed corn bread for breakfast; steamed or pan baked corn bread for lunch; and thick, salty corn porridge and corn bread for supper. No meat, no vegetables, no main dishes at all. After a few days of eating that kind of food, most of us got a seriously sour stomach and stomachache. We could not complain because the farm workers were no better off than we were. Once every a couple of months, one or two of our parents would manage to come for a visit, and bring salted veggies (something like pickles) bottled in jars. The bottled vegetables had to be very salty to preserve them. There were no paved roads and no public transportation to the farm, so it was very difficult for us to get out, and for our parents to get in. We had to budget the salty veggies so they could last until the next time some parents came.
For the first six months there, we only had wheat flour buns two or three times and boiled carrots once. Never having been in such a situation, you cannot imagine how delicious boiled carrots can be. It was the best dish I had ever had, and I could not believe it of myself who had been so particular about food and never liked cooked carrots at all. I was, indeed, reeducated in that sense. We also had a rare chance to have meat to eat. That was when the boys had caught a wild hog and slaughtered it. With such irresistibly delicious meat, nobody could ever be picky about food anymore. It was a big feast. We celebrated it joyfully.
Our daily work on the farm was to hoe up weeds, loosen the soil, carry the manure to the cornfields, and open up the new fields, etc. In the spring we plowed and planted; in the autumn we harvested ears of corn, shelled the kernels, cut the corn stalks, and so forth. To our disappointment, all work was done in the most primitive way. We used sacks to carry everything on our backs: manure, cornstalks, and anything else that needed to be moved. To plow a field, which was the hardest work, we used a kind of pickaxe (which looks like a hoe but much bigger and heavier). I could not figure out why we, as Chinese, who had been farmers for five thousand years, still used the same methods our great, great, …grandfathers had used. Some of us students did try to improve things by using a carrying stick with baskets on the two ends, and even a one-wheel cart to carry things.
Winter work on the farm was either gathering grass and shrubs from the desert to make compost, or cleaning and repairing irrigation canals. Once we went to Sangzhu, a small village at the foot of the Kunlun Mountains near the upper reaches of our water source to work on the construction of a major canal and dam. Sangzhu (Sanju) village was on a short cut to Kashmir and India, near a pass in the mountains. The trail to the pass was dangerously steep and narrow. Caravan travelers commonly lost their camels and even their own lives falling off the trail on the cliffs. In the March 1996 issue of National Geographic, there is an old photo Owen Lattimore took in 1926 showing his group on the pass. But back then none of us knew much about the place. For almost ten years, schools had been paralyzed by the Cultural Revolution so that we had not had history or geography classes. There were no regional maps either; actually, no concept of regional maps existed in our mind. You can imagine how surprised I was ten years later in the U.S. when I saw satellite photos of Pishan County shot by NASA and published in the February 1996 Scientific American, clearly showing the mountains, villages, and even the streets in town.
We had been assigned to work there for two weeks, but instead, we stayed for only two days because the farm workers really pitied us and sent us back. At the construction site, there were mountains on one side and desert on the other. There was no house or any kind of shelter for us to stay in. We built a circle with rocks for cooking. At night, we slept on the open ground. The experienced people taught us how to find a good spot out of the wind for sleeping at night. This was usually behind sand dunes where the roots of a Red Willow bush were buried. There was always wind at night; it was just a matter of whether it would be big or small. But even the least wind could be very annoying, and the wind was sometimes dangerous. We soon learned that we had to cover our faces completely with wool scarves, or sand would fill our noses, mouths, eyes and ears, and even choke us. Even covered, we still felt we were chewing sand all the time. At first it was such an exciting experience to sleep in the open desert. I thought I would look at the sky counting the stars or dreaming about romance all night. Oh! There was no way you could lie on your back with your face up. All your open orifices would fill up with sand. Reluctantly, I covered myself completely under the thick quilt, as it was very cold too. In the morning, we all laughed at each other, because we still looked like people made out of sand, no matter how well we had covered ourselves, but there was no water to wash ourselves with.
In the desert, any degree of a wind could make a sand twister. It was fun to look at the twisters dancing around. Sometimes I suspected that Wang Wei’s famous line of poetry about desert might refer to a twister, although it is usually interpreted as a signal fire:
In the vast desert, there’s a lone smoke straight up;
Above the long river, the setting sun appears so round.
Gathering shrubs for compost was another normal winter task. One cold winter day, very early in the morning, we got up, packed a little corn bread and water, and went into the desert. Our job that day was to cut, gather, and bring back shrubs for making compost. The air was chilly and fresh. The sky was dark blue and full of bright stars. I saw the entire sky like a huge upside down bowl resting on the earth. It was beautiful and awesome. I wondered if there could be any better scene in the world. Nobody talked. We were simply quieted by the overwhelming cosmic silence.
There are only a few kinds of plants that grow in the area. Among them are the Red Willow (a kind of five-stamen tamarisk), a shrub tree whose thick, deep roots we commonly dug up for firewood, and Camel Thorn (Alhagi maurorum), a shrub with needle-sized thorns which had no use except to rot for compost to fertilize soil. I always felt sorry to cut them down. In the dull desert, they were the only colorful things that could cheer you up. Red Willows have small red-purple blossoms stuck along the branches, and Camel Thorns grow tiny purple flowers the size of your smallest fingernail. But Camel Thorns were the ones we wanted for this particular job.
The shrubs grew so widely scattered that we had to spread far apart in the desert. We reminded each other to keep close enough so that we would not get lost. Quite soon, we could only hear but not see each other. At one point I helped two girls put their bound loads on their backs ready to go. When the sun rose high, I saw the last one off. She actually insisted that we two go back together. But I did not feel I had enough. So I told her to go ahead, and I went further into the desert to gather more shrubs. I did not notice how much time passed before I had gotten a big hill of thorns gathered in front of me. I pressed and tightened it with my whole body. I tramped and jumped on it so it could be bound into a bundle. I did my best to tighten and tie it. (Many years later, in the States, I could still feel one or two thorns poking out here and there from the sheep’s wool trousers I had knit myself and had on that day). But the bundle was still bigger than me, and it was so heavy that I had very hard time loading it up on my back.
From behind me, one would have been unable to see a person, only a hill of bushes moving slowly. It took several minutes before I suddenly realized that I should check the direction to make sure I was heading home. There were no roads, no trails, but only endless sand. I was afraid that I might not be able to put the bundle back on my back again by myself, so at first I hesitated whether I should drop the load and go up to a hill looking for some signs. But my instinct told me I should do it right away. So I dropped the load and climbed to the highest sand dune nearby.
When I got to the top of the hill and looked around, I was shocked. All directions looked exactly the same. There was not a single sign showing the way home. The farm with the little village was totally beyond the horizon. Instantly I collapsed, my heart beating wildly and my legs shaking. A great panic fell over me. At first my mind went blank and then I could not think rationally. I do not know how long I kneeled there before I realized I should do something. I managed to stand up and call out loudly, hoping somebody was still around. “Is there anybody here?” “Can somebody hear me?” But to my horror, no sooner had I begun to shout, than I realized that my voice was completely gone. I could not get a sound out. I had lost my strength. I pulled up myself and tried again. “Hello! Is anybody there?” This time the sounds came out of my throat but were immediately swallowed by the vast empty space. The power of the desert overwhelmed me. I looked up. It was cloudy. I could tell the sun was directly overhead; there is no way to use the sun to determine directions when it is noon. And I knew that since we came to the farm I had not paid attention to the directions anyway. I was totally lost. Desperate, I began to think about death.
Taklamakan, the name of the desert in Turkic language, simply means “a place one can go into, but will not come out of.” All the stories about the desert poured into my memory. Some told how people lost their way in the desert and were only found mummified years later. Some described how the wind moved sand dunes from one side of the road to the other overnight but kept them in the same shape, so after a storm travelers did not notice the change and therefore went the wrong direction and got lost forever. There were even reports of well-prepared explorers vanishing in the desert. Furthermore, everybody knew that cargo truck drivers always went in a group carrying more than enough water and food in case there were unexpected situations.
Now, kneeling in the sand, alone, shaking all over, I found the stories became real. But I was only nineteen, too young to die. “I cannot die like this.” I had to find a way out. The sun above me reminded me that it was noon, and I had several hours to try to find a way out before it got dark. I struggled to stand up. Still, every direction looked the same, all reached to the end of the earth. I slid down the hill, leaving the food bag behind as a sign, and looked around. Something caught my eyes. Goat droppings. And then, donkey droppings. My heart almost jumped out of my throat. I knew I might have a chance. Soon I found the animals’ tracks. I crawled on the ground to study them. But, the more tracks I found, the less confidence I had. There were too many of them, and they pointed in all directions. I did not want to give up. I decided that I would go to the direction I felt right by instinct, and if I did not see any sign of a village within one or two hours of walking, I would come back and go in the opposite direction, but staying always within range of the animals’ tracks. Having made this decision, I felt relieved a little, and went up the hilltop to eat my corn bread. The bread was already frozen, too hard to bite. I put it under my arms to warm up. I still had some water in the canteen, partially frozen. Luckily it was not summer, or I could have been fatally dehydrated already.
While eating, I began to think whether or not I should carry the big load – my whole purpose in life by this time. “Maybe it won’t be too late to drop it if the plan goes really wrong,” I persuaded myself. So again, I knelt down and leaned my back against the load, put my arms into the rope loops, straightened myself up, bent a little bit forward, crawled a few steps on my hands and knees, and then lifted the weight and stood up. Before I started to walk, I dug out a Red Willow stick from the sand hill, and dragged it on the ground while I walked in order to draw a line as a sign, in case I had to come back to the opposite direction. I actually changed directions several times. I did not know how long it took me to get out of the desert. I did not have a watch. When I suddenly saw the trees in the distance, I staggered and almost cried. I said to myself, “Don’t fall. Hold up. Don’t fall. You’ve survived.” Several years later, when I sat in the university library reading Jack London, I felt like saying to him, “Hey, buddy, I’ve been there.”
When I arrived at the village it was late afternoon. I was too exhausted to step up even the three inches off the ground to the scales, to record how heavy a load I had carried. Two guys had to pull me up. I had carried a load of about 130 pounds, 20 pounds heavier than myself. At supper that evening, one of my roommates said to me, “You stupid girl. Why are you so serious? Look at our Boss! He brought only 20 pounds. Do you want to die?” I only smiled wearily. I did not explain to anybody why I came back so late. I did not want to talk about my experience of life and death casually to those who had not had a similar experience or who would not understand such things. I needed time to myself to think and digest the meaning of it. It was like a sudden enlightenment that made me begin to think both philosophically and realistically about my life.
Before graduation, the school authorities and the Communist League had organized us to study Chairman Mao’s theories and discuss the significance of the strategy of letting students go “up the mountains and down the countryside.” At those meetings, we studied a case of “Regional Realization of Communism” – the Da Zhai Commune in Shanxi Province. There the farm workers had reached the goal of supplying enough food to the Commune members and even achieved a surplus to contribute to the government as well. They could afford to send all the children to school and were able to provide medical care to all the members of the commune. All the villagers had become better off equally. The example was exciting and tangible. In the past, Communism had looked so vague and abstract to me, but now it became concrete and something that could be accomplished. If people of Da Zhai could make it happen, we could too. So when I got to the farm, I calculated how much income I could possibly make, and then the total needed for all villagers to have sufficient food and other supplies. To my disappointment, I realized that at my best, by the end of each year I would be earning a share of 330-440 pounds of grain plus 100-200 yuan cash (about $10-20 dollars). This meant I would be able to have about one pound of grain for food and 0.40 yuan (or 4 cents) cash to spend per day. But I thought that was good enough.
Now, suddenly, I felt how ridiculous the Communist ideal was and how foolish we were to believe in such nonsense. How could I have been so naïve and so stupid and so blind? How could we change people’s life and change the world by using the most primitive production methods and by sacrificing young people’s lives in the desert? How could such minimum basic survival conditions be the Communist Ideal?! What is Communism anyway?
The Taklamakan desert transformed me. Not because I was scared by the desert, but because I experienced the overwhelming power of nature so closely and truly. If I had ever had a religious feeling, it was then, when I was overwhelmed in the desert, kneeling to pray to it to have pity on me. Even when I overcame it, it was with great awe and respect, and I saw my limits.
New Jersey July 5, 2007
The above is my persoanl narrative written for an analogy on Teaching the Silk Road by SUNY Publication.
The Desert
To many people who have never been there or who have only tasted it a little, the desert can be romantic. To most people who live next to it, it can be annoying or dangerous. But if you truly understand it, and therefore deeply love it, it is beautiful and sublime. Classical Chinese poems about the western frontier always describe the desert as vast, barren, harsh and lonely, a place where Chinese soldiers fought against “barbarians,” a place to which good guys were exiled. Only when heroism, loyalty, life and death were involved with the vastness, extreme hardships and loneliness did the poems raise the desert to the level of a tragic beauty and a manifestation of the sublime. I am sometimes disappointed to find so few poems about the desert that express something other than sad feelings or violent death. It is a pity we have not found poems written by people who lived in the desert all their lives or by caravan travelers who walked through the desert countless times.
I have traveled along the rim of the desert several times by bus, once – that first time - by truck, from Khotan to Urumqi, and then by train, from Urumqi to Xi’an to visit my grandparents. It took eight and a half days, one-way, by bus, and four days by train. I do not know if I was fortunate or not in never having traveled by riding a camel; that seems so romantic. So, I had passed through most portions of the Silk Road east of the Pamir mountain range. On these trips, perhaps because I had lived in the desert for too long, I was not really sensitive to it or inspired by it. When jolted in the bus with your stomach turning upside down for eight days, you cannot and do not enjoy the scenery. After all, there is only one scene – the endless, dull-colored sand, sand, and more sand. However, the desert’s infinite space, the blurring of the sky and earth, and the mysterious mirages that follow one after the other on the horizon, did leave strong impressions on me that remain till today.
My real understanding of the desert only occurred when I had my “re-education” years on a farm deep in the desert. Although it is as far away from metropolitan areas as it is, Khotan did not escape the “Great Cultural Revolution.” Upon high school graduation, the government sent us all deeper into the countryside to be re-educated by farm workers. The idea was to let young people learn and share the feelings of poor farm workers by living and working with them, and, at the same time, help them to improve their fieldwork and living conditions, and ultimately to realize the Communist Ideal. The idea was noble. And it was the call from Chairman Mao and Party. Although no one knew it then, we were the last ones who had to go into the countryside. The Cultural Revolution was near its end. I did not have to go because my brother went down to a farm two years earlier and was still there, and by then there was a new policy that each family could keep one child in town. However, I felt it would be shameful if I did not go. I was so naïve and idealistic. In a public speech I gave at the farewell meeting in the town I vowed that I would “take root” in the countryside and do what farm workers do for the rest of my life. I declared that from bottom of my heart. So there we were, about thirty graduates from high school and middle school, sent to a small farm west of Khotan.
The place we settled in was called Happiness Farm within Happiness Commune in Pishan County, one of the seven counties in the Khotan District. The farm was located beside a little seasonal stream twenty kilometers from the headquarters of the commune. There were about twenty or so families of Han Chinese who some years earlier had fled from the big famine in Gansu Province and managed to settle here. We were given an adobe building with one single row of rooms. Six girls shared one room, with a single adobe bed that stretched from one end of the room to the other. It was just big enough for the six of us to lay down our bedding next to each other (each space was no more than a twin size). Each of us had a wooden chest for clothes and other belongings, and two basins for washing. Water was a thirty-minute walk away in the stream.
The first room on one end of the building was the kitchen. We took turns cooking for the whole group. Because of the scarcity of water, we did not grow vegetables and therefore did not have vegetables to eat. The meals were always the same: plain corn gruel and steamed corn bread for breakfast; steamed or pan baked corn bread for lunch; and thick, salty corn porridge and corn bread for supper. No meat, no vegetables, no main dishes at all. After a few days of eating that kind of food, most of us got a seriously sour stomach and stomachache. We could not complain because the farm workers were no better off than we were. Once every a couple of months, one or two of our parents would manage to come for a visit, and bring salted veggies (something like pickles) bottled in jars. The bottled vegetables had to be very salty to preserve them. There were no paved roads and no public transportation to the farm, so it was very difficult for us to get out, and for our parents to get in. We had to budget the salty veggies so they could last until the next time some parents came.
For the first six months there, we only had wheat flour buns two or three times and boiled carrots once. Never having been in such a situation, you cannot imagine how delicious boiled carrots can be. It was the best dish I had ever had, and I could not believe it of myself who had been so particular about food and never liked cooked carrots at all. I was, indeed, reeducated in that sense. We also had a rare chance to have meat to eat. That was when the boys had caught a wild hog and slaughtered it. With such irresistibly delicious meat, nobody could ever be picky about food anymore. It was a big feast. We celebrated it joyfully.
Our daily work on the farm was to hoe up weeds, loosen the soil, carry the manure to the cornfields, and open up the new fields, etc. In the spring we plowed and planted; in the autumn we harvested ears of corn, shelled the kernels, cut the corn stalks, and so forth. To our disappointment, all work was done in the most primitive way. We used sacks to carry everything on our backs: manure, cornstalks, and anything else that needed to be moved. To plow a field, which was the hardest work, we used a kind of pickaxe (which looks like a hoe but much bigger and heavier). I could not figure out why we, as Chinese, who had been farmers for five thousand years, still used the same methods our great, great, …grandfathers had used. Some of us students did try to improve things by using a carrying stick with baskets on the two ends, and even a one-wheel cart to carry things.
Winter work on the farm was either gathering grass and shrubs from the desert to make compost, or cleaning and repairing irrigation canals. Once we went to Sangzhu, a small village at the foot of the Kunlun Mountains near the upper reaches of our water source to work on the construction of a major canal and dam. Sangzhu (Sanju) village was on a short cut to Kashmir and India, near a pass in the mountains. The trail to the pass was dangerously steep and narrow. Caravan travelers commonly lost their camels and even their own lives falling off the trail on the cliffs. In the March 1996 issue of National Geographic, there is an old photo Owen Lattimore took in 1926 showing his group on the pass. But back then none of us knew much about the place. For almost ten years, schools had been paralyzed by the Cultural Revolution so that we had not had history or geography classes. There were no regional maps either; actually, no concept of regional maps existed in our mind. You can imagine how surprised I was ten years later in the U.S. when I saw satellite photos of Pishan County shot by NASA and published in the February 1996 Scientific American, clearly showing the mountains, villages, and even the streets in town.
We had been assigned to work there for two weeks, but instead, we stayed for only two days because the farm workers really pitied us and sent us back. At the construction site, there were mountains on one side and desert on the other. There was no house or any kind of shelter for us to stay in. We built a circle with rocks for cooking. At night, we slept on the open ground. The experienced people taught us how to find a good spot out of the wind for sleeping at night. This was usually behind sand dunes where the roots of a Red Willow bush were buried. There was always wind at night; it was just a matter of whether it would be big or small. But even the least wind could be very annoying, and the wind was sometimes dangerous. We soon learned that we had to cover our faces completely with wool scarves, or sand would fill our noses, mouths, eyes and ears, and even choke us. Even covered, we still felt we were chewing sand all the time. At first it was such an exciting experience to sleep in the open desert. I thought I would look at the sky counting the stars or dreaming about romance all night. Oh! There was no way you could lie on your back with your face up. All your open orifices would fill up with sand. Reluctantly, I covered myself completely under the thick quilt, as it was very cold too. In the morning, we all laughed at each other, because we still looked like people made out of sand, no matter how well we had covered ourselves, but there was no water to wash ourselves with.
In the desert, any degree of a wind could make a sand twister. It was fun to look at the twisters dancing around. Sometimes I suspected that Wang Wei’s famous line of poetry about desert might refer to a twister, although it is usually interpreted as a signal fire:
In the vast desert, there’s a lone smoke straight up;
Above the long river, the setting sun appears so round.
Gathering shrubs for compost was another normal winter task. One cold winter day, very early in the morning, we got up, packed a little corn bread and water, and went into the desert. Our job that day was to cut, gather, and bring back shrubs for making compost. The air was chilly and fresh. The sky was dark blue and full of bright stars. I saw the entire sky like a huge upside down bowl resting on the earth. It was beautiful and awesome. I wondered if there could be any better scene in the world. Nobody talked. We were simply quieted by the overwhelming cosmic silence.
There are only a few kinds of plants that grow in the area. Among them are the Red Willow (a kind of five-stamen tamarisk), a shrub tree whose thick, deep roots we commonly dug up for firewood, and Camel Thorn (Alhagi maurorum), a shrub with needle-sized thorns which had no use except to rot for compost to fertilize soil. I always felt sorry to cut them down. In the dull desert, they were the only colorful things that could cheer you up. Red Willows have small red-purple blossoms stuck along the branches, and Camel Thorns grow tiny purple flowers the size of your smallest fingernail. But Camel Thorns were the ones we wanted for this particular job.
The shrubs grew so widely scattered that we had to spread far apart in the desert. We reminded each other to keep close enough so that we would not get lost. Quite soon, we could only hear but not see each other. At one point I helped two girls put their bound loads on their backs ready to go. When the sun rose high, I saw the last one off. She actually insisted that we two go back together. But I did not feel I had enough. So I told her to go ahead, and I went further into the desert to gather more shrubs. I did not notice how much time passed before I had gotten a big hill of thorns gathered in front of me. I pressed and tightened it with my whole body. I tramped and jumped on it so it could be bound into a bundle. I did my best to tighten and tie it. (Many years later, in the States, I could still feel one or two thorns poking out here and there from the sheep’s wool trousers I had knit myself and had on that day). But the bundle was still bigger than me, and it was so heavy that I had very hard time loading it up on my back.
From behind me, one would have been unable to see a person, only a hill of bushes moving slowly. It took several minutes before I suddenly realized that I should check the direction to make sure I was heading home. There were no roads, no trails, but only endless sand. I was afraid that I might not be able to put the bundle back on my back again by myself, so at first I hesitated whether I should drop the load and go up to a hill looking for some signs. But my instinct told me I should do it right away. So I dropped the load and climbed to the highest sand dune nearby.
When I got to the top of the hill and looked around, I was shocked. All directions looked exactly the same. There was not a single sign showing the way home. The farm with the little village was totally beyond the horizon. Instantly I collapsed, my heart beating wildly and my legs shaking. A great panic fell over me. At first my mind went blank and then I could not think rationally. I do not know how long I kneeled there before I realized I should do something. I managed to stand up and call out loudly, hoping somebody was still around. “Is there anybody here?” “Can somebody hear me?” But to my horror, no sooner had I begun to shout, than I realized that my voice was completely gone. I could not get a sound out. I had lost my strength. I pulled up myself and tried again. “Hello! Is anybody there?” This time the sounds came out of my throat but were immediately swallowed by the vast empty space. The power of the desert overwhelmed me. I looked up. It was cloudy. I could tell the sun was directly overhead; there is no way to use the sun to determine directions when it is noon. And I knew that since we came to the farm I had not paid attention to the directions anyway. I was totally lost. Desperate, I began to think about death.
Taklamakan, the name of the desert in Turkic language, simply means “a place one can go into, but will not come out of.” All the stories about the desert poured into my memory. Some told how people lost their way in the desert and were only found mummified years later. Some described how the wind moved sand dunes from one side of the road to the other overnight but kept them in the same shape, so after a storm travelers did not notice the change and therefore went the wrong direction and got lost forever. There were even reports of well-prepared explorers vanishing in the desert. Furthermore, everybody knew that cargo truck drivers always went in a group carrying more than enough water and food in case there were unexpected situations.
Now, kneeling in the sand, alone, shaking all over, I found the stories became real. But I was only nineteen, too young to die. “I cannot die like this.” I had to find a way out. The sun above me reminded me that it was noon, and I had several hours to try to find a way out before it got dark. I struggled to stand up. Still, every direction looked the same, all reached to the end of the earth. I slid down the hill, leaving the food bag behind as a sign, and looked around. Something caught my eyes. Goat droppings. And then, donkey droppings. My heart almost jumped out of my throat. I knew I might have a chance. Soon I found the animals’ tracks. I crawled on the ground to study them. But, the more tracks I found, the less confidence I had. There were too many of them, and they pointed in all directions. I did not want to give up. I decided that I would go to the direction I felt right by instinct, and if I did not see any sign of a village within one or two hours of walking, I would come back and go in the opposite direction, but staying always within range of the animals’ tracks. Having made this decision, I felt relieved a little, and went up the hilltop to eat my corn bread. The bread was already frozen, too hard to bite. I put it under my arms to warm up. I still had some water in the canteen, partially frozen. Luckily it was not summer, or I could have been fatally dehydrated already.
While eating, I began to think whether or not I should carry the big load – my whole purpose in life by this time. “Maybe it won’t be too late to drop it if the plan goes really wrong,” I persuaded myself. So again, I knelt down and leaned my back against the load, put my arms into the rope loops, straightened myself up, bent a little bit forward, crawled a few steps on my hands and knees, and then lifted the weight and stood up. Before I started to walk, I dug out a Red Willow stick from the sand hill, and dragged it on the ground while I walked in order to draw a line as a sign, in case I had to come back to the opposite direction. I actually changed directions several times. I did not know how long it took me to get out of the desert. I did not have a watch. When I suddenly saw the trees in the distance, I staggered and almost cried. I said to myself, “Don’t fall. Hold up. Don’t fall. You’ve survived.” Several years later, when I sat in the university library reading Jack London, I felt like saying to him, “Hey, buddy, I’ve been there.”
When I arrived at the village it was late afternoon. I was too exhausted to step up even the three inches off the ground to the scales, to record how heavy a load I had carried. Two guys had to pull me up. I had carried a load of about 130 pounds, 20 pounds heavier than myself. At supper that evening, one of my roommates said to me, “You stupid girl. Why are you so serious? Look at our Boss! He brought only 20 pounds. Do you want to die?” I only smiled wearily. I did not explain to anybody why I came back so late. I did not want to talk about my experience of life and death casually to those who had not had a similar experience or who would not understand such things. I needed time to myself to think and digest the meaning of it. It was like a sudden enlightenment that made me begin to think both philosophically and realistically about my life.
Before graduation, the school authorities and the Communist League had organized us to study Chairman Mao’s theories and discuss the significance of the strategy of letting students go “up the mountains and down the countryside.” At those meetings, we studied a case of “Regional Realization of Communism” – the Da Zhai Commune in Shanxi Province. There the farm workers had reached the goal of supplying enough food to the Commune members and even achieved a surplus to contribute to the government as well. They could afford to send all the children to school and were able to provide medical care to all the members of the commune. All the villagers had become better off equally. The example was exciting and tangible. In the past, Communism had looked so vague and abstract to me, but now it became concrete and something that could be accomplished. If people of Da Zhai could make it happen, we could too. So when I got to the farm, I calculated how much income I could possibly make, and then the total needed for all villagers to have sufficient food and other supplies. To my disappointment, I realized that at my best, by the end of each year I would be earning a share of 330-440 pounds of grain plus 100-200 yuan cash (about $10-20 dollars). This meant I would be able to have about one pound of grain for food and 0.40 yuan (or 4 cents) cash to spend per day. But I thought that was good enough.
Now, suddenly, I felt how ridiculous the Communist ideal was and how foolish we were to believe in such nonsense. How could I have been so naïve and so stupid and so blind? How could we change people’s life and change the world by using the most primitive production methods and by sacrificing young people’s lives in the desert? How could such minimum basic survival conditions be the Communist Ideal?! What is Communism anyway?
The Taklamakan desert transformed me. Not because I was scared by the desert, but because I experienced the overwhelming power of nature so closely and truly. If I had ever had a religious feeling, it was then, when I was overwhelmed in the desert, kneeling to pray to it to have pity on me. Even when I overcame it, it was with great awe and respect, and I saw my limits.
New Jersey July 5, 2007
The above is my persoanl narrative written for an analogy on Teaching the Silk Road by SUNY Publication.
Flashes at the End of the Sky (2)
My Personal Khotan on the Silk Road
The Bounty of Khotan
Khotan has been famous for a variety of beautiful things since ancient times, especially jade and silk. In the Shang dynasties (16th-11th century BCE), Khotan jade found its way to the royal courts in central China. According to Shanhaijing, a book from the second century BCE, in the tenth century BCE, a Zhou dynasty emperor Mu Wang traveled to the Kunlun Mountains to find white jade. Khotan jade has been the privileged royal and national jewel for China ever since.
Jade caught my attention in an unlikely manner. On a street corner a small, deformed Uyghur man had a little vendor’s stand. On Sundays, my father often took me to the bazaar (Uyghur people use the word for market) to buy our vegetables and fruits. The bazaar was a little down from the town center at the only intersection of two dusty roads. Uyghur vendors and farmers from far away sold vegetables, fruits, herbs, spices, meat, live chicken, eggs, crafts, firewood, and local food like kaoyangrou, roasted mutton kabob; zhuafan, rice polo; nang, baked flatbread; and lamian, hand-pulled long noodles. At one corner of the intersection next to the bazaar, a man, shortened by polio, always kneeled or curled up beside a shawl about two feet square laid on the ground. On it were some pieces of jade: wine cups, tobacco pipes, rings, bracelets, cubes for seals, and raw pebbles. The beautiful shining colors of the jade – pale green, dark green, cream white and orange etc. made a dramatic contrast against his always-blackened all-weather chiapan (a kind of long robe) and his sheepskin hat. Very often, he was pushed and even buried in the Sunday crowds. Few people paid attention to him. As if never noticing anything around him, the little man always faced his “jewels,” never calling out to sell them, never moving. He sat like a black statue. My father and I were constant visitors to his two-foot stand. I remember over the years father bought a few cubes of jade for carving seals to stamp on his paintings. I liked to hold the cups or play with the bracelets, but father never bought any for me. We simply could not afford such luxury. I always felt, and still feel, guilty for not buying more jade from the poor man. He disappeared during the Cultural Revolution.
It was at this little jade stand that my father enthusiastically talked to his only audience, me, about Khotan jade. The Kunlun Mountains to the south of Khotan are home to the largest deposit of the best quality jade in the world. The two kinds of jade are both produced here: nephrite and jadeite. Jadeite is a hard stone, mostly in green colors, which exists in many places all over the world. Nephrite is softer and occurs mostly in white colors. There are only three or four places in the world where nephrite deposits are known, and Khotan happens to produce a very rare type, called “sheep-grease,” which is creamy white and partially translucent. In the spring, when the snow in the mountains melts, the flood pours down with rocks, and jade pebbles appear on the riverbed. Interestingly, the two different jades are always found separately in two separate rivers, the two main rivers running through Khotan, one on the east side, the other the west. So it is not a surprise to find that one river is named yurung kash in Uyghur language, meaning white jade, the other is kara kash, black jade.
Since ancient times, people have made a living picking up the stones in the river. But almost every person living in Khotan has had the experience of looking for jade. Each winter the town government would organize people to go to the rivers to repair the banks and dams. School kids from the fourth grade up always went. We often heard that someone we knew had found a piece of jade while digging the riverbed. Or a farm worker heading to market had randomly picked up a stone from the river to put on one side of the load on his little donkey to balance the weight, and the rock only later was recognized by prospectors in the market to be a valuable chunk of jade. Everybody in Khotan can tell you one or two stories like that.
The two jade rivers, like two living dragons, yield their most precious treasures, water and jade to Khotan’s people. But sadly, for the last ten years, under the greed of the new commercial wave, the rivers have been turned upside-down as deep as several meters. The businessmen from developed areas brought in the most powerful modern machinery to dig, screen, and to destroy the riverbed for money.
Another famous product of the region is silk. Nobody is really sure exactly when sericulture reached Khotan. It seems it has been there all along. In the Tang Dynasty, Xuanzang visited the town and recorded their legend of the Silk Princess who had first brought silk to Khotan. The Princess from the East Kingdom married the prince of Khotan. Before leaving for her new home, she was advised to bring some silkworm eggs and to raise the worms and make silk of her own so she would not feel homesick. However, there were strict rules forbidding anyone to take the secret of silk making out of her home kingdom. So the princess hid the eggs in her fancy hairdo and carried out the eggs to Khotan. From then on, Khotan had its own silk. More than a thousand years after Xuanzang’s visit, Aurel Stein excavated a wooden board from the Tang period with a painting identified as the Silk Princess.
The kids in Khotan were all completely familiar with silk and silk production. We almost all raised silkworms as pets. We normally started with some nearly invisible tiny black dots fixed on a slip of bark paper – one egg is smaller than a dot from a ballpoint pen. The kids would tear the piece of paper into even smaller pieces to share among themselves. When the weather gets warmer in the spring, the worms come out of their shells, as tiny as the tiniest ants in a brownish color. They have to be put on white paper for the first few days so people can see them, or they could be easily wiped off without being noticed at all. As they grow they become white and fat, and two inches long. It was fun to go out of town after school to pick mulberry tree leaves for the worms. It usually took us thirty minutes to an hour one way to get to the outskirts where poplar, sand-date, and mulberry trees lined the road on both sides. Imagine how happy we were to walk under the trees with friends after a long school day, not just picking the leaves but also eating the berries! The mulberries were always so irresistibly sweet and juicy, like all the other fruits grown there, that we could not resist eating and eating until we had no more room in our stomachs. We were experts on picking the right leaves and processing them. The leaves have to be young and tender and must be washed and dried before you feed the worms. The chewing noise of the creatures is pleasant like music, but could be annoying as well, especially when you tried to sleep at night. Some of us were also good at forcing the worms to spin their silk into cocoons of whatever shape we desired, either normal or into a neat flat sheet. Many of us used the flat sheets that came as stuffing in the containers for calligraphy ink. You could fold one into a small square and fit it back into the little brass box. Sometimes, we could get special worms that would produce colored silk. I once had silkworms that produced bright yellow and pale green silk. I never figured out how they could make colors out of their bodies.
There was a silk reeling factory in town. The local farm workers bred silk worms and grew mulberry trees on their own, and then sold silk cocoons to the factory to be processed. The master workers in the factory had come from “the capitals of silk,” Suzhou and Hangzhou, near Shanghai. The factory recruited many Uyghur girls and sent them to Suzhou for training. The local factory helped revive the fame of the old silk town on the Silk Road, and the parents of many of my classmates worked in the factory. Once, a story came to my mother’s attention at the Khotan Daily. A young man on a farm in Yutian County was looking for a Uyghur girl who his mother had nursed almost fifteen years before in Suzhou while her mother was in training there. He hoped that newspaper reporters could help him find her. He had no address or names, but my mother asked a reporter friend to work with her to find the whole story. After going to many places and interviewing many people, they found out that the girl’s mother had moved to Kashgar and left the daughter with a grandmother. It took my mother and her colleague more than a year to finally locate the girl. To my mother’s surprise and delight, the girl happened to be my classmate sitting right next to me. Her name is Bahargul in Uyghur, meaning Spring Flower. My mother drew a picture book about the story and published it. From then on, we thought of Bahargul as a modern silk princess.
The above is my persoanl narrative written for an analogy on Teaching the Silk Road by SUNY Publication.
The Bounty of Khotan
Khotan has been famous for a variety of beautiful things since ancient times, especially jade and silk. In the Shang dynasties (16th-11th century BCE), Khotan jade found its way to the royal courts in central China. According to Shanhaijing, a book from the second century BCE, in the tenth century BCE, a Zhou dynasty emperor Mu Wang traveled to the Kunlun Mountains to find white jade. Khotan jade has been the privileged royal and national jewel for China ever since.
Jade caught my attention in an unlikely manner. On a street corner a small, deformed Uyghur man had a little vendor’s stand. On Sundays, my father often took me to the bazaar (Uyghur people use the word for market) to buy our vegetables and fruits. The bazaar was a little down from the town center at the only intersection of two dusty roads. Uyghur vendors and farmers from far away sold vegetables, fruits, herbs, spices, meat, live chicken, eggs, crafts, firewood, and local food like kaoyangrou, roasted mutton kabob; zhuafan, rice polo; nang, baked flatbread; and lamian, hand-pulled long noodles. At one corner of the intersection next to the bazaar, a man, shortened by polio, always kneeled or curled up beside a shawl about two feet square laid on the ground. On it were some pieces of jade: wine cups, tobacco pipes, rings, bracelets, cubes for seals, and raw pebbles. The beautiful shining colors of the jade – pale green, dark green, cream white and orange etc. made a dramatic contrast against his always-blackened all-weather chiapan (a kind of long robe) and his sheepskin hat. Very often, he was pushed and even buried in the Sunday crowds. Few people paid attention to him. As if never noticing anything around him, the little man always faced his “jewels,” never calling out to sell them, never moving. He sat like a black statue. My father and I were constant visitors to his two-foot stand. I remember over the years father bought a few cubes of jade for carving seals to stamp on his paintings. I liked to hold the cups or play with the bracelets, but father never bought any for me. We simply could not afford such luxury. I always felt, and still feel, guilty for not buying more jade from the poor man. He disappeared during the Cultural Revolution.
It was at this little jade stand that my father enthusiastically talked to his only audience, me, about Khotan jade. The Kunlun Mountains to the south of Khotan are home to the largest deposit of the best quality jade in the world. The two kinds of jade are both produced here: nephrite and jadeite. Jadeite is a hard stone, mostly in green colors, which exists in many places all over the world. Nephrite is softer and occurs mostly in white colors. There are only three or four places in the world where nephrite deposits are known, and Khotan happens to produce a very rare type, called “sheep-grease,” which is creamy white and partially translucent. In the spring, when the snow in the mountains melts, the flood pours down with rocks, and jade pebbles appear on the riverbed. Interestingly, the two different jades are always found separately in two separate rivers, the two main rivers running through Khotan, one on the east side, the other the west. So it is not a surprise to find that one river is named yurung kash in Uyghur language, meaning white jade, the other is kara kash, black jade.
Since ancient times, people have made a living picking up the stones in the river. But almost every person living in Khotan has had the experience of looking for jade. Each winter the town government would organize people to go to the rivers to repair the banks and dams. School kids from the fourth grade up always went. We often heard that someone we knew had found a piece of jade while digging the riverbed. Or a farm worker heading to market had randomly picked up a stone from the river to put on one side of the load on his little donkey to balance the weight, and the rock only later was recognized by prospectors in the market to be a valuable chunk of jade. Everybody in Khotan can tell you one or two stories like that.
The two jade rivers, like two living dragons, yield their most precious treasures, water and jade to Khotan’s people. But sadly, for the last ten years, under the greed of the new commercial wave, the rivers have been turned upside-down as deep as several meters. The businessmen from developed areas brought in the most powerful modern machinery to dig, screen, and to destroy the riverbed for money.
Another famous product of the region is silk. Nobody is really sure exactly when sericulture reached Khotan. It seems it has been there all along. In the Tang Dynasty, Xuanzang visited the town and recorded their legend of the Silk Princess who had first brought silk to Khotan. The Princess from the East Kingdom married the prince of Khotan. Before leaving for her new home, she was advised to bring some silkworm eggs and to raise the worms and make silk of her own so she would not feel homesick. However, there were strict rules forbidding anyone to take the secret of silk making out of her home kingdom. So the princess hid the eggs in her fancy hairdo and carried out the eggs to Khotan. From then on, Khotan had its own silk. More than a thousand years after Xuanzang’s visit, Aurel Stein excavated a wooden board from the Tang period with a painting identified as the Silk Princess.
The kids in Khotan were all completely familiar with silk and silk production. We almost all raised silkworms as pets. We normally started with some nearly invisible tiny black dots fixed on a slip of bark paper – one egg is smaller than a dot from a ballpoint pen. The kids would tear the piece of paper into even smaller pieces to share among themselves. When the weather gets warmer in the spring, the worms come out of their shells, as tiny as the tiniest ants in a brownish color. They have to be put on white paper for the first few days so people can see them, or they could be easily wiped off without being noticed at all. As they grow they become white and fat, and two inches long. It was fun to go out of town after school to pick mulberry tree leaves for the worms. It usually took us thirty minutes to an hour one way to get to the outskirts where poplar, sand-date, and mulberry trees lined the road on both sides. Imagine how happy we were to walk under the trees with friends after a long school day, not just picking the leaves but also eating the berries! The mulberries were always so irresistibly sweet and juicy, like all the other fruits grown there, that we could not resist eating and eating until we had no more room in our stomachs. We were experts on picking the right leaves and processing them. The leaves have to be young and tender and must be washed and dried before you feed the worms. The chewing noise of the creatures is pleasant like music, but could be annoying as well, especially when you tried to sleep at night. Some of us were also good at forcing the worms to spin their silk into cocoons of whatever shape we desired, either normal or into a neat flat sheet. Many of us used the flat sheets that came as stuffing in the containers for calligraphy ink. You could fold one into a small square and fit it back into the little brass box. Sometimes, we could get special worms that would produce colored silk. I once had silkworms that produced bright yellow and pale green silk. I never figured out how they could make colors out of their bodies.
There was a silk reeling factory in town. The local farm workers bred silk worms and grew mulberry trees on their own, and then sold silk cocoons to the factory to be processed. The master workers in the factory had come from “the capitals of silk,” Suzhou and Hangzhou, near Shanghai. The factory recruited many Uyghur girls and sent them to Suzhou for training. The local factory helped revive the fame of the old silk town on the Silk Road, and the parents of many of my classmates worked in the factory. Once, a story came to my mother’s attention at the Khotan Daily. A young man on a farm in Yutian County was looking for a Uyghur girl who his mother had nursed almost fifteen years before in Suzhou while her mother was in training there. He hoped that newspaper reporters could help him find her. He had no address or names, but my mother asked a reporter friend to work with her to find the whole story. After going to many places and interviewing many people, they found out that the girl’s mother had moved to Kashgar and left the daughter with a grandmother. It took my mother and her colleague more than a year to finally locate the girl. To my mother’s surprise and delight, the girl happened to be my classmate sitting right next to me. Her name is Bahargul in Uyghur, meaning Spring Flower. My mother drew a picture book about the story and published it. From then on, we thought of Bahargul as a modern silk princess.
The above is my persoanl narrative written for an analogy on Teaching the Silk Road by SUNY Publication.
Flashes at the End of the Sky (1)
My Personal Khotan on the Silk Road
Coming to Khotan
Khotan is a far, far away little town on the edge of the world’s second largest desert – the Taklamakan - in northwestern China. It is as far away as “the end of the sky” according to a Chinese expression, set in the Kunlun Mountains between the Tarim Basin and Tibetan plateau, in one of the fertile oases where there are water resources to grow grains and raise sheep and cows. The earliest traceable residents were probably Sakas, an Iranian-language-speaking people, who later mixed with Qiang-Tibetans and Turkic peoples. In about 9th century CE, a Turkic people called the Uyghur became the dominant population. They converted to the Muslim religion, and thus there is a strong Muslim presence in the region today. The Han Chinese people have founded small communities there since the Han Dynasty. Geographically and historically, Khotan has been an important trade center for caravans, pilgrims, explorers, and even diplomats: a place to stop for a rest, to reload supplies, and to conduct trade. Early travelers who stayed in Khotan and left their remarks about the place include Zhang Qian, the envoy to the West Region during the Han Dynasty; Xuanzang, the Tang dynasty Buddhist monk who traveled to India; and Marco Polo, the merchant of medieval Venice and ambassador of the Pope to Cathay, to name the best known. And, of course, there was Aurel Stein, the Hungarian-British archaeologist, who made Khotan even better known to the world at the turn of the 19th and 20th century with his famous rediscovery of ancient Khotan.
My parents, who were assigned to work for a local newspaper, the Khotan Daily, brought me to Khotan in the early 1960s, when I was five years old. Both of them had been artists and editors-in-fine-arts, my father for a publishing house and my mother for the only women’s magazine in Xinjiang Autonomous Region. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had secretly labeled my father as “having Right Opportunist opinions,” and supposedly sent him to Khotan to help with frontier development. Mother had to go with him. However, since there were so many things going on in the country at that time, my parents did not know the true reason they were chosen until some twenty years later. The Party had called on educated people to go to the remote and poor areas to work. The District of Khotan sent delegations to the big cities to recruit people with up-to-date knowledge and skills; and the government tried to relocate people from big-famine-affected provinces to Xinjiang. My parents, young and idealistic (naïve, too), simply believed they had responded to the Party’s call for the noble cause of constructing a Communist new China. Only a few years earlier, the CCP had called on them to help build the new Xinjiang and sent them from Xi’an, the ancient capital city in central China, to Urumqi, the largest city and the capital of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Now they were on the road again from Urumqi to Khotan.
We traveled on a military truck that had a grass-green colored heavy canvas cover. We sat on our suitcases and luggage rolls and were tossed up and down on a poorly paved road along the edge of the desert. Three other families and a few young retired soldiers were packed in with us. All of them, including my parents, were so optimistic and enthusiastic that they ignored the length and boredom of the journey. As my mother recalls, the journey was not really so bad. It was early spring. Within a day or two of driving in the dull barren desert there were occasional areas with fruit trees full of blossoms and green fields, and these always caused great excitement. All I can remember is that when we stayed in Kashgar (another large oasis town) for two days, my father took me with him to a bazaar to look around, and I became obsessed with a small colorful doll the size of my hand carved out of rough wood. It took us twelve days to get to Khotan.
Khotan welcomed us with its cheerful blossoms. For new settlers, as for travelers throughout time, its abundance of fruits, grains, and lamb meat, make strong impressions. Thanks to the ever-lasting snowmelt of water in the Kunlun Mountains, the crops of the oasis are secure. Actually, at the time we got there, it had such surplus that the Khotan District was responsible for shipping its grain to Tianjin, the third largest city in China, to relieve the devastating famine there.
In the town, people who were Han Chinese like my family made up only two percent of the population. But to my surprise, I gradually learned that Han Chinese had lived there all along. These included the families of merchants from the central provinces, descendents of Qing dynasty’s officials, and those who had helped the Russians to build railways in Siberia and fought for them during the first World War, but became stuck in Khotan on their way back home. Many of these people had married local Uyghurs, Russians, and in a few cases, Jews. We called these Han Chinese “Old Khotanese.”
Growing up in Khotan, I was happy, although to many people it was such a miserable and unlivable place. Sand was everywhere – in the air, on the ground, in and out of your houses, all the time. No matter if you sat in an outdoor movie theatre (there was no indoor one) with rough wood benches for two hours, or went out for a short time to shop for groceries, you needed to whisk off the dust and sand from your head, shoulders, and feet before you could go into your one or two-room apartment. Every year in the spring there were sandstorms. Sometimes they could be so thick that the entire sky became dark like nighttime. One storm could last for an hour or two. When it passed, you would find sand at least an inch thick on everything in the room, no matter how well you had shut or even sealed the doors and windows. We called these storms a “black wind” if they were very bad, or a “yellow wind” if they were not so bad.
Water, obviously, was precious here. Each government agency or residential compound had a man-made reservoir called a laoba to store water for daily use. There was one laoba in the Khotan Daily compound. It was the size of a standard American swimming pool and held water for about one hundred residents (employees and their families). Twice a year canals would bring in water to refill the reservoir. Most of the time the water was brownish and opaque. And of course, we were not the only ones who needed water. There were other creatures: birds, toads, bugs, water-worms, and so forth that also shared the same water. It was my mother’s strict rule that we must boil the water before drinking it. Even then, it would still take a couple of minutes for the dust particles to fall to the bottom of a cup before you could drink it. My father, and later on my brother, was responsible for fetching water for the family, with our two aluminum buckets. Occasionally there were bad years when we were very short of water. When that happened, the entire family would use one bowl of water to wash all our faces in the morning, and we saved it to wash our feet in the evening.
Because of the moisture around the laoba, willow trees and fruit trees grew nearby. They were the famous native fruit trees: apricots, peaches, pears, and plums. A man who was publicly denounced as a “Counter-Revolutionary” and therefore not given any other job but janitorial work was in charge of taking care of the laoba area. He seemed to put all his time and energy into planting many kinds of flowers, which turned the field into a beautiful garden. It was this garden which we called the “circle of the laoba” that became our kids’ Eden. We children spent most our off-school time playing there. Still today we remember this place fondly.
The grape trellises all the way to the roofs in front of our apartments and office buildings created another pleasant and common scene in the compound. We could reach the grapes right outside the apartment door. But of course, we were not allowed to pick the grapes on our own until the autumn time when the grapes were ripe and shared by all members of the agency. All the fruits grown in Khotan were extraordinarily sweet.
There were never any extra material goods other than the most basic. I remember I had only one doll all my childhood. Four of us lived in a two-room apartment without any appliances but some make-shift furniture including three beds made of plain wooden boards, a small cabinet for clothes, a wooden shipping case used for storing the kitchen utensils, a desk and a chair, a very small eating table with four little stools, and a large bookshelf. There was neither kitchen nor bathroom in the apartment. In the summer we cooked outside on an adobe stove on the ground, and in the winter we had an iron stove set in one room for both heating and cooking. The birthday treat was two boiled eggs for the birthday-child, and the other could have only one egg. I did not receive any birthday present until my twelfth birthday when my parents spent more than a half of their monthly salary to buy me a violin – the greatest luxury in all their lives and mine until then. It was heyday of the “Cultural Revolution.” My parents were criticized as “black” (meaning bad) artists with bourgeoisie and revisionist ideas. They had to burn or hide pictures of any Western art except for the Russian socialist realistic art. They did not want us to follow in their footsteps to become artists anymore, although they had dreamed of training me to be a painter and my brother a sculptor. But Western musical instruments were all right if we played revolutionary music on them. So there they were, my parents, with this beautiful violin, wishing I would grow up artistic and elegant.
Some years later I brought my violin with me to Grandma’s in Shanxi Province, just to kill time there. I had played only some folk and revolutionary songs. One day my first uncle asked me to follow him to his room. He moved pillows from an old broken couch that had a strong steel frame. He crawled down looking for something under the couch. Surprisingly, he tore the seat from underneath and took out some old records, and then a record player. It was like magic. He said he had had to hide these things when the Red Guards had come looking for anything feudal or bourgeois. I helped him carry the player and records to the grandma’s room where my third uncle helped set up the record player. They played famous classical music for me, which I had never heard before. All western music had been banned during the Cultural Revolution. It was the first time in my twenty-year old life that I heard Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, and many others. I was electrified the moment Beethoven’s No. 5 Symphony started. I stood like wood by the record player for about an hour or so without noticing my uncles’ gesture telling me to sit down. How could there be such beautiful music ever in the world! And why was it not allowed to be played? The world I had known became suddenly so small and so ridiculous. A hunger for more knowledge burst out inside me. I realized there was another much larger world out there. It was the darkest moment before dawn, to use a Chinese expression. My uncles and I played the music everyday after that; but we played it with low volume and with all doors and windows closed, so nobody on the street could hear us. While I tried to suck in every note of the music, my uncles fell into their remote memories and dreams. I felt very sorry for them.
I am grateful to my parents for passing on to us their optimistic attitude toward hardships. Bad as our circumstances were, their artistic eyes always sought out beauty from this sandy, barren, harsh, difficult, and forgotten corner of the world. Father’s landscape paintings were of the lofty Kunlun Mountains, of peaceful pastures with grazing horses and cows, of yellow diversiform-leaved poplar trees and Red Willow shrubs stubbornly growing in the desert, of farm workers riding on little donkeys going to markets. Mother’s fine-line paintings of Uyghur girls with many little hair braids and beautiful dresses dancing on Khotan-style carpets under the grape trellis, or of Tajik children caring for their baby sheep, all made us love the place and feel fortunate to live here.
The above is my persoanl narrative written for an analogy on Teaching the Silk Road by SUNY Publication.
Coming to Khotan
Khotan is a far, far away little town on the edge of the world’s second largest desert – the Taklamakan - in northwestern China. It is as far away as “the end of the sky” according to a Chinese expression, set in the Kunlun Mountains between the Tarim Basin and Tibetan plateau, in one of the fertile oases where there are water resources to grow grains and raise sheep and cows. The earliest traceable residents were probably Sakas, an Iranian-language-speaking people, who later mixed with Qiang-Tibetans and Turkic peoples. In about 9th century CE, a Turkic people called the Uyghur became the dominant population. They converted to the Muslim religion, and thus there is a strong Muslim presence in the region today. The Han Chinese people have founded small communities there since the Han Dynasty. Geographically and historically, Khotan has been an important trade center for caravans, pilgrims, explorers, and even diplomats: a place to stop for a rest, to reload supplies, and to conduct trade. Early travelers who stayed in Khotan and left their remarks about the place include Zhang Qian, the envoy to the West Region during the Han Dynasty; Xuanzang, the Tang dynasty Buddhist monk who traveled to India; and Marco Polo, the merchant of medieval Venice and ambassador of the Pope to Cathay, to name the best known. And, of course, there was Aurel Stein, the Hungarian-British archaeologist, who made Khotan even better known to the world at the turn of the 19th and 20th century with his famous rediscovery of ancient Khotan.
My parents, who were assigned to work for a local newspaper, the Khotan Daily, brought me to Khotan in the early 1960s, when I was five years old. Both of them had been artists and editors-in-fine-arts, my father for a publishing house and my mother for the only women’s magazine in Xinjiang Autonomous Region. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had secretly labeled my father as “having Right Opportunist opinions,” and supposedly sent him to Khotan to help with frontier development. Mother had to go with him. However, since there were so many things going on in the country at that time, my parents did not know the true reason they were chosen until some twenty years later. The Party had called on educated people to go to the remote and poor areas to work. The District of Khotan sent delegations to the big cities to recruit people with up-to-date knowledge and skills; and the government tried to relocate people from big-famine-affected provinces to Xinjiang. My parents, young and idealistic (naïve, too), simply believed they had responded to the Party’s call for the noble cause of constructing a Communist new China. Only a few years earlier, the CCP had called on them to help build the new Xinjiang and sent them from Xi’an, the ancient capital city in central China, to Urumqi, the largest city and the capital of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Now they were on the road again from Urumqi to Khotan.
We traveled on a military truck that had a grass-green colored heavy canvas cover. We sat on our suitcases and luggage rolls and were tossed up and down on a poorly paved road along the edge of the desert. Three other families and a few young retired soldiers were packed in with us. All of them, including my parents, were so optimistic and enthusiastic that they ignored the length and boredom of the journey. As my mother recalls, the journey was not really so bad. It was early spring. Within a day or two of driving in the dull barren desert there were occasional areas with fruit trees full of blossoms and green fields, and these always caused great excitement. All I can remember is that when we stayed in Kashgar (another large oasis town) for two days, my father took me with him to a bazaar to look around, and I became obsessed with a small colorful doll the size of my hand carved out of rough wood. It took us twelve days to get to Khotan.
Khotan welcomed us with its cheerful blossoms. For new settlers, as for travelers throughout time, its abundance of fruits, grains, and lamb meat, make strong impressions. Thanks to the ever-lasting snowmelt of water in the Kunlun Mountains, the crops of the oasis are secure. Actually, at the time we got there, it had such surplus that the Khotan District was responsible for shipping its grain to Tianjin, the third largest city in China, to relieve the devastating famine there.
In the town, people who were Han Chinese like my family made up only two percent of the population. But to my surprise, I gradually learned that Han Chinese had lived there all along. These included the families of merchants from the central provinces, descendents of Qing dynasty’s officials, and those who had helped the Russians to build railways in Siberia and fought for them during the first World War, but became stuck in Khotan on their way back home. Many of these people had married local Uyghurs, Russians, and in a few cases, Jews. We called these Han Chinese “Old Khotanese.”
Growing up in Khotan, I was happy, although to many people it was such a miserable and unlivable place. Sand was everywhere – in the air, on the ground, in and out of your houses, all the time. No matter if you sat in an outdoor movie theatre (there was no indoor one) with rough wood benches for two hours, or went out for a short time to shop for groceries, you needed to whisk off the dust and sand from your head, shoulders, and feet before you could go into your one or two-room apartment. Every year in the spring there were sandstorms. Sometimes they could be so thick that the entire sky became dark like nighttime. One storm could last for an hour or two. When it passed, you would find sand at least an inch thick on everything in the room, no matter how well you had shut or even sealed the doors and windows. We called these storms a “black wind” if they were very bad, or a “yellow wind” if they were not so bad.
Water, obviously, was precious here. Each government agency or residential compound had a man-made reservoir called a laoba to store water for daily use. There was one laoba in the Khotan Daily compound. It was the size of a standard American swimming pool and held water for about one hundred residents (employees and their families). Twice a year canals would bring in water to refill the reservoir. Most of the time the water was brownish and opaque. And of course, we were not the only ones who needed water. There were other creatures: birds, toads, bugs, water-worms, and so forth that also shared the same water. It was my mother’s strict rule that we must boil the water before drinking it. Even then, it would still take a couple of minutes for the dust particles to fall to the bottom of a cup before you could drink it. My father, and later on my brother, was responsible for fetching water for the family, with our two aluminum buckets. Occasionally there were bad years when we were very short of water. When that happened, the entire family would use one bowl of water to wash all our faces in the morning, and we saved it to wash our feet in the evening.
Because of the moisture around the laoba, willow trees and fruit trees grew nearby. They were the famous native fruit trees: apricots, peaches, pears, and plums. A man who was publicly denounced as a “Counter-Revolutionary” and therefore not given any other job but janitorial work was in charge of taking care of the laoba area. He seemed to put all his time and energy into planting many kinds of flowers, which turned the field into a beautiful garden. It was this garden which we called the “circle of the laoba” that became our kids’ Eden. We children spent most our off-school time playing there. Still today we remember this place fondly.
The grape trellises all the way to the roofs in front of our apartments and office buildings created another pleasant and common scene in the compound. We could reach the grapes right outside the apartment door. But of course, we were not allowed to pick the grapes on our own until the autumn time when the grapes were ripe and shared by all members of the agency. All the fruits grown in Khotan were extraordinarily sweet.
There were never any extra material goods other than the most basic. I remember I had only one doll all my childhood. Four of us lived in a two-room apartment without any appliances but some make-shift furniture including three beds made of plain wooden boards, a small cabinet for clothes, a wooden shipping case used for storing the kitchen utensils, a desk and a chair, a very small eating table with four little stools, and a large bookshelf. There was neither kitchen nor bathroom in the apartment. In the summer we cooked outside on an adobe stove on the ground, and in the winter we had an iron stove set in one room for both heating and cooking. The birthday treat was two boiled eggs for the birthday-child, and the other could have only one egg. I did not receive any birthday present until my twelfth birthday when my parents spent more than a half of their monthly salary to buy me a violin – the greatest luxury in all their lives and mine until then. It was heyday of the “Cultural Revolution.” My parents were criticized as “black” (meaning bad) artists with bourgeoisie and revisionist ideas. They had to burn or hide pictures of any Western art except for the Russian socialist realistic art. They did not want us to follow in their footsteps to become artists anymore, although they had dreamed of training me to be a painter and my brother a sculptor. But Western musical instruments were all right if we played revolutionary music on them. So there they were, my parents, with this beautiful violin, wishing I would grow up artistic and elegant.
Some years later I brought my violin with me to Grandma’s in Shanxi Province, just to kill time there. I had played only some folk and revolutionary songs. One day my first uncle asked me to follow him to his room. He moved pillows from an old broken couch that had a strong steel frame. He crawled down looking for something under the couch. Surprisingly, he tore the seat from underneath and took out some old records, and then a record player. It was like magic. He said he had had to hide these things when the Red Guards had come looking for anything feudal or bourgeois. I helped him carry the player and records to the grandma’s room where my third uncle helped set up the record player. They played famous classical music for me, which I had never heard before. All western music had been banned during the Cultural Revolution. It was the first time in my twenty-year old life that I heard Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, and many others. I was electrified the moment Beethoven’s No. 5 Symphony started. I stood like wood by the record player for about an hour or so without noticing my uncles’ gesture telling me to sit down. How could there be such beautiful music ever in the world! And why was it not allowed to be played? The world I had known became suddenly so small and so ridiculous. A hunger for more knowledge burst out inside me. I realized there was another much larger world out there. It was the darkest moment before dawn, to use a Chinese expression. My uncles and I played the music everyday after that; but we played it with low volume and with all doors and windows closed, so nobody on the street could hear us. While I tried to suck in every note of the music, my uncles fell into their remote memories and dreams. I felt very sorry for them.
I am grateful to my parents for passing on to us their optimistic attitude toward hardships. Bad as our circumstances were, their artistic eyes always sought out beauty from this sandy, barren, harsh, difficult, and forgotten corner of the world. Father’s landscape paintings were of the lofty Kunlun Mountains, of peaceful pastures with grazing horses and cows, of yellow diversiform-leaved poplar trees and Red Willow shrubs stubbornly growing in the desert, of farm workers riding on little donkeys going to markets. Mother’s fine-line paintings of Uyghur girls with many little hair braids and beautiful dresses dancing on Khotan-style carpets under the grape trellis, or of Tajik children caring for their baby sheep, all made us love the place and feel fortunate to live here.
The above is my persoanl narrative written for an analogy on Teaching the Silk Road by SUNY Publication.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
秦淮河
去南京不去秦淮河好象不成。离开前一天，硬是让一位专程从北京赶来的高中老同学推掉他已经订好的一桌宴席，改到秦淮河边的夫子庙晚晴楼了。我说，来南京不看秦淮河哪行。他说，我来南京多次了，从来不知道有个秦淮河。蛮拧。
老同学当了多年的军人，后来又做了军商，自然对文人雅士所关心的东西不感兴趣。看着窗下河里的灯船、对岸的酒楼歌厅，评价了一句：嗯，还不错。后来饭席间有两次琵琶和胡琴琴师进来献艺，都被这位同学朋友挥挥手请出去了。结果送上门的秦淮音乐也没捞着听，倒是伸着脖子从阳台外偷看了两眼隔壁包厢的演唱。后来想想，到这样的地方，还非得有一帮浪荡才子、酸臭文人聚在一起才可尽兴。
据传说，秦淮河是秦始皇东巡时为断龙脉而开凿的。当时他看见金陵上空紫气飞腾，便让方士徐福解释这一景象。徐福风水阴阳云云之后，告之此地为龙脉极盛之地，紫光为龙首之象，几百年后这里将有帝王出现。秦王自然不悦。为预防他人做王，秦始皇命令开凿一条十里长河横断这里的龙脉。
后来，作为六朝都城，这里云集了不少名门望族官宦商贾；再后来，朝代的兴兴衰衰、起起落落又招来了无数文人骚客的缅怀凭吊。明清时，十里秦淮进入鼎盛期。金粉楼台，画舫灯船，歌女艺妓 ...... 设在北岸的江南贡院更是年年招来大批科举考生，给秦淮增添了浓厚的文化气息，也因此产生了无数动人的故事。钱谦益和柳如是，侯方域和李香君，唐伯虎，郑板桥，还有陈圆圆、苏小小，等等，等等。
对我，秦淮河是只敢去看，不敢去写。历代文人写它已经太多；赞美的，怀念的，感叹的...... 在此抄下前人的名句。
唐 刘禹锡：“朱雀桥边野草花，乌衣巷口夕阳斜，旧时王谢堂前燕，飞入寻常百姓家。”
唐 杜牧：“烟笼寒水月笼沙，夜泊秦淮近酒家。商女不知亡国恨，隔江犹唱后庭花。”
清 孔尚任：“梨花似雪草如烟，春在秦淮两岸边，一带妆楼临水盖，家家粉影照婵娟”。
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