Ma Jian - Stick Out Your Tongue

As he continued talking, he thought about his school, and about what an oddity he was in the eyes of his classmates: a boy who came from the wild grasslands, five thousand metres above sea level. When he first arrived in Saga, he felt homesick, and often dreamed about the tent that smelt of dung smoke and warm milk, and about the endless, empty plains. In the grasslands, if you have a rifle, some gunpowder, a horse and a dog, you can feed on gazelles and wild deer, and sleep for free under the stars. But after a while, he settled in and began to enjoy the comforts and excitement of modern life. When he left Saga last month and boarded the bus to Mayoumu, he was so torn between the town and the grasslands that he felt as though his body were being ripped in two.

Now, half of his body had returned home. He was sitting in his family’s tent on the high plateau near the shores of Lake Drolmula, listening to the wind rustling outside and his family discussing the breeding of yaks and sheep. He knew that the smell of cake in the air was the smell of Dawa’s skin.

He stood up, and with his head bowed low circled the tent. He stroked the rough surface of the central pole. As a child, he used to test the knives he made by running the blades through the wood. He stroked the mirror on the door of the wooden wardrobe. Dawa walked over to him and, just as she used to, pushed her head against his. She gazed at her reflection, and he gazed at it too as her hair brushed against his neck. Nothing had changed.

Didn’t you want to come home to Mayoumu? he asked himself. Haven’t you come home now? Haven’t you found your family’s tent? Haven’t you given Dawa a gold chiffon scarf and a pair of nylon socks, your mother a shirt, a box of powdered orange juice, a scroll painting of a Chinese landscape? But didn’t the black horse run away with those presents? You told them that the girls in Saga wear leather shoes and you showed them how they walked. You said: ‘I’ll take you to Saga. You could find work there. There are books on everything, the roads are as hard as rock, there are a hundred times more shops than there are in Mayoumu. If you go to Saga, you’ll never want to come back here again.’

Dawa walked over and poured him some fresh tea. ‘Undo your top buttons,’ she said. ‘You’re sweating. Did you meet many girls in the town?’

He stared at Dawa’s eyes, then at her mouth, and said, ‘The girls in Saga wear jeans, not robes. Their legs are as shiny as yak legs. They take off their jeans before they go to bed. They don’t sleep in their robes like us.’ After he said this, Dawa looked away, and he too dropped his gaze.

In Saga, whenever he saw a girl walk down the street, his thoughts always returned to the high plateau, and the dank, heavy air that pressed down on it.

Another gust of wind blew on Sonam’s face. His heart sank as he watched the slowly wakening marshes of Lake Drolmula. The ribbons of salt crystals along the shore were soaking up the first rays of the morning sun. The black horse must have delivered my sack to the tent by now, he thought to himself. In a daze, he found himself walking back to his family’s tent. The sheepdog Pemu ran up to him and rubbed its head against the zip of his trousers.

Beyond the blue sky he could see Mount Kailash moving towards him. It was shrouded in white clouds, just like Goddess Tadkar Dosangma. He tried to stay upright, but his feet gave way and he collapsed on the ground. A ballpoint pen rolled out from the pocket of his jacket and landed between two blades of grass.

As the sun turned red, wisps of white cloud drifted towards the horizon. I could tell that the sunset would be beautiful. I checked the view through my camera. There was no snow on the mountains to the east, and the hills in the foreground made an awkward silhouette. I would have to climb the hill for a better shot. I was at the western edge of Tibet’s high Changthang Plateau, a region of lakes and hills. It was a good place for photography, but the land was criss-crossed with rivers and streams, and it was easy to get lost. As I crested the hill, the sun dropped below the horizon. In the fading light I scanned the grasslands and discovered that my road back had sunk into the darkness. The rolling plains that spread before me were pitch black, there were no campfires in sight. I knew that I’d have to sleep under the stars again. I sat down on a breezy slope and finished the biscuits I’d bought in Baingoin. Then I dug into my pocket and pulled out two pieces of dried yak cheese that I’d pilfered from a market stall. I popped one into my mouth. At first the taste was so sour that I nearly spat it out, but as the lump softened it produced a milky aftertaste that was comforting and familiar.

Before the night wind started to blow, I spread out my sleeping bag and snuggled inside with my shoes still on. I lay on my back, stared into the black sky and thought about life and death. For Tibetans, death isn’t a sad occasion, merely a different phase of life. But it was hard to understand the pilgrims who prostrated themselves for hours outside the temple gates, grating their heads on the ground. Why are men so afraid of retribution? I was hungry. My stomach was empty. A gust of air whirled through my abdomen and slipped out through my guts.

I rolled onto my side to ease the pain in my stomach. It was getting cold. I looked up and checked the direction of the wind, and was relieved to find that it was blowing from east to west. There was a river to the west, and then the flat plains, so that even if any wild dogs over there had caught my scent in the wind, they wouldn’t have been able to reach me. I took a dagger from my bag, held it in my palm and lay down to sleep. But as soon as I closed my eyes, I was assailed by terrifying visions: a wild yak stampeded towards me; a wild dog ran off with my rucksack; a wolf crept up behind me and silently clamped its jaws into my spindly neck; a pack of hungry ghosts surrounded me and gnawed at my ears, nose, hands and feet as though they were chewing radishes.

Then my mind turned to women, and the warm smell inside their bras.

I glanced back in the direction in which I’d come and saw a still, faint light. I reached for my camera, and through the zoom lens discovered that the light was a square air vent at the top of a tent. I hoped that the person inside might let me spend the night there. I climbed out of the sleeping bag and groped my way down the hill. Two hours later, I reached the camp. As I approached the tent, I made a small noise to check whether there were any dogs about. But no dogs leaped out, so I lifted the door curtain and peered inside. An old man was sitting very still by the fire. I greeted him in Tibetan. He turned his head towards me, but couldn’t see me clearly at first — he had probably been staring too long at the flames. It wasn’t until I sat down by the fire that he realised I was a Han Chinese. He smiled and in Chinese asked me where I was from. I told him that I’d been in the hills taking photographs of the sunset, and that yesterday I had camped in Duoba village. He said that he knew what a camera was. As a young man, he’d spent a few years at Sera Monastery repairing a bronze Buddha, and had seen a few Western and Chinese tourists. He had also been able to pick up some basic Chinese while he was working there.

I put my rucksack down and glanced around the interior of the tent. It was empty. The stones in the fire pit were burned through. It was obviously a popular site for nomads to set up camp. The old man had arrived here that morning, or perhaps the day before. I swept my eyes around the tent again, searching for something to eat, but all I could see were the old sheepskins he was sitting on, a saddle and an aluminium bowl. I asked him if there was any food. He said there was none. I put my hand over the fire. He reached behind him and pulled over some freshly cut wild grass and a pile of twigs. He continued talking to me, but I was too weak with hunger to hold a conversation, so I just grunted occasionally in response. As my mind began to blur, he got up, fastened his belt and walked out into the night. I spread my sleeping bag over one of his sheepskins, crawled inside and closed my eyes.