Life: The village of three eyes
After looking east and west at the entrance of the village for a long time, I finally saw a young woman who was thirty years old away, carrying a bamboo basket and holding a young child in her arms, and the child was crying and making trouble. To our overnight request, the young woman readily agreed. We followed him to her house. The house was very dark, and the young woman stood in front of a figure and spoke: I met these two people at the entrance of the village, and they were going to spend the night. After saying this, he squatted down to the fire, and soon the fire in the fire was burning vigorously, and the fire light illuminated the house in a flash. To the left of the fire pit sat an old woman with her eyes closed, squirming her dry mouth, and her left hand flicking a string of rosary beads; to the right of the fire pit stood a young man with a little boy holding his left leg. The man waited to see me and Zhang Ke, and rushed to get a mattress and spread it on the bench, beckoning us to sit down and rest. When we sat down, a little embarrassed to say, there is nothing good to eat at home, please don't be surprised, let the young woman Zhang Luo dinner.
The master's family was called Nyima, and the young woman was his daughter-in-law, who had been married from the weli area of Mangkang County, Tibet. During the conversation, it was learned that the two families were originally relatives. The little boy who had just held his left leg was the son of his daughter-in-law's sister, whose mother had died of illness two years earlier and whose family was poor, so they took the child and raised him. The boy had a clear eyebrow and sat quietly on the side.
The meal was quickly prepared, white rice on scallions scrambled eggs, butter tea. Eating very comfortably, Zhang Ke said repeatedly on the side, "Delicious and delicious." "The wind swept away the food in the dishes.
Nyima's daughter-in-law kept pouring firewood into the fire, and the whole house was lit up. Nima's house was newly built, and the inside was not yet partitioned, and the main house was simply surrounded by a few wall panels. Nima said it took two years to build the house. Because the timber cutting point for the construction of the house in Xieda Village is very far away, behind the hill, it took more than 100 days to cut off intermittently, and the wood was pulled back to the village one by one, and the preparation of materials took a whole year. From the foundation of the house to the construction of the wall, to the erection of the pillars, to the paving of the floor, it is all thanks to the help of the whole village and relatives. The nima family's house cost a total of more than 30,000 yuan, and all of them had to be invested to more than 60,000 yuan.
The money for Nyima to build a house comes from matsutake and cordyceps, and when the price is good, only the income of matsutake can reach 20,000 yuan, which is the most in the village. His daughter-in-law's hand in picking matsutake mushrooms is particularly good, and she can collect an average of more than 100 yuan a day. When it comes to picking matsutake mushrooms, Nyima said that picking matsutake mushrooms mainly depends on luck, and no matter how busy people are, they can only pick up a little bit, and sometimes they have to leave empty-handed. Nima said his luck was neither very good nor bad, and was medium.
"The blessing is really innate, and those who do not have the blessing will fall even if they put the blessing on their forehead." One year, the two of them went to pick matsutake mushrooms together, drilled in the forest for half a day, and the daughter-in-law picked several pounds, but he only picked up a few flowers, not the kind of thick. He sat down against a tree to rest, smoked a cigarette, and his daughter-in-law picked more than 20 strong and strong matsutake mushrooms around his ass.
Picking matsutake mushrooms is fun. Nyima spoke less formally.
When it comes to the season of picking matsutake mushrooms, the mountain forest is bustling. People hold a "bapai" (a wooden hoe used to pick matsutake mushrooms) in their hands, cats waist, like devils looking for mines, carefully, aiming around on the ground, can not find matsutake mushrooms, anxious, eyes are green. Of course, this is a part of the people, and some people are a little indifferent, as if they are specially here to play, and jokes, and sing songs, tired to find a place to lie down and sleep. This kind of person is the happiest, and perhaps the mountain god is also amused, and basically will not return empty-handed. When they found the matsutake mushrooms, they were not busy picking, first find a suitable place, put down the "Bapai", and then kneel down to thank the gift of the sacred mountain, "Benevolent mountain god, thank you for your selfless gifts, I cannot repay, I am under your care in this life and this life from birth to death, thank you!" ”
Nyima spoke eloquently. In the story he was telling, a swollen indescribable thing surged up in my heart, churning and churning, and suddenly I felt a sour nasal cavity.
There are not many fields in The village of Xieda, and each family has only four or five acres. Because of the high altitude, the land is barren and only produces one season a year. The main crops are cold barley, winter wheat, potatoes and vines. Yields are very low, with only 250 to 300 kilograms per acre, some of which are fed to livestock, and simply cannot meet the need for rations. The inability to provide for grain is a problem, and it seems that the rural areas do not eat much of their own barley and wheat, and eating white rice has become a habit, and rice has become a staple food.
When it comes to Tibetans eating white rice, I think of an old man I interviewed. Before liberation, in order to pay off debts, he began to travel to Dali, Lijiang and Lhasa, Kalunda in India, and Calcutta from the age of twenty. The old man's greatest wish in life is to eat a full meal of white rice, he said, as long as he can eat a meal of white rice, there will be no regrets in this life. The old man's wish came true, and in his old age he really ate white rice, and white rice changed from myth to reality. In the years when even their lives were tied to the waistband of their pants, they played for the lives of the soldiers (bosses), but except for the sticky and dry nests, they rarely ate rice. White rice with white flowers, the old man said with emotion, these foods that have nothing to do with him, even dreams of it. When I was herding horses in Lijiang Huaping, I sat on the hillside and looked at the rice in the field, one after another, golden rice, and the rice piles of white flowers that transformed into the height of the mountain, how mouth-watering. But don't talk about rice, a section of sugar cane is hard to find. In Huaping, a few horse-driving men had to be angry in order to taste the sweetness of sugar cane. The old man still remembered the disgraceful incident: "A few of us discussed it, they went first, I looked around, I didn't see anyone, so I ran to the ground and pulled a sugar cane and turned around and ran, but a woman who came out of nowhere stopped the way, the woman didn't say anything, bent down and took off the shoes on her feet, snapped three times on my head, and snatched the sugar cane from my hand." I felt a buzzing sound in my head, standing there like a stake. We horsemen have rules, can not quarrel with women, otherwise it will be obscure, there will be a lot of unsatisfactory things on the road, the boss will be very angry when he hears about this kind of thing. "This man, who was born and died on the long and arduous Tea Horse Road, had no more thoughts than to pay off his debts, but to eat a meal of white rice comfortably. In June 2002, I took the old man to Kunming, a city that had rice with white flowers. On the plane, the old man looked at the undulating mountains on the Tea Horse Road from the porthole and sighed with emotion, "I didn't expect to fly over the footprints of that year when I was about to be unable to walk." ”
The villagers of Schida eat white rice because they cannot feed themselves with the grain they grow, and the rice is bought from outside. The money to buy rice was earned by picking matsutake mushrooms and digging up cordyceps. The money to buy rice alone costs at least 2,000 yuan to 3,000 yuan a year, plus buying oil, which costs almost 4,000 yuan. These are all given by the mountains, if there is no pine mushroom on the mountain, there is no cordyceps, then what else do we Schida people eat?
"Grains and grains are Ganlin's sons, and black-headed Tibetans are the children of the forest." From the side of the fire came the words of the old woman who seemed to be saying to herself, "This is the Dangbu (proverb, teaching) handed down from the old ancestors." The old woman cleared her voice and said that we have three eyes in this village, one is "Gong Qisong" (the Three Treasures of the Dharma Monk), one is a sacred mountain, and the other is a mountain, rivers and forests. I translated this sentence to Zhang Ke, who pondered for a long time and said in a low voice, this sentence is too good. The old woman said she got up, hunched over her waist, and went to sleep.
I inexplicably felt that the old woman was like a wild cat through the vast night.
I asked Nyima about the respected old man in his village, and he said that anaki was the most respected Aqu (home teacher) in the whole village of Jiangpo, but he had been invited by a family in Jiangpo to chant the scriptures for several days. Aniji is more than 70 years old, but his body is very strong, and he often recites the sutra to his neighbors.
That night Zhang Ke and I slept on the roof, the sky was full of stars, and occasionally there was a pheasant or two from the dark night. Zhang Ke said that it was so good that he could sleep in the bed and look at the stars and fall asleep.
I told him that's how I slept when I was a kid. When I was a child, I went to sleep in the open on the roof in the summer, and the family slept in a row. Overhead is a brilliant starry sky, the night floats with the rich aroma of plants, insects chirping, one after another, fireflies shining green light flying in the air. On a moonlit night, you can see the forest on the mountain, the path on the mountain, the temple, the buckwheat field on the mountain, the small dam halfway up the mountain, where there are two springs... Sleeping under the stars on a summer night, listening to the stories of my aunt, the stories of the two brothers, the stories of tea and salt, the stories of Aktonba, the stories of Memetso, the girl who could not meet her beloved, has been lurking in my memories of summer. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, it will suddenly rain, and I will quickly get up from the bed and move the sleeping bunk under the eaves. Sometimes, I don't care about the small raindrops, I sleep with my head covered, and the raindrops get bigger and bigger, crackling, and by the time I move the sleeping bunk, the quilt is already semi-wet. Of course, summer can sometimes give people sadness, such as heavy rains will cause floods, mudslides, and rush down from the mountains, making a terrible loud noise, which is frightening. I remember one night, my father was out looking for a side job, and my brother was not at home. In the middle of the night, it suddenly rained heavily, and soon the mudslide was clucking from far and near, and the mother quickly took a bamboo basket and climbed to the roof, buckled the bamboo basket upside down on the ladder, and the mudslide that rushed straight down magically turned in direction. My mother hugged me and stood in front of the window for a long time, silently weeping.
Will it rain in the middle of the night? Under the sudden rain, let the ungrown grow out quickly, so that the children who have been unearthed become strong, so that the mountain forest after dawn is filled with a rich aroma of matsutake mushrooms. in Tashi Nyima