It was the first day of autumn, a sad day. Tsedo and Amnye were in serious discussion over breakfast, their conversation riddled with numbers. They were talking about the herd. Today the annual head count was due. Each family member was allowed by law to own only ten yaks, twenty sheep, and half a horse. Though what a nomad could do with half a horse, I had no idea. There were eleven family members in Amnye's tent and now he had a dilemma on his hands. According to his calculations, he had too many animals and today he would have to sell ten yaks, thirty sheep and four and a half horses to the Muslim slaughterers.
It was a difficult task deciding which ones should die. Many had been promised a safe life by the family and could not be sold. My yak, Karee Ma, was one such lucky beast. They knew each animal's name, and I listened as they recited the roll-call and determined their fate. It seemed inconceivable that every sheep could be so clearly identified, since they all looked more or less the same to me, but it added poignancy to the proceedings. Hardest of all to judge was which horse should go. The nomads loved their horses. When I had met Tsedup, he had told me that his family had fifty horses, five hundred yaks and a thousand sheep. But this was only a memory. He was shocked to discover that while he had been in England, the government had introduced new laws to control land division and livestock ownership. The vast herds that used to roam the great grasslands for hundreds of miles were now depleted and had been sectioned off by barbed-wire fences.
At this time of year, the only contented people were the slaughterers. With every nomad bringing animals to town to sell, they controlled the prices. The market would be saturated and such competition meant no profit for a man like Tsedo. For him, there was nothing to be gained but a few paltry yuan. In fact, it was difficult to see how the nomads made their money. I knew that Amnye received a small salary for his post as local councillor and that must have been the family's major source of income. They were big producers of cheese, wool, leather and butter, but they seemed to use most of this for their own subsistence and didn't appear to sell much. The butter was part of their staple diet; any surplus was stored in the family tent, in a skin-covered wooden box for the winter, donated to the monastery, or used to make butter lamps for the altar in the tent. The sheepskins were kept for making tsokwas, the thick winter tsarers, and the wool was spun and woven into dobshair, the textile hanging used to cover the items stored at the back of the tent, or felted to make mattresses, clothes, saddle-blankets or dalin, saddle-bags. The cheese was eaten or stored – it was so hard it didn't go mouldy. Sometimes it was traded for fruit and noodles when the Chinese entrepreneurs' three-wheeled truck brought provisions from the town to the tribe. The yak wool was spun and used for weaving the tents and braiding ropes. Only the occasional yak hide and some sheep's wool had made their way to town, as far as I had observed.
I had recently watched the men complete the shearing. They rounded up the sheep into a corral, which had once been 'houses' for the nomads during the Cultural Revolution. The ugly stone and concrete constructions looked like small railway arches, about twenty in a row. They punctuated the landscape all over Machu, like lines of abandoned gravestones. I found it difficult to believe that these tribal nomads, whose home was the land, had been forced to inhabit such dungeons. But today they had a new function. I had watched the sheep bleat and riot with brainless terror beneath the arches, as the men grabbed their horns and wrestled them, one at a time, to the ground. A man or boy stood on the horns while another sheared swiftly with huge scissors, sharpened with spit and stone. Once the wool had been cut, it was flung on to a huge pile and twisted into long skeins, while the sheep fled, bouncing comically into the air.
The family lived comfortably with none of the trappings of a materialist culture. They had a tape-recorder and sometimes bought cassettes of Tibetan music. Occasionally they bought new clothes or shoes, but normally it was the food and essentials with which the animals could not provide them: wheat or barley flour, rice, cabbage, spring onions, chillies, apples, oranges, watermelons, sugar, salt, matches, candles and, of course, tea. The nomads were big tea-drinkers. That was something we English had in common with them. In fact, it was so important to the nomads that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tea was compressed into bricks and used as currency. I had seen and tasted this brick-tea: it was a powerful brew made from the coarse leaves and twigs of the shrub, which had been steamed, weighed and squashed so solidly into bricks that it had to be ripped apart with some force. The Amdo nomads did not drink butter tea, as their Lhasa neighbours did, but occasionally they added milk to the black broth in the kettle. All of the family's provisions were bought by the sackload and stored at the back of the tent, apart from the vegetables, which were kept in a tin box in the corner and the fruit, which was devoured within half an hour. They always gave me a pile of apples to hide for myself before the children finished the lot.
They had few possessions and the ones they had were given away freely. If you admired something, they offered it to you with no qualms. Their Buddhist philosophy taught them the value of non-attachment to material possessions and I could see this clearly in their generosity. But the nomads also didn't like to be swindled by their Chinese neighbours and were shrewd at bartering. When it came to the animals, a man like Tsedo was no fool. He would try to make as much as he could from the sale.
The next day he left early with the doomed beasts. Sirmo, Shermo Donker and I were also bound for the town, but our trip was to be less harrowing. We girls were going shopping. Since the women were rarely away from the tribe it was a treat, and in contrast to the sober mood the herd count had induced, we were all in high spirits.
After breakfast we dressed in our finery. It was important that we looked our best to go to town. Sirmo and Shermo Donker scrubbed their faces and rubbed lotion into their ruddy cheeks. They moistened their hair with a highly perfumed balm and combed it long and flat, until it shone with greasy brilliance. Then they wove it into two plaits, one over each shoulder and tied the ends together, before flicking it over their heads, down their backs. They rummaged around at the back of the tent under the plastic sheet and pulled their best tsarers and silk brocade shirts out of an old rice sack. These were never used for work. In contrast to their everyday clothes, these were vivid and lustrous. I watched them tying their sashes. Although she was tough, Shermo Donker was so petite I found it difficult to imagine that she had had three children. As she pulled the fabric tightly around her waist, I noticed that her hips were no bigger than a girl's. By contrast, Sirmo was taller and more voluptuous. Her full breasts quivered beneath her thin shirt as she deftly rearranged the tucks and layers of her tsarer, checking her back, measuring the front, until she was satisfied. They polished and put on their best shoes and, finally, retrieved their jewellery from a wooden box and strung the coral beads around their necks. Shermo Donker's necklace was a family heirloom given to her by her mother. Between the coral, there were enormous amber orbs, the size of cricket balls. Tsedo had lent me his coral necklace that day and I wore it proudly and conspicuously over the top of my red silk shirt. We giggled at our new-found splendour.
They saddled the horses and helped me to mount. I was riding with Shermo Donker on Amnye's white horse, and Sirmo had the grey. They had placed a piece of foam mattress on the horse's rump for me to sit on and, for now, it felt comfortable. I put my arms around my sister-in-law's tiny frame and we set off at a gende walk, the children running alongside laughing, the dogs barking. It was a bright, hot day. The crisp grass crunched beneath the horses' hoofs and skylarks started from their nests into the blue sky. In the distance, the rocky summit of Kula stood jagged and stark above us. We made for the road, stopping at the gate for Sirmo to dismount and let us through before closing it again behind her. If nothing else, the fences kept out the wolves. The nomads had strung pieces of fabric tightly over the gate to cover any holes the predators might squeeze through, and Sirmo was careful to replace them exactly as before.
Then we discovered we had an addition to our party. Cherger, the dog, had followed us to the boundary of our encampment, and when Sirmo ordered him to return to the tents, he stood obstinately wagging his tail. As we continued through the grassland, he trotted loyally alongside us. He was obviously familiar with the six-mile journey and fancied a day sniffing out a different environment. But when he heard a bus's engine he started barking. The white vehicle had turned off the dirt road from town and was now bumping over the pot-holed track through the grass towards the tents. As it neared us, I peered curiously through the tinted windows and was astonished to see the excited faces of a group of Chinese tourists. They were pointing at us, laughing, taking snapshots. I was filled with dread: they were on their way to the tribe.
I turned away and ignored them. The girls did the same. Tsedup had told me about this sort of thing. He remembered them coming when he was a boy. They had parked their bus in the middle of the tribe and flashbulbs flashed. Then the rain had come and they had sought refuge in Jerko's tent. The nomads hadn't understood why they were in the tribe, but had let them in and served them tea anyway. They had sat on the wooden gamtuk, containing the family's tsampa, and hung their socks over the fire to dry, both sacrilegious acts. They had not realised their errors, but Jerko's wife had been furious.
A few weeks ago I had witnessed other curious visitors to the tribe. Sirmo and I had been washing clothes in the stream, when a jeep pulled up and a voice cried, 'Hi, there!' It was an American accent but I didn't know the people inside. I had felt a curious sense of loathing and had turned away as two Chinese men got out and walked towards us, followed by a Tibetan, who had smiled in embarrassment at us and given a half-wave.
'Do you know them?' I had asked Sirmo.
'I don't know the Chinese. I know the Tibetan,' she had replied.
From their dress I had realised that they were not from America but were English-speaking tourists from one of the big Chinese cities. The Tibetan was their guide. Judging from the size of the lenses suspended around their necks, I knew what they had come for. They had instructed the guide to ask Sirmo if she would stand by her horse so that they could snap her. I had felt her reluctance as we sat huddled together in our tsarers and I did not want her to perform for them. She told the guide that she didn't want to be photographed so they had reluctantly taken a few pictures of her horse, said goodbye, then driven off to photograph the rest of the tribe.
I had been galled by their blatant voyeurism and insensitivity, yet found myself struggling with my identity. Was I a hypocrite? I had been photographing the family and the tribe at odd moments in their beautiful, traditional costume. I knew they were photogenic. I knew they were a curiosity, part of a world that we 'civilised' nations had lost in the frantic race for development. In that respect I knew I was no better than these tourists. But somehow it was different. I was a part of things, and not just objectively pointing a lens at something beautiful. I was trying to capture someone, a member of my family, whom I respected and loved. They had made me a part of them and I was honoured.
That morning, the vulgarity of the tourists' actions had made me feel more of a nomad than I had felt before. Yet I would never be one. I was under no illusions. I was a westerner living the life of a nomad. There was a big difference.
The tourists were soon forgotten and we strolled on horseback through the dandelions, fording pebbled streams and laughing at the prairie dogs, who stood alert, yapping on their hind legs, then scurrying into their burrows. Below us, to our right, the river meandered through the sun-dazed valley from the eastern horizon. On either side the mountains slipped to the valley floor and a white spray of cloud flecked the otherwise blue-blank sky. The dog trotted amiably at our side as we chattered in the saddle. We passed an old man on horseback, who smiled, and a couple of young boys on yaks, who nearly fell off when they saw me. Shermo Donker started to tease Sirmo. It appeared that she did have a loved one, after all, but she was not giving anything away. We pleaded with her to tell us, but she just smiled coquettishly from beneath the brim of her hat. The only details we could extract from her were that he was beautiful and he wore a big earring. I wondered if she was hoping to catch a glimpse of him that day.
Soon we rounded the brow of a hill and saw the town spread out before us in the distance. It was low-rise, clinging to the valley floor, its tiled roofs packed together. Only the post office stood sentinel in the crush of concrete, the sun blazing brilliantly on its blue-glass façade: a symbol of progress. To the north of the labyrinth of squat buildings, stood the scarlet archway built by the Chinese to signal the entrance to the town. Tiny trucks trailed dust along the gravel road into the distant mountain valleys. We trotted down the track on to the flat pasture. It was two hours since we had left the camp. The dry heat of the midday rays toasted our cheeks, as the flies droned and the horses swirled their tails.
At the first set of dwellings on the outskirts of the town, Shermo Donker and Sirmo pulled up beside a mud wall and dismounted. They helped me down from the saddle and I slumped, numb, to the ground. 'Tsanduk errgo?' Sirmo asked, squatting in the ditch. I joined her, hitching up my skirts, then took the horses' reins so that Shermo Donker could relieve herself. This was an important pit-stop, I soon discovered. A trek across the grassland could play havoc with a girl's clothing and it just would not do to arrive in town without first smartening up. The next few minutes were spent nipping, tucking and tying until we all looked like new again.
We rode in like a scene from a Western, two abreast on the sandswept road, high in the saddle. The town was a dusty ramshackle of shops, restaurants, a market and street stalls all plying their trade. The buildings were concrete, some white-tiled, like a bathroom, some painted white with green and orange decorative borders under their eaves. Their doorways were crowded with goods, and people spilled out of watch-menders' and carpet-vendors' on to the pavements. A gang of Chinese schoolchildren in blue and white tracksuits ran from the gates, shouting hello. Nomads riding yaks jostled Han Chinese on bicycles. Sharp suits cruised on motorbikes through flocks of sheep. Muslim women bartered in black headdresses over wheelbarrows of fruit. Monks sat begging in burgundy robes at the market entrance, chanting prayers. Chinese pop and traditional Tibetan music pumped out from every doorway, while a shooting range emitted a relentlessly mundane, electronic refrain – Kwan ying, kwan ying, kwan ying, kwan ying.
We moved through the cacophony and came to rest at the crossroads in the centre of town. There we tied the horses to a telegraph pole and hobbled them as a small crowd began to form around us. I was obviously something of a spectacle: an old nomad couple cooed their satisfaction with my costume, grinning through blackened teeth; a group of Chinese workers in blue suits and caps stared, expressionless; a young nomad woman with fat, rosy cheeks and jangling earrings jabbered at me, throwing her hands in the air and squawking with delight. Shermo Donker took my arm and guided me across the road to a restaurant. We dived in as she cussed the dog, who was still following us. He lay down on the pavement to wait. Safe inside, she shouted for a jug of water and the Muslim waiter filled her bowl. As he walked back to the kitchen, she called, 'Arro! Tangwan! Oi! Waiter!' He turned and she quick-fired her order in Tibetan while Sirmo gave hers in Chinese. I ordered a bowl of tanthuk, gesticulating the action of flicking dough pieces into water. Sirmo translated. The restaurant was one big room with Formica walls and four tables. A mirror spanned one wall and a bar stood opposite. The sunlight filtered through the net curtains and formed doily patterns on the yellow linoleum floor. A couple of nomads stared, unblinking, at us as they slurped their noodles and smoked simultaneously in the corner. Off the main room were four doors leading to smaller, private dining rooms. This was a common feature of Chinese restaurants, as most people preferred to eat discreetly, especially the officials, who would carouse for hours. But there were no restrictions and anyone could relax in seclusion with friends or family.
As if on cue, the door to one of these rooms opened and Tsedup walked out. He was wearing his tsarer and a cheeky grin of surprise on his face. I had not seen him since yesterday and was amused to find myself blushing with pleasure at the sight of him. He was followed by his younger brother, Gondo, and as they were both a little bleary-eyed, I concluded that they had probably been ruminating over a bottle of rice wine in the confines of their shady room. There was a lot to catch up on. They sat with us for a while, smoking and teasing us, as we devoured our food. Then they paid for it quietly, and left to wander the streets. I felt like a young girl who had bumped into her boyfriend. It wasn't the done thing for men and women to hang out together here. Even if I had wanted to, I wouldn't have gone with him: today was our girls' day out and I had no intention of deserting the side.
When we had finished and Shermo Donker had licked her plate clean, we stepped out into the street. Shopping was a serious business and these women were no different from me when it came down to a bit of retail therapy. Soon I was being steered from shop to shop as they examined, prodded, poked, measured and tasted. They were like methodical housewives in the January sales. No shopkeeper was going to get the better of Shermo Donker. She was a seasoned professional at bartering and pulled me away from any purchases she deemed unreasonable. She knew the Chinese traders were out to make a fast buck from someone like me. They ushered me into their shops, eyes glinting, rubbing their palms together. Everywhere we went people asked the same questions: ‘Is she married? How old is she? Does she have children?' She evaded their impertinence with a swift retort of 'She's a namma,' implying that I had just got married and didn't have children yet. But the pressure was on. A woman of thirty with no brood was unheard-of. In the street the nomads stared amazed as I wandered conspicuously through the small crowds, feeling uncomfortable. Some old men stood transfixed, staring blankly at me, and I wondered what they were thinking. Some women, who had heard about the English bride, stopped to point and exclaim quite vocally to their friends, 'Look, namma!' I was really under the microscope. Most of the old nomad women smiled at me, examining my costume, murmuring, 'Sweet.' I was touched that they acknowledged my attempts to assimilate with their way of life. When they chatted to me and discovered I spoke a little of their language, they were even more delighted. It was strange to them that I wanted to be a part of their culture. In Machu only a few Chinese spoke the Amdo dialect: they saw it as the responsibility of the nomads to learn Mandarin, and the nomads assumed that a foreigner such as myself would demand the same. I was a mystery, a phenomenon, a friend.
Still, it was important to keep moving. If I stood for any time on one spot in the street, a small crowd would rapidly form around me, a sea of unabashed, staring eyes. It was tolerable for a short time and I would perhaps focus on some distant space or pretend to be absorbed in examining an interesting purchase. Then I knew it was time to move on. But I couldn't blame them for staring: this place was so remote that the locals had rarely seen a western face. Perhaps a handful of tourists each year would venture this far into the wilderness. Also many of the nomads hardly ever came to town as their encampments were often far away, so I understood their bewilderment at witnessing, probably for the first time, a white face, a long nose, eyes like marbles.
We took a break from the shopping in a poky wooden shack, where Shermo Donker barked for three plates of rungpizz. The cold ribbon noodles, covered in tofu, chilli, garlic and vinegar, were delivered to our table by a surly Muslim woman. She flung the plates down in front of us and Shermo Donker scowled and snapped at her carelessness. The woman snapped back. Rungpizz was the nomad women's favourite afternoon snack and was called 'the women's tuckpa' by the men. It was hastily devoured by Sirmo and Shermo Donker, who sucked on the slippery noodles, splattering juice liberally on the plastic tablecloth and wiping their chins with the back of their hands. I did the same, but nearly choked as the hot chilli stung my throat. 'Ka tsag.!' They giggled. 'Mouth hurts.' The nomads had a high tolerance for chilli, which sadly I lacked. I drank some water and paused to catch my breath.
Outside a Chinese man in a cap and blue jacket was selling chickens from a wheelbarrow. They were crushed into cages, piled three deep, squawking and flapping pathetically. A small boy was prodding them through the bars and recoiled, giggling, when they pecked him. I watched a Chinese customer arrive. The chicken-seller selected some birds and pulled them from the cages for the man to look at, stuffing them back when he seemed uninterested. Finally he chose two birds. The chicken-seller strung them together by their feet and suspended them upside down from the rod on his scales. Then the man paid and squashed them into the front pannier of his bicycle, one upright like a passenger, the other upside down, and rode off past trucks full of yaks, driven by Muslim slaughterers. That day, all manner of life was doomed for the dinner table.
It struck me that the Chinese were especially cruel in their treatment of the animals. Their methods were at odds with the concerns of the compassionate nomads. I had witnessed extreme examples of this, such as the fish outside the post office. The nomads were appalled by the shallow basins of river creatures gasping for life at the street-traders' stall. They saw the fish as sacred. They would buy them from the Chinese to put back in the river. Of course, the traders knew this so they continued catching the fish. It was a profitable business.
The dynamic between the three different peoples in the town was intriguing. A fragile hierarchy supported a population that seemed to exist only by being tolerant. According to the local guidebook, the Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (of which Machu was a part) had a population of 600,000,which was predominantly Tibetan, then Chinese, with the remainder made up of other ethnic groups. The book boasted a harmony of interests, due to the Communist Party's policy on minority nationalities in the prefecture and its open-door policy which, it claimed, saw that everyone adhered to 'one central task, two basic points'. The central task was the priority of animal husbandry, which was the major area of production, with cereal growing and forestry as its two sidelines. With 3 million livestock in the area, providing 30,000 tons of meat, 4,000 tons of milk, 1,000 tons of wool, 90,000 pieces of cattle hide and 29,000 sheepskins, it was not hard to see how important the nomads' lifestyle was to the local economy. Yet, on the social scale, as far as I could see, the Han Chinese condescended to the nomads, whom they saw as inferior and dirty. The Tibetans were disgusted by the Muslims' obsession with killing, and thus condescended to them. Meanwhile, the Muslims stuck together and profited from their astuteness for trade.
At the table in the noodle shack, I toyed with a yuan note. Like the guidebook, it celebrated the harmony of races with a picture of a Tibetan woman next to a Muslim, next to a Chinese, and a few words from their different languages. I paid the cheerless waitress with it and she scowled ungratefully.
That afternoon we bought needles, cotton, woven trim, shiny fabric, cooking utensils, a new basin for washing in, hair balm and soap. Sirmo treated herself to a tiny pot of face cream, and she and Shermo Donker bought identical new shoes for the winter. I bought a pink shirt, sweets and wa ha ha, small bottles of milk shake, for the children. We stopped at a hoop-la stall that had been set up in a courtyard and threw plastic hoops. Our neighbour won a wok. Sirmo missed a blanket by an inch. She was distracted: looking over her shoulder for a sign of 'the beautiful one with the earring'. It was getting late now and we still had to get to the jewellery shop. Cousin Dolma was waiting.
When we arrived she was standing, like a doll in her Tibetan costume, behind the glass case of treasures and ornate knives, chattering to the Chinese jeweller in her impish voice. She was the nomad women's contact for getting good jewellery made. Today Sirmo wanted her earrings changed to include more silver chains and coral, which Shermo Donker had given her. I had been given a lump of silver by Annay and Amnye to have my own earrings made. They thought it wrong that I didn't have any nomad jewellery. They wanted to spoil me. I chose some small turquoise stones and showed Dolma the design I had drawn up. Then she huddled in conversation with the jeweller, who winced at it through his eyepiece. He nodded his approval. Our new accessories would be ready in a week, Dolma twittered. Would we like to come back for dinner? She had just bought some meat. We declined politely, but walked with her back to the horses.
The streets were dim and most of the shops were closing. A few street-lamps were lit and straggling shoppers toiled home with their wares through the pools of light. Even the monks had ceased chanting at the market entrance. In their place, an old beggarwoman was sifting through a box of rubbish and bruised fruit, mumbling and cursing. We filled up the saddle-bags with our purchases and untied the horses. Shermo Donker gave me their reins and darted into one of the last open shops. She wanted to make the most of her freedom. It was already too late to get back in time for us to tie up the yaks. Indeed, I realised, she had had no intention of being early. Despite her conscientiousness, she was a rebel today.
Eventually we rode off in exuberant spirits out of the town and into the wide open spaces of the grassland. They teased me bawdily about the saddle sores between my legs and all the way home we sang to the sky and screamed the wild cries of the horse-racers, with shameless tongues. 'Ngoo sajermek! You have no shame.' We laughed lustily. Women didn't do this sort of thing. Yet we were alone and who cared? It had been a great day out. We laughed until the sun fell over the snow mountain, until all I could see was the white of the horse's hide as the ground spun beneath me in the blackness. Then all I could sense was the homely scent of smoked dung on the night air.