From her bed on the ground, Wen tried to make some deductions about her hosts, but found it impossible to guess how well-off the family was from the many gold and silver hanging decorations, the battered tools, the large number of bowls and jars, and the limited bedding. Everything felt very new and strange to her, not least the peculiar odor of dung, sweat, and animal hide.
The sound of footsteps drifted in from outside and, for the first time in her life, Wen felt how peaceful it was to have one’s ear to the grass and hear the sound of the human tread. When Zhuoma reentered the tent, she was surrounded by a crowd of people of all heights and ages. As Wen lay there looking up at their unfamiliar faces, her head swam.
Zhuoma introduced their hosts. There was Gela, the head of the family; his wife, Saierbao; and his brother, Ge’er. The family had six children but only four were present because two of the sons had entered a monastery. Wen found it impossible to follow the Tibetan names of the six children. They seemed even more inscrutable than the Latin names in the medical dictionary that she had never been able to memorize. Zhuoma explained that each of the names contained a syllable from the sacred mantra that every Tibetan uttered hundreds of times each day: Om mani padme hum. She suggested that Wen just call each child by the single syllable from the mantra: this would make the oldest son Om and the next son, who was at the monastery, Ma. The two daughters would be Ni and Pad. Me would refer to the other son who had gone to a monastery, and the youngest son would be Hum. Wen asked Zhuoma to thank the family for her and watched their shy smiles as Zhuoma translated.
Over the following weeks, Wen was nursed back to health by Gela and his gentle wife, Saierbao, who fed her milk tea mixed with herbal medicine every day. Zhuoma told Wen that the family had delayed moving to their spring pastures until she was fit enough to manage the journey.
The two women discussed at length how they should proceed in their search. Zhuoma thought that they should stay with the family until the warmer weather came. By summer, they would both have learned enough to survive outdoors, and the family would have built up their reserves of food and might be able to spare them some provisions and a couple of horses. Wen was alarmed by the idea of such a long wait. What might happen to Kejun in the meantime? But Zhuoma reassured her. The family was planning to travel northward to find spring pastures. Perhaps, she said, they would meet other nomads or travelers on the journey who would be able to give them news of Kejun and Tiananmen.
Wen had no choice but to accept her situation, although, lying weakly in her bed, unable to join Zhuoma as she helped the family with their tasks, cut off from conversation by her inability to speak the language, each day felt endless. As she convalesced, she watched the Tibetan family’s routines. She was struck by the rigorous order of their days, which seemed to follow a pattern that had remained the same for generations. Each member of the family went about their business with very little verbal communication. Everyone seemed to know their place and their days were filled to overflowing with jobs to be done.
Gela and Ge’er, assisted by the oldest son, Om, were responsible for important matters outside the home, such as pasturing and butchering their herds of yaks and sheep, tanning hides, and mending their tools and tent. Zhuoma told her that it was they who would go off and leave the family periodically in order to trade for household items that were needed. Saierbao and her two daughters did the milking, churned the milk for butter, cooked the meals, collected the water, and made the dung cakes that would provide heat, cooking fuel, and light for the tent. They also spun and made rope.
Wen was full of admiration for the skills that made the family’s self-sufficient life possible, but was daunted by how much she had to learn. Even eating their meals involved learning a whole new set of rules. Except for the cooking utensils, there were no forks, spoons, or chopsticks in the tent. The only eating tool the family used was a ten-centimeter-long knife that hung from their waists. The first time Wen tried to use one of these knives to cut a hunk of mutton, she nearly speared her hand. The children, who had crowded around her in amused curiosity as if they were watching an animal at play, gasped with horror.
The family ate the same three meals every day. In the morning they “licked jiaka.” A dough made from roasted barley flour and curds was heated on the stove and placed on one side of a bowl. Milk tea was then poured into the other half of the bowl. While they drank their tea, the family would turn their bowls so that the tea absorbed the jiaka, gradually washing it away. There was no need for cutlery. The first time Wen was given breakfast, she drank all the tea in the bowl in one go and then asked Zhuoma how to eat the jiaka. Once she was used to it, however, she enjoyed the sensation of partly drinking, partly eating her food, and found a way to avoid burning her mouth.
The midday meal was “mixed.” This involved making tsampa out of ground roasted barley and curds. Holding the bowl in one hand, Wen used the other to roll the ingredients into little balls. “Rub first, turn second, and grasp third,” she would repeat to herself. The meal was always very generous: in addition to tsampa and milk tea, there would be dried meat boiled on the bone, which the family picked off with their knives. The little boy Hum showed Wen how to rip it apart with her hands and gnaw on it. There would also be delicious fritters fried in butter. Wen could see that this was an important meal for everyone: it could last for nearly two hours and the normally quiet family would spend some time discussing problems that had come up in the day. In the evening, the family ate meat and barley flour again, but cooked into a sort of gruel in a way that reminded Wen of the hula soup she had drunk in Zhengzhou.
Each meal was so health-giving and nutritious that Wen’s cracked skin healed and her cheeks became rosier every day. Already she could feel her body getting stronger and her skin becoming tougher as it adapted to the harsh winds, the cold, and the sharp sunlight. The family appeared to accept her presence, but they never tried to speak to her. They would talk only to Zhuoma, of whom they appeared to be in great awe. Later, Zhuoma would tell Wen what had been discussed. Excluded from all conversation, Wen sometimes felt like one of the family’s animals: protected, gently treated, watered, and fed, but set apart from the human world.
The religious practices of the family made her feel even more of an outsider. They prayed constantly, muttering the mantra “Om mani padme hum” under their breath even as they worked. They frequently came together for prayer ceremonies where the father, Gela, would turn the heavy bronze cylinder above the altar by means of a length of rope and lead the family’s incantations as they spun little wheels on sticks. Zhuoma explained to Wen that both the large cylinder and the smaller wheels were prayer wheels. She depended heavily on Zhuoma for explanations about everything and gave thanks that she had been fortunate enough to encounter such a brave, clever woman. Had it not been for Zhuoma, she could never have begun to understand this family who, with their deep spirituality and carefree self-sufficiency, was as different from the Chinese as heaven and earth.