Two Hundred Thousand Kowtows[4] to Reach the Dreamland
THIS DREAM REPEATED itself two or three times long before he became a zhaba[5]. In the same dream, he was stricken by the same tall and majestic snowcapped mountains and a vast expanse of lake, but he had no idea where they were. His master told him that only in Tibet could he find a place like this.
The Hard Life of the Child Gong Bao
I should start Gong Bao's story from the tenth year of his life.
Ten-year-old Gong Bao was riding on a bony horse, with his mother and a man walking by his side. The man, a Khampa (native of Kham, a historical region), was not his father. Back in their hometown of Huangyuan in Qinghai Province, his father was still kept in the dark when his mother took him and eloped with this man.
When they had eaten up all the fried qingke (namely barley flour, a kind of cereal), zanba (made of roasted qingke), dried meat and butter tea, mother and the Khampa's footsteps were even more faltering. The bony horse was the first to die from hunger, but following a Tibetan rule, they would not eat it. Gong Bao, hiding under his mother's Tibetan robe, stared at the dead horse in the snow with helpless and horrified eyes.
The three of them allayed their hunger with wild herbs. The placentae of the Tibetan antelopes could have served as their food, but vultures and the other bigger birds always got the upper hand. In desperate hunger, they finally climbed over the snowy Tanggula Mountains, welcomed by a scene of luxuriant grass and blooming wild flowers. Gong Bao, having picked a bunch of vibrant yellow and purple flowers, ran to his mother to hand them to her. His mother, however, looked at him blankly and reached out to Gong Bao's small tough hands instead of the flowers and led him into a tent.
The world inside the tent was just like that outside, with all the grass and flowers. Mother whispered a few words to the man in the tent, who nodded and handed her a small bag of highland barley. With that bag made of sheepskin in hand, Mother walked out of the tent to the Khampa and to the vast grassland.
At the end of the grassland was an endless extension of snowcapped mountains.
Gong Bao followed them, running, until he was too tired to run any more. He stopped by two stones and looked at them. The stones were moving and bleeding. He stopped crying. After a closer look, he realized the moving bloody stones were his own little feet.
Gong Bao kept gazing into the distance for months and months from the front of the tent. The grass turned from green to yellow, the flowers withered, the dim sun set, and the grassland was once again covered with snow. The owner of the tent was always busy milking, making butter and cheese, killing sheep and eating mutton. So Gong Bao's only companions were black yak and white sheep.
At last, grass sprouts broke through the snow cover and grew with drops of crystal-clear dew on the tips. There were yellow chrysanthemums, purple gesang, and green saussurea involucrata.[6] Once, Gong Bao was sent by the tent-owner to look for a stray lamb.
He was walking toward the edge of the grassland when the fragrance of butter was wafted along by a wisp of smoke from afar. Several pilgrims on their way from Qinghai to Lhasa had stopped for a rest. They were cooking buttered tea in the open air.
Eleven-year-old Gong Bao, following the footsteps of the pilgrims, headed for Lhasa.
On Bakuo Street in Lhasa, Gong Bao miraculously saw his mother. He stared at her indifferently for a long time before finally walking up to her. Her face was much more detached than her son's. Mother grabbed a ball of roasted barley flour from her dirty wooden bowl and fed him, saying, "You're still alive! Now go anywhere as long as you can survive."
Since then, Gong Bao's stiff sheepskin robe became even thinner and more ragged, and the louse in his hair grew much more fleshy.
At the age of twelve, Gong Bao became a lama at Drepung Monastery. He fled because of hunger, but was caught by an older lama and a servant and was hung in a dry well after a thorough beating-up. That night another young lama saved him. He rushed out of Lhasa that very night and headed home.
When he finally arrived home in far away Huangyuan in Qinghai Province, he found his father had lost heart in him long ago.
Having nowhere to go, Gong Bao went along the main road to Lanzhou, capital of Gansu Province. Somehow, he sleepwalked and ended up in the battlefield of liberating Lanzhou. The PLA took him in and he became a soldier. The leader sent him to study at the Northwest Institute for Nationalities, where he didn't understand a word because all the teachers spoke Mandarin Chinese. Shortly after he went down to Sichuan Province with the army, a paper transfer order sent him to Xinjiang Province on a Soviet aircraft. Onboard was an elegant young man, also a Tibetan from Qinghai Province, a person with whom he could finally talk. At that time, Gong Bao had no idea who this man was except that his name was Tu Huaying.
Soon enough, Gong Bao became a soldier under Li Disan and was sent to north Tibet with Li's advance force. All the other soldiers cared for him because he was the youngest among them, so he suffered little when the army went short of food and clothing.
Once, there was a negotiation between Li Disan and Ngari local government representatives. Since Li's translators had all fallen ill that day, he took Gong Bao as his chief interpreter, thinking that as a Tibetan he must have spoken the language. However, it turned out that Gong Bao couldn't understand a word of Ngari Tibetan. After Li Disan's death in the war and after the liberation of Ngari, Gong Bao grew to become the backbone of the army.