Chapter 13 Traveling Notes

We worked late that day, and around ten o’clock that night—almost eleven, really—we noticed that all the workers were looking at the snow-capped mountains in the distance.

Fatty and I also looked up and saw that a star had appeared on one of the snowy mountains.

It must’ve been Poker-Face’s flashlight, because it was moving very fast. Even as it traveled along the top of the mountain, down the cliff, and into the valley, it seemed to maintain the same speed.

As everyone stood there puzzled, the German girl came up with a strange theory: it was Totoro’s bus traveling along the snowy mountain.⁽¹⁾

I didn’t know what she was talking about, but it did sound familiar.

The star almost looked like a ghost wandering around the snow-capped mountains because it would appear for a while before disappearing behind the other mountains. Then, it finally jumped down from the cliff right by Jila Temple’s gates.

I looked down at my watch and saw that it was 11:47.

At this time, everyone started to realize that the star was actually a person.

We decided to call it a day. As everyone rushed to see the star, Fatty and I took a little dip in the hot spring to relieve our exhaustion and then also went down.

Back in the room, Poker-Face had already fallen sleep. Apparently, the journey was very hard even for him. Fatty and I also lay down, and I started to think about what to do with tomorrow’s project. On the one hand, the spring water had continued to overflow after it reached the snow pit and was now flowing directly down the cliff into the temple, seeping under the bluestone slabs on the temple floor and making a big pool.

The project in the temple may be more urgent, but I wanted to hurry up and build a second-floor room above the shack we had just built by the hot spring.

In other words, I wanted to use the existing shack as the foundation and build an attic above it.

There was no need for a stove in this attic space because the hot spring would be right below it. The whole building would be very warm and the floors would all be hot, which could help treat back pain.

These two projects were both big endeavors.

But before I could make up my mind, I fell asleep within seconds.

That night, I had a beautiful dream where a huge furry bear was carrying what looked like a lantern dango made up of more than thirty lanterns.⁽²⁾ The bear had a lot of pouches on it—much like a kangaroo—and each of us hid in one as it took us on a wild ride around the snowy mountains.

All that running made the bear hungry, so it dragged Fatty out of the pouch with its claws and ate him.

I was so frightened that I jerked awake. That bear wasn’t trying to be a mother, I thought to myself, we were just snacks!

Even though I had woken up early, I was still in good spirits. I glanced around and saw that Poker-Face was still sleeping, which was rare, and Fatty was still snoring away. I quietly got up and walked outside the room.

I returned to the construction site, climbed up, and soaked in the hot spring for a while. Once I had warmed myself up, I went and sat on one of the nearby rocks, which still kept me very warm.

I looked off into the distance, where the snow-capped mountains shimmered under the starlight. The Milky Way was especially bright here—since Jila Temple was completely dark at this time, the magnificent stars looked like they were right in front of me. As long as you looked up at the night sky, you wouldn’t only see shooting stars but a vast expanse of stars as far as the eye could see.

I was completely empty as I lay against one of the wooden posts with a felt blanket wrapped around my naked body and warm stones under my butt.

Those stars slowly seemed to morph into various animals and people from all kinds of stories. It was like the sky was putting on a show, and all the stars were acting out a resplendent epic.

In a trance, I saw a star-studded band of light emerging from the mountain and slowly approaching Jila Temple. The band of light was like a train going up and down the snowy mountains.

I wasn’t entirely sure if I was imagining it, because from that point on, I started to become drowsy and then fell into a deep sleep.

When I woke up again, I found that a young lama who had arrived early had mischievously painted a lot of Tibetan characters on my body. When I took a closer look at them, I found that all their meanings had something to do with laziness. This lama was from the Menba ethnic group and was very young. He always made fun of me for being lazy, but he did bring me breakfast.

I sat with him by the edge of the hot spring and ate my breakfast while he told me Menba folk tales. Ever since the sun first started rising over the golden mountains, the Menba people’s literature was mainly focused on “Zhuo Bagulu”, which meant “the shepherd’s song”. The young lama had already taught me “Taibo Galie” three times, so I could almost recite it backwards.⁽³⁾ But he was a talker who would always start chatting with me whenever he saw me. I figured he was just using me to practice his Chinese.

I was halfway through listening to him talk when I decided to find an excuse to interrupt him. “Is there any recent news in the temple?” I asked him.

The young lama didn’t mind the interruption and said, “Deren came back last night and brought the people of Kangbaluo with him.”

<Chapter 12><Table of Contents><Chapter 14>

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TN Notes:

(1) “My Neighbor Totoro” is a 1988 Studio Ghibli film that’s super famous. It tells the story of a professor’s two young daughters (Satsuki and Mei) and their interactions with friendly wood spirits in postwar rural Japan. Totoro is the large spirit they befriend and he takes them on a giant cat bus to go visit their mom in the hospital.

(2) Dango is a Japanese dumpling made from rice flour mixed with uruchi rice flour and glutinous rice flour. Dango is usually round-shaped and three to five dango are often served on a skewer.

(3) Basically sounds like an oral tradition. “Taibo Galie” is a long narrative poem that’s a large-scale and widely spread work. I couldn’t find anything in English but the Chinese sites seemed to say that it was about Taibo Galie, the ancestor of animal husbandry. In response to the prayers of the people, he brought them a sacred cow and vividly described the labor process of animal husbandry to them. The poem is in free form, with three or five lines in each stanza, with varying syllables. The singing is accompanied by dances. One person disguised as a shepherd, namely Taibo Galie, holds a cow and dances while singing. I got that info from here.