Saving Fish From Drowning. Amy Tan

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       3 SUCH WAS THEIR KARMA

      Lateness, I would have reminded my friends, is one of the deadly sins on a group tour, not to be tolerated, and punishable by the fates in any number of unforgiving ways. But this rule and warning were not established early on, and after that mistake of a lunch, my friends spent an additional twenty minutes locating everyone so they could board the bus.

      Rupert had taken off down the road to check out the rock-climbing possibilities, and because he was fifteen and utterly unable to discern the difference between five minutes and fifty, not to mention between private and public property, he had managed to climb a stone wall and trespass into a courtyard housing six hens and a disheveled rooster. Roxanne was capturing arty footage with her camcorder of Dwight walking down a deserted road. Wendy had located some photogenic children who belonged to the sister of the chef’s wife, and she busied herself taking pictures with a very expensive Nikon while Wyatt made faces to make the kids laugh. Bennie was adding shading to the sketch he had made of this local Chinese bistro, a dilapidated building at a crossroads that appeared to lead to nowhere. Mr. Fred, the bus driver, had wandered across the road to smoke a cigarette. He would have stayed closer to the bus, but Vera, who wanted to board, had asked with exaggerated waves of her hands that he not contaminate the air around her. Miss Rong was in the front seat, studying a book of English phrases. Moff also got on the bus, and lay down at the back for a five-minute nap. Heidi boarded and applied a disinfectant to her hands, then put some on a tissue and wiped down the armrest and grab bar in front of her. Marlena and Esmé were doing their best to use the latrine with its perilous pit. Bad as it was, they preferred privacy to open-air cleanliness. Harry had gone searching for a better loo and in doing so saw a pair of interesting red-breasted birds with twitchy eyes.

      This tendency for people to wander off was already becoming a habit, with Rupert and Harry vying for first place in being the most dilatory. When everyone had finally been rounded up, Miss Rong counted heads: the black lady, the plump man, the tall man with horsetail hair, the kissing girl, the man who drank too many beers, those three with baseball caps, another two with sun hats, and so on, until she reached eleven and had to start over again. At last, she found the requisite twelve. She gave the signal to the bus driver with a triumphant “Zou ba!” and off they went.

      The bus’s transmission and shock absorbers were put to the test as Mr. Fred lurched into oncoming traffic and in Russian-roulette fashion passed slightly slower vehicles on the uneven road. The combination of bad suspension and frightful suspense was ideal for inducing motion sickness in almost everyone. Heidi felt no queasiness whatsoever, thanks to her anti-nausea wrist device. And Rupert was also unaffected and was even able to read from a black-covered paperback, Stephen King’s Misery, which held as its ignominious bookmark a page of the notes I had worked on so laboriously.

      Stone Bell Temple lay ahead. I had hoped my friends might learn about the importance of its holy grottoes and their carvings, many created in the Song and Tang dynasties, with the more recent ones completed in the Ming, several hundred years in the past. By seeing a medley of ancient Nanzhao, Bai, Dai, and Tibetan images, they might have sensed how streams of minority tribes’ religions had joined the dominant—and often domineering—Chinese river of thought. The Han Chinese have always been good at absorbing motley beliefs yet maintaining their own as paramount. Even the Mongols and Manchus, who had conquered and ruled them since the thirteenth century, had assimilated Chinese ways and had virtually become Chinese themselves. Think about this, I would have said to my charges: as we go into this temple, think about the influences of tribes, invaders, and rulers upon one another. You see remnants of their effects in both religion and art, in essence those areas that are expressions of the spirit.

      The bus rumbled on. The tribe they were about to meet was the Bai, and my twelve friends would have a profound effect on them, and vice versa.

      “Hey, Dad,” Rupert called out, holding up the page from my notes, “get this.” He began to read what I had written: “‘One of the shrines is most aptly named the Grotto of Female Genitalia.’” Rupert snickered through his nose in an unattractive way and neglected to read further, where I had written the following: “Many tribes in this region believe that creation begins from the womb of darkness and death. Thus, there is a profound reverence for grottoes. This particular grotto is unspectacular but delightful, and contains a rather plain and small shrine, about twenty inches in width and twenty-four in height, and carved simply in the shape of a vulva surrounded by labia onto which have been inscribed tributes over the centuries to fertility. The grotto symbolizes fertility, and fertility is fervently worshipped in China, for to lack fertility is to lose one’s family line, and a family without heirs is consigned to oblivion, darkness, and the permanence of death.”

      No, sad to say, my queasy friends did not read this, although their imaginations had become quite fertile. The Grotto of Female Genitalia: What could such a curiously named place look like? Collectively, the women envisioned a primordial cave emanating warmth, mystery, comfort, safety, and innate beauty. The men pictured a cleft in the mountain with overgrown bushes behind which was a tiny entrance that led into a moist cave, and Bennie’s imagination further embellished is as dark, slimy, and filled with screeching bats.

      Before they reached СКАЧАТЬ