We had told Huang we were very interested in learning about “dongba,” the special script used by Naxis for hundreds of years. Although it’s quickly fading into the sunset of other dead and dying languages, dongba is the center of an earnest revival effort, since it has the unique status of being the only pictographic language currently used in the world! We saw many examples of dongba on signs and walls throughout Lijiang. Huang arranged for us to spend the afternoon learning about dongba script from one of Lijiang’s very few masters of the language, who is also a renowned wood carver – a happy combination of two of the girls’ big interests! We found his shop along a narrow lane crowded with nondescript souvenir stalls. His shop’s sign, which says, “dongba language,” was written in Chinese, pinyin (the Roman-alphabet transliteration of Chinese) and dongba itself, so we knew we were in the right place. Teacher Liu’s magnificent carvings crowded the walls of the shop.
Huang seemed happy to be doing something new, and asked us to keep trying to think of things to do that would be new to him as well! Teacher Liu first gave us an introduction to some of the common characters in dongba script.
To start our language lesson, the girls (and me!) were eager to ask Teacher Liu if he would give us names in dongba. First we wrote out our Chinese names. He looked at them thoughtfully, wrote down some characters, then turned to his dongba dictionary for inspiration. While he was considering, I looked up and saw an amazing-looking woman walk by under a towering, black velvet headdress. “She is a Yi minority,” said Huang, and stepped outside to chat with her in the local Yunnan dialect. It turned out that she was down from the remote hills, where most Yis live, visiting her cousin in Lijiang – like us, she was simply a tourist enjoying the sights! Huang asked her politely if we could take a photo with her, and to my surprise, she obliged.
...but after a week of travel and feeling not beautiful at all, it was nice to hear! Huang explained that many old people don’t like having their picture taken – which I had often noticed – not because, as I had thought, that they had philosophical reasons against it or because they disliked tourists, but because they consider themselves ugly! Huang confessed that he, too, used to think that the wrinkled, old faces of rural elders were unattractive, but that more recently he had come to appreciate the strength of character and different kind of beauty to be found in such faces. Teacher Liu composed great names for all of us, using dongba characters to approximate the sounds of our Chinese names. The next step was to carve them into wooden plaques – but first, the girls got to paint them! He does the carving in his shop, but the painting takes places at his house – our next stop! Just steps away from the shop, and up a narrow flight of stairs, we entered a different world behind the bustle of the street.
After a round of snapshots, we headed back down to the shop to start the main event: wood carving! Teacher Liu warned that the hard wood would be a little difficult for the girls to carve, so he first demonstrated the technique and encouraged them to practice on a scrap piece.
The sight of two foreign kids sitting in the shop, carving wood and chatting away with Teacher Liu in Chinese, drew the attention of quite a few passers-by.
When we saw it revealed, we immediately realized that such an enormous and beautiful work of art was far beyond our means; moreover, we knew it deserved to be somewhere other than a private home. Teacher Liu told us that he conceived of and completed the mammoth painting during the months of the SARS epidemic in early 2003, when China virtually emptied of tourists. He hopes one day to sell it to a museum, and we hope to see it there one day, too.
In addition to their carvings, the girls had Teacher Liu inscribe their dongba names onto stone “chops” for them to use as signatures. And to keep the dongba message alive on a daily basis, we also went to a design-on-the-spot t-shirt store, where the saleslady decorated their shirts with their favorite characters from their dongba names. Now they can carry the culture to the wider world! Next: Morning
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