Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood at the End of the World

Rating:
Summary: Run, Namu, Run--Taking the road less traveled by.
Review: Fascinating. This is a very absorbing book, told in an easy, personable style. To be sure, some of Namu's reminiscences seem to have come to us right out of Huckleberry Finn-they strain credulity just a little. Like when she goes to meet her pen pal, and reacts violently to the fact that he is not the way she had pictured him: "How dare you be so ugly!" This book is Namu's life as told to an anthropologist, and some of the anecdotes appear to have been tweaked a bit for effect. Namu herself alludes to this when she says that her words were "filtered through another's imagination." And I had to chuckle at the publisher's promotion on the dust jacket: "Despite the freedoms Namu enjoys, they are not the freedoms she desires." Such could only be written by an affluent American. Freedoms? When little Namu was warming her frozen extremities in the flow of a yak's urine, the furthest thing from her mind was how bored she was with her "freedom." That being said, I do think that Namu speaks from the heart, so this book really is a sincere accounting of Namu's life growing up as a Moso... "with a few stretchers," as Huck Finn would say.

I was a bit confused at the beginning of the book, because Namu seems almost to glorify the institutionalized promiscuity that permeated the Moso lifestyle, although, to her credit, she honestly admits to the venereal disease that was a result of it. But as the book progressed, I began to understand her a little better. She seems to want to emphasize that her running away from the village of her childhood is not a repudiation of everything in her past. In order to be fair, I decided to accept her position for the sake of argument and see where it led.

To the extent that this book is a defense of a fatherless society, it does not succeed. A society where there are no fathers--where marriage is not respected as a sacred institution, where nobody ever says, "'Till death do us part," where the father is never more than a guest in the home, where people literally do not know how to tell the difference between "sexy" and "beautiful"-such a community and such a culture is not a place people want to move to. It is a place people want to get away from, which is what this book is about. But if the Moso have not been divinely chosen to lead the world to utopia, who is qualified to sit in judgment of their way of life? Certainly not the Americans. Nowhere in the world has promiscuity become more thoroughly institutionalized that in America. The Americans have lost the ability to distinguish between romantic love and conjugal love. And this in a society that once nurtured such distinctions as the defining qualities of civilized society. No, if there is a culture somewhere that stands in contrast to the Moso ethic, it is certainly not America, where people say, "I do," but don't.

So I depart from judgment and focus on the very personal story of a young woman who is determined not to be stuck in the rut of the destiny her family tradition has mapped out for her. She is determined to break free. To go beyond. To live, to discover, to explore, to be free! Suddenly I have found someone I can really relate to. What was it that made my grandfather leave his home in Norway, and come to America to live as a homesteader? It wasn't money. He was the oldest son; he had inherited the family farm. And what made my father leave the comforts of America and go to postwar Japan as a missionary? Again, it wasn't about money. When I graduated from high school in 1972, my classmates were all getting summer jobs and preparing for college. I packed all my belongings in my brother's army duffle bag. Then I had my sister take me to the nearest freeway, and I stuck out my thumb.

There is something I really like about this lady. For me, the most powerful part of this book is that moment in the kitchen of the country schoolhouse when she destroys the cooking pots. I wanted to grab a hammer and help her. Then I wanted to crush those blasted pots to a fine powder! Run, Namu, run! Go! Leave! Get out! Run, run and don't stop running! There is a big world out there! All kinds of opportunities await you! A rut is just a grave with both ends kicked out. Get out now!! Fly! Be free!

I give this book my highest recommendation, because in the end, it really is a story of the triumph of the human spirit over the crushing weight of what everyone expects you to do. To be sure, there is always more to the story than just running. Far too many have made a life of running and running and running and never finding. And if what you are leaving is bad, what you go to could be worse if you are not careful. Like the pathetic-humerous adventurer in Bette Bao Lord's "Legacies" who "escaped" to North Korea! But I'm wandering. The point is that Namu did not allow her past and the expectations of her community to define who she was to become, and in that sense, her story is a triumph, and her life is an example to young people everywhere who are faced with similar choices. This is the story of a courageous young lady who took "the one less traveled by" and it made all the difference.

Rating:
Summary: About more than 'walking marriages'
Review: The best beginnings are always the simplest.

In Leaving Mother Lake, the reader is instantly drawn in as Namu begins her story by pleading with her mother to share the details of her birth. With this seemingly simple request made at her mother's knee, Namu unfolds the world in which she grew up and all of the important players. She tells her own coming of age story but she also shares the stories of her village and her people.

It's easy to see why she wanted to leave such a remote and impoverished place. What makes Namu's story special is how much she feels indebted to her culture and her people for producing her.

Everyone has great stories about their childhood but some of Namu's are particularly expected. For instance, this is probably the first time readers will come to know a little girl who was so cold while herding yaks in the mountains that she stuck her legs in the yaks' stream of urine during Winter mornings to feel warm, even if only for a few moments.

A truly spectacular memoir.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent glimpse into the daily life of this culture!
Review: This is a nice, interesting, quick read that really takes one into the heart of this village and culture.