Читать книгу The Ends of Kinship - Sienna R. Craig - Страница 21

A Facebook notification appears on my computer screen as I sit writing in the library in early June 2018. It is Choesang’s first birthday. He is Yangjin’s son.

What is remarkable about this event is neither the substance of the pop-up notification nor the time-space compression that brings me heart-to-heart with his mother in Kathmandu nor is it the ability to virtually peer into a private family celebration. No. What is remarkable is the marking of the birthday itself.

Yangjin and her husband are not the only young couple from Mustang who have adopted this cultural ritual. Birthday parties have become a thing. From Nepal to New York, people are sending out invitations, renting halls, or reserving banquet rooms in fancy restaurants. At times, they are connecting a first birthday with the official consecration of a marriage. They are celebrating with sparklers, streamers, and elaborate meals. Birthday parties have become a site of conspicuous consumption and also a new form of ritualized reciprocity—a moment to give money, always an odd number for good luck, placed in an envelope marked with your name. As with weddings and funerals, people keep records of the giving.

A generation ago, a first birthday would not have been marked at all. In fact, to call attention to such a moment could have been viewed as inauspicious. It would be considered dangerous to shine a spotlight on a new human being, one who might still be vulnerable to nöpa and other forms of harm, who might not survive to age two or age five, let alone into adulthood.

This is to say nothing of dates and calendars. Among people in their forties or older from Mustang, knowing the precise day of your birth is unusual. In contrast, the day of the week you were born often lives as part of your name. Lhakpa, for instance, means “Wednesday.” This can be useful for astrological calculations. Likewise, the time of birth, the season, the animal year in which your birth occurred, and the relationship between your birth moment and the coming of Losar, the lunar new year, are all important. But assigning a birthdate in the Gregorian or Nepali Vikram Samvat calendar systems has been, for many generations from Mustang, an ex post facto act. It wasn’t that important.

So, too, with birth certificates. To be born at home, especially in the village, meant that you did not receive a birth certificate. This form of “making paper”—getting the government to recognize your existence in official terms—took effort and was not always successful. A turn toward clinic or hospital births has been coupled not only with the creation of a paper trail but also with a demographic transition away from larger families and a public health turn toward infant and child survival. As I stare at the Facebook pictures of birthday hats and candles, of a cake bedecked in sugar roses beside platters filled with more traditional offerings of nuts and fruits, I think about the radical nature of this cultural turn toward celebrating the very young, away from the elderly.

Tharchang celebrations are markers of liberation from householder responsibilities for people who have made it into their seventh decade of life. Just as first birthday parties are on the rise, tharchang rituals are becoming rarer in Mustang. In great part, this is because the aging generation cannot really afford to “retire.” Even with remittances, there is work to be done: farms to manage, animals to husband, hotels to run, village meetings to attend, grandchildren to care for.

Although Mother’s Day has not taken on the social import of birthday parties, it is a holiday moment that people from Mustang, particularly those in New York, are beginning to celebrate.

In May 2017, I attend a Mother’s Day party at the Elmhurst Community Center. It is organized by several young women—themselves unmarried and not yet mothers—who have gone to college in the U.S. and whose fiery adoption of feminism, along with a sense of devotion to their community, moves me. When I arrive at the community hall, kathag in hand, the African American security guard at the entrance asks, “You lost?” I assure him that I am not.

Spring coats are strewn about the foyer. The hall has been decorated with banners and balloons. Long folding tables line the sides of the room. One table has been set up at the entrance. There, I buy a $15 ticket. I am told that, after recovering expenses for food, a Nepali DJ, and decorations, any remaining funds will go toward the language and culture classes held for Loba children each Sunday in the basement of an apartment building in Queens.

The room is filled with women of different ages. I recognize some only vaguely; others, I know well. I see Tenzin, the wife of an old friend. She brings me a flimsy aluminum plate piled with fried beef jerky, pounded rice, spicy chickpeas, and a donut made of rice flour. This woman’s sister-in-law, whom I have not seen in many years, but with whom I had spent time long ago in Pokhara, comes up next. She smiles, wraps her arms around me. We sit together, holding hands. Soon, there are selfies.

Some in the room wear chuba and woven aprons. Others sport skimpy off-the-shoulder shirts, tight pants, stilettos. All fashion sensibilities are welcome here. One of the organizers explains, “We decided to have the party on actual Mother’s Day, Sunday, because we wanted it to feel special. But we knew that some people wouldn’t be able to come, because they have to be back at their live-in jobs by Sunday.”

I see another familiar face—a face from the past. A late-twenties nail technician and a mom of two reveals herself as the girl from Dhi who was adopted into the home of a trekking lodge owner in Jomsom. We used to make tuna sandwiches together in the German bakery on the far side of the Kali Gandaki. I remember her navy blue school uniform, her plaited hair.

We eat, talk, dance. I am asked to make a speech. “It will be good,” one of the organizers says, “for them to hear you speaking Nepali and our language. It will encourage them to value their culture.” I am embarrassed and nervous, but I take the microphone. I speak, mostly in Logé, telling them how happy I am to be here, how hard they all work, how difficult it is to be a mother. I say that it makes me feel old but also glad to see people whom I knew when we were younger, back in Mustang, and that I am encouraged to know they are doing well here.

Everything I say feels inadequate. When they ask me to sing, I freeze up. All I can muster is “Happy Mother’s Day to You …” repeated to the tune of “Happy Birthday.”

Later that evening, I recall a poem I once wrote to my mother, on the same annual occasion, when I was about seven. At that time, our small household was fracturing. Divorce was imminent. I was at once too young to understand motherhood and old enough to intuit something of what it means to be a mother. The poem went like this:

Moms. The people who hold the world together.

They take care of their joy through all sorts of weather.

They take care of the house, every last toy.

I’ll learn from her as she learned from her mother.

And someday, I’ll pick up a toy, and I’ll know

I’m a mother that holds the world together.