Naxi, My Lost Inheritance
By Abala
Naxi is a minority group with its own language. Naxi people are smart. Naxi women are hardworking. Naxi music is ancient. Naxi script is one of the oldest scripts. For years, I have been telling people about Naxi, with a tint of pride in my heart. But it was not so when I was growing up.
I was born in Weixi, a Lisu Autonomous County which borders with Lijiang, the Naxi’s heartland, and surrounded by peers who only spoke a southwest dialect Chinese, I used to feel ashamed for being a Naxi. My shame was intensified whenever I longed to distance myself from my mother, from whom I got the Naxi blood. My mother was,at least so I thought in the past, illiterate. She had never gone to school. My mother was also paralytic. In a tractor accident on her way back from Lijiang,her back was seriously wounded. From then on, her health went worse and worse until she had to either sit on a wheelchair or lie in bed. I felt her incomplete. Unlike other healthy mothers who could accompany their children to school, she could only stay at home. I was left alone. So, as a revenge perhaps, I deliberately avoided learning my mother’s language too.
