The Ends of Kinship. Sienna R. Craig
also effect younger women:
I thought I could not get pregnant the first time I had sex. But I did.
I lost one baby when it was four months inside me. The doctor in Kathmandu said he would take care of me, but he put in something that caused me pain [an IUD]. He didn’t tell me. I bled so much, I thought that I would die.
I studied global health and feminism in college, but there I was at the clinic anyway, waiting for something I never thought I’d need.
A woman in her forties was sterilized by tubal ligation. She tells me that her womb was removed but that her monthly cycles continue. A new mother wipes away her colostrum. She has been told that this yellow liquid is impure, that she should wait to feed her infant until the white milk comes, sweet and salty on the tongue.
We live the knowledge we are given.
REPRODUCTIVE HISTORY (A HUNDREDS EXPERIMENT)
In the beginning, water. Remember, what are now mountains was once sea. After this, Tibetans describe a coupling of monkey and ogress. He sought crags, a place to cultivate mind. But place breeds desire. She was crag, rock, plain; forest, river, peak. Soon, she birthed the multiples. Later, they will say the bodhisattva of compassion engineered this union, that Buddhism tamed the wildness of a place once known as feminine ground. Over time, bodies made peace with the lightness of air, the thinness of atmosphere. Local biologies hold many possibilities for survival. Still, genetic forgetting happens quickly in the lowlands.
I listen to hundreds of women recount reproductive histories—songs of innocence and experience. Calculations overwhelm: thirteen pregnancies, six living children; eight pregnancies, two miscarriages, a stillbirth, four living children; more rarely, five pregnancies, five living children. A friend has five children but had nine pregnancies. The twins died. A third child succumbed after a seemingly endless labor that my friend was lucky to have survived. She bore three more pregnancies, two more children. The names of her children come to me easily. I know each of them. But, that summer, I learn the ghost numbers. It takes a different kind of asking.
After many tries, we fail to read the pulse of an ancient woman wearing Chinese Ray-Bans, as fake as she is real. Is it blood coursing through her, or memory? The grandfather she calls “husband” does not speak. He spins his upright prayer wheel, sinks into a natty carpet. Children, near a dozen born, fade into the revelation that this woman has spent nigh eight years, a century of months, three thousand days spinning the wheel of blood and bone, waiting for a blessed gasp: breath to last beyond the present; breath thick with possibility; breath seared by loss.
A night of sickness in a Lhasa bathroom. Then, the ultrasound conveyed what I could already picture: watery womb, fuzzy tangle of new life. I carry her across the wrinkle of a year. Before I leave the high country, a doctor predicts she will be “big and dumb,” karmic payback for my remaining in the mountains. My body tells different stories. Still, her warning nestles in. She has mopped up so much death. My labor unfolds in a hospital on the other side of the world. Forty hours can be a lifetime. Here, forty hours might have taken my life.
FAMILY PLANNING
The lama and I sit on a grassy knoll beside the village water tap. The cliff out of which his monastery protrudes towers over us. The monk’s shaved head is covered by a rust-colored wool hat, and his robes are tea stained yet neatly folded. He is telling me about the school he runs—a hybrid institution that includes monks, nuns, and a few lay children in one of the hamlets north of Monthang. He has adopted this mode of education because, otherwise, he fears that all the young people will leave the village for boarding schools or monasteries elsewhere. He is worried, among other things, about religious lineage.
The monastery in his charge is a Kagyu institution. “But everywhere these days it is only Sakya,” he says, exasperated. “The parents see that they can get their kids a free education if they send them off to one of the big monasteries in Kathmandu or India, but they don’t think about our own places. They just send them down. And what do we do? We bring in kids from outside. Import-export. Look at Chöde in Monthang or the Tsarang gönpa,” he says. “Do you see Loba kids there? Not many. Most are from Dolpo. They are Gurung or Tamang or the children of laborers who come up to do construction or work in fields. Mustang kids fill up Tibetan monasteries in the south, and our own gönpa become places for outsiders. It should not be this way!”
The lama rolls his prayer beads between his palms and blows on them out of habit, before wrapping them around his wrist. He speaks of the well-educated monks from Mustang, the ones who have gone off to Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong to attend senior Tibetan Buddhist teachers or expound the dharma themselves. “It is good to spread the Buddha’s teachings,” he says, “But for every opportunity, there is an obstacle. For every act of virtue, the possibility of sin. Too often I think these people are ‘om money padme hum.’ They lose their humility and forget the land they come from.” I laugh at his pun. From mani, “prayers,” to “money,” cash.
“The other big problem is the medicine women take. You know, those injections and pills to stop babies from being made. This is sinful. Since women started this practice, we’ve had trouble in the monasteries.”
I swallow and wonder how to respond. “What kind of trouble?” I ask.
“Families used to have five, six children. Older sons would become ngakpa, and middle children went to the monastery or nunnery. But now, people are only having two or three children. This is not enough!”
He tells this story of demographic decline as a morality tale. I think of other stories.
The great expanse of territory that stretches from Mustang and other Himalayan borderlands across the Tibetan Plateau was once envisioned as the supine form of a wrathful demoness. She needed to be subdued—literally staked down to Earth—for Buddhism to thrive. Mustang is marked by the demoness’s dismemberment. Her entrails are reborn as a row of mani stones. That chalky mountainside is her liver. Her heart becomes the 108 chöten that radiate out from Lo Gekhar, one of Mustang’s oldest monasteries, a place associated with Guru Rinpoche and the building of Tibet’s first monastery, Samye.
Much can be said about this story. Buddhism emerges from these acts of gendered violence, even as it is a practice of peace, a way of supplicating and sharpening the mind. I am left considering the need to tether agentive feminine power in order that enduring structures of Tibetan and Himalayan society could be built, could flourish. This says nothing about what it feels like to be pinned to place or to be tethered to one’s body and its wily capacity for making life.
“Sometimes it is difficult for women to have many babies,” I say. “It can be hard on their bodies and their heart-minds.” I remember stories of miscarriages and maternal deaths, secret abortions and efforts to keep contraception hidden from husbands. I think, also, about the Tibetan word for “woman,” kyemen, and its etymological parsing: kye is birth and men indicates something that is lower, below, lesser than.
“I’m a monk!” the lama answers. “What do I know of women’s bodies?”
THE GRANDMOTHER HYPOTHESIS
In the summer of 2014, I visit Dolma in the two-bedroom walk-up in Queens, where this friend from Lo Monthang now lives. I’ve come to meet her first grandchild: a baby girl born five weeks prior in a New York hospital.
“Come inside,” Dolma ushers me into her small living room. Nyima, her daughter, sits on the floor in front of the TV, looking tired and proud. I coo at the swaddled, sleeping child and place a kathag and other gifts beside this newborn. As the baby sleeps, Dolma and I sit on the couch, speaking of the pathways that have led to this new life.
Dolma was born in Tibet and came to Lo as a teenager to attend the queen. Eventually, Dolma married a local man. She gave birth to three daughters and another child who did not survive. For three of these