The Vine Basket

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

A Note from Mamatjan Juma,
Uyghur Service Editor, Radio Free Asia

Author's Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

 

Clarion Books 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003

 

Copyright © 2013 by Josanne La Valley

All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

 

Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

 

www.hmhbooks.com

 

Map art by Jennifer Thermes

 

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

La Valley, Josanne.
The vine basket / by Josanne La Valley.
p. cm.
Summary: Life has been hard for fourteen-year-old Mehrigul, a member of the Uyghur tribal group scorned by the Chinese communist regime, so when an American offers to buy all the baskets she can make in three weeks, Mehrigul strives for a better future for herself and her family despite her father's opposition.
ISBN 978-0-547-84801-3 (hardcover)
[1. Basket making—Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 3. Farm life—China—Fiction. 4. Ethnic relations—Fiction. 5. Uyghur (Turkic people)—Fiction. 6. China—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.V2544Vin 2013
[Fic]—dc23
2012021007

 

eISBN 978-0-547-84805-1
v1.0413

 

 

To the Uyghur people of East Turkestan in their struggle to preserve their language, culture, and religion and to live freely in their own land

 

 

 

Uyghur is pronounced
WEEgur.

M
EHRIGUL SCANNED THE CROWDS
at the market, looking for Ata. Surely by now her father had spent the yuan they'd made from the sale of a few peaches. But there was no sign of him along the dirt paths that were lined with the autumn harvest from nearby farms, the green and red peppers, the onions and potatoes piled high on donkey carts or spread out on blankets. Ata was not among those bargaining for turnips or carrots or meat cut from hanging carcasses of sheep.

He'd been gone long enough to get drunk. Wasn't that why he had brought her? Each Wednesday he left her alone with the cart for a longer and longer time.

Her gaze shifted to the mounds of honey peaches that lay unsold, the pile of willow baskets. Until her brother went away, it had been his job to come to market. Memet had insisted Mehrigul come, too, during her summer vacation.
She arranges wilted radishes so they look good enough to eat,
he'd told Ata.

She could arrange the family's goods, but she had no gift for selling. When Memet was in charge, they'd sold everything, and their legs swung happily from the edge of the empty cart as their old donkey pulled them home.

That seemed a lifetime ago. It had only been eight weeks.

“Are you all right?”

The woman selling yarn next to her had called out to her. Mehrigul was standing, gripping the edge of the cart. She forced her hands to loosen their hold and made a slow turn to face her neighbor, who sat on a crate pulling yarn into her lap, winding it into skeins.

“Would you mind watching my cart? For just a few minutes?” Mehrigul asked.

The woman waved Mehrigul away. “Take your time. Neither of us has many customers today.”

Mehrigul bobbed her head. She put two peaches into a basket and walked off. A hard-boiled egg would take away the pangs of hunger, if not her troubling thoughts.

 

As usual, the egg woman squatted on the ground next to the seller of pots and pans. Piles of eggs and discarded shells lay on the same green ground cloth she always used. Mehrigul's classmate Hajinsa sat in front of her on a long, rolled-up rush mat she'd obviously just purchased, leaving no room for other customers who would have squatted in the accustomed manner and purchased or bartered for an egg.

Her high and mighty self sat there, her tall, slender body supple as a willow branch, her perfect red high-platform sandals and red stockings showing beneath her long blue skirt. After paying for an egg, she began peeling it, picking at the shell and carelessly dropping it bit by bit onto the ground.

The egg woman noticed Mehrigul first. Then Hajinsa glanced in her direction.

“Mehrigul, come,” Hajinsa said, gesturing for her to share the seat. “Why haven't you been in school?” Rather than wait for an answer, she turned away. Blew a huff of air. “Your headscarf, tied under your chin. You try hard to look like a peasant, don't you?”

Mehrigul found her feet—no, her ugly, cheap baby strap shoes—glued to the dusty pathway.

“Better watch out,” Hajinsa said, taking a bite of egg before turning around to look at Mehrigul again. “You're the kind they send to work in the factories on the coast.” She hitched her shoulder. “Unless, of course, your family has lots of money to pay a fine.”

Mehrigul's eyes blazed hatred at Hajinsa, but the truth in Hajinsa's words left her numb. It was already the end of October, and she hadn't been to school for even one day. She knew her name might be on the local party chief's list of girls to send away to slave in the factories of the Chinese, far from her own Uyghur people.

“Sit, Mehrigul.” The voice of the egg woman broke through her stupor. “Sit next to Hajinsa. It's not often there's such a soft place to rest.” She held out an egg.

Mehrigul clamped her jaws shut as she forced one offensively ugly shoe after the other over the mat and took her place.

“Have you brought something for me?” the egg seller asked.

Mehrigul handed over the peaches, basket and all, taking the egg in exchange. “My grandfather would want you to have the basket, too. Not many have sold today.” Mehrigul allowed her eyes to meet those of the egg woman—kind eyes. “The basket will be good for holding throwaway eggshells.”

“Thank you,” the woman said, removing the peaches and setting the basket in front of Hajinsa's red shoes.

Hajinsa didn't seem to notice. She pulled money from her pocket. Bought another egg. Again plucked off the shell in tiny pieces, letting them fall anywhere.

Mehrigul cracked her egg with a quick press of hands, peeled it, and carefully placed the shell in her grandfather's basket before taking a bite.

“So, are you coming back to school?” Hajinsa asked.

Mehrigul finished chewing her mouthful of egg. Forced herself to swallow. “Of course,” she said, then twisted away for fear her face would reveal the reality she'd never admit to her classmate—that with Memet gone, there was no hope of her going to school.

As she turned from Hajinsa, she saw Ata. His back was to her, but it was unmistakably her father standing there with a group of men around a gambling table, no more than eight meters away. Mehrigul could not mistake the blue jacket she'd washed so often. The
dopa,
Ata's own brimless, four-pointed cap her mother had made for him.

Ata was throwing yuan from their morning's earnings into the pile on the caller's table.

“I must get back to my cart.” Mehrigul rose, but not before the egg woman pressed another egg into her empty palm and held her hand for a moment.

Mehrigul walked past the stacks of pots and pans. At the far side she allowed herself to steal a glance back at the gamblers. Her hands shook as she put the eggs—one half-eaten, one whole—into her pants pocket, but her mind stayed clear. She did as Memet had taught her: looked for a spy. Not Chinese; Han Chinese never came to the local market. He would be Uyghur. One of their own. Sold out to the Chinese. Paid to hang around the market dressed as a peasant, gathering information on men who might be plotting against the government. Reporting them.

Memet had been certain he was being watched. He wanted nothing to do with the Chinese Communists and their rules. He was a splittist; he wanted Uyghurs to have their own separate country where they could speak their own language and practice their own ways in freedom. Their land had once been called East Turkestan, and that was what Memet wanted again. He'd had no trouble saying bad things about the Han, only he was careful not to say anything in front of the wrong person. Ata had gotten angry when Memet talked like that, but maybe Ata was a splittist, too. Was he careful about what he said when he was drinking?

Mehrigul narrowed her eyes. There was no one behind the gamblers, only empty, shuttered stalls, a parked motorcycle. Nor was any man lingering close enough to overhear what the gambling men were saying. A few women were nearby examining kitchenware, the rows of teakettles and enamel platters and bowls spread out on the ground on the other side of the egg seller. Spies were never women, Memet had told her.

Maybe a man who drank and gambled wasn't of interest to the Chinese, Mehrigul thought as she took a long, fierce look at Ata. He was only harmful to his own family.

Ata's drinking and their poverty had already trapped Ana in her own hopeless world. Withdrawn and silent. Ashamed of being poor, she would no longer see friends. What would her mother do, Mehrigul wondered as she trudged back to the cart, if Ata were arrested and taken to a detention center?

The wool seller was in a flurry when Mehrigul returned. “A woman came. A woman came,” she kept saying. Mehrigul had no idea what she meant. The piles of peaches and baskets seemed the same as when she left.

“A foreign lady,” the wool seller said. “She wants to buy your basket.”

“All the baskets are for sale. Three yuan,” Mehrigul told her. Their neighbor had bought baskets from them before. She knew the price.

“No. No. Your special basket.” The wool seller pointed to the vine basket that hung from the crossbar on the cart, where it had been since midsummer. It was a cone-shaped basket holding a single sprig of cotton. “She's coming back,” the wool seller added.

“My basket?” Mehrigul bit at her lower lip. Not believing. Wondering what she should charge. One yuan? Half a yuan? She had only twisted together some old grapevines.

Mehrigul loosened the twine that attached the basket to the crossbar and held it in front of her, for a moment remembering how her fingers had seemed to move by themselves as she and Memet sat resting near the grape arbor one summer afternoon. He kept cutting long, thin vines and she kept weaving them in and out, making a funnel about thirty centimeters high. A cornucopia, Memet said. Nothing useful like the baskets her grandfather made that could hold the wool seller's skeins of yarn or that a woman could use in her kitchen. It couldn't stand up or hold much of anything. Yet Memet had liked it and said they should use it to decorate the cart. They added the cotton to remind them of the small village where Ana had been born, a special cotton township where the women grew and spun the cotton for the men to weave. Occasionally Memet and Mehrigul stuck in a flowering squash vine for color.

Right now her cornucopia was the color of parched earth and desert sand. Mehrigul removed the cotton sprig and gave it a shake, then snapped her fingers against the cotton bolls to release more dust. She cleaned the basket with the bottom of her shirt as best she could and retied it to the crossbar.

Even as she pulled her vest down to hide the stains, she knew there was no way to conceal her soiled blouse or wrinkled pants or ugly shoes except to stand behind the cart when the lady came. But she could tie her scarf in back.

Mehrigul loosened the knot under her chin. Fluffed her hair around her face before covering it again with her scarf and tying it loosely behind her head, looking less the peasant than she really was. Maybe she'd even thank Hajinsa one day for her advice, for she'd grown careless, not bothering about how she looked. The retied scarf must have made a difference, for the wool seller caught her eye and clucked her tongue in approval.

Now Mehrigul had nothing to do but wait. She ate her eggs, bargained with the few customers who came by, and kept watching the pathways. She would have no trouble spotting a tourist; foreigners seldom, if ever, came to the Wednesday market. The goods here were for local farmers and people who lived in the small, nearby townships, not for tourists as they were at the bazaar in the city of Hotan.