Tibet is HappySad

Lots of people back here in Bangkok knew I had gone to Tibet. They asked me if I had fun. I had to answer “yes and no.” The country is thoroughly fascinating. My aunt is a great traveling companion. The monasteries and mountaintops were inspiring. Yet our emotions flipped all the time between exhilaration and despair. The beauty! The Burma-like oppression! The devotion! The death! The dung!

Since coming home I’ve looked over websites like freetibet.org, tibet.com, and savetibet.org. The picture they paint of life in Tibet matches what we saw. The sites describe a booming Tibetan economy that doesn’t benefit Tibetans. We noticed that migrant Chinese workers are getting the best jobs, and presumably maintaining their advantage through their language and networking. The websites also confirm our sense that although Beijing is sponsoring development, it’s in buildings, power plants, and roads—advances that give the advantage to a police state. No similar gains are being made in education, healthcare, and other areas that build up a people.

I realize that we, and the websites, look at Tibet with a strong Western bias. Our viewpoints are probably as far from the middle way as the Chinese government’s are. Maybe the Dalai Lama would laugh if he saw our wish list for his country.

But I still hope that the millions of prayers flying out of prayer wheels and prayer flags around Tibet lead to dialogue and a political solution there—soon. My aunt’s frequent tears during our trip came in response to the rapid extinction of Tibet, and to the nearly endless series of protests and clampdowns that has caused so much suffering up on the plateau.

As tourists, we won’t ever experience or understand most of that suffering. But we did witness enough to doubt that the two groups now sharing those wide open spaces will live happily ever after. The Chinese government’s continual deployments of additional troops there, its appetite for resource extraction, and the ongoing restrictions on religion, travel, and speech, make me suspect that Tibetan culture will go the way of Native American culture in the U.S.

I hope I’m wrong about that. Not only does the world need more middle-way success stories, it needs models to address the rights of people everywhere whose principles and customs are distinctive. If we can’t figure out more ways to accommodate everyone’s views, then it’s going to be a pretty sad century.

Tibet: Screen Saver Reminder

Because she is so good at reaching out to people, my aunt knows a few Tibetans well enough to invite them to dinner. One group was so much fun, and their joy in being together so obvious, that we met up with them twice in the same week.

It was hard to say what was more entertaining: the four Tibetans joking in Tibetan about this and that, or us listening to them laugh and then explain the jokes in their excellent English. Not everything we talked about was light-hearted, but these women had a way of smiling through tough times that made us want to bottle up their high spirits and share them with the whole planet.

They were also proud of their educations and of their country, without ever sounding superior. Out of nowhere one of them said, referring to her computer, “Guess what’s on my screen saver?” Our first thought was a picture of the Dalai Lama. We didn’t say it out loud, partly because that guess was too obvious, and partly because we weren’t sure how to refer to him in a public restaurant. Do you say “His Holiness?” “HH?” “He who must not be named?” She helped us out with a hint: “it’s not what you’re thinking.”

“A picture of your family?”

“Nooo,” she smiled. “Too easy.”

“Your village?”

“Getting closer.”

“A yak?”

She clapped her hands with delight before answering her own question. “You almost got it,” she squealed. “It’s yak shit!”

Of course. What better than dung to symbolize her herder childhood and the struggles of life in Tibet? The women collapsed on each other with laughter.

Tibet: Night at the Nunnery

The guest house at the end of the road was sounding awfully appealing. Though our several-hour drive had been wonderful, the weather was turning foul and some of us were feeling the thousand meters of altitude gain since Lhasa.

All day the sights and sounds felt like Tibet—or at least the Tibet that lives in our imaginations. Ganden Monastery, celebrating its 600th anniversary this year, bustled. Monks in every one of the dozens of rooms we passed through were sewing, carving, chanting, practicing the long horns. Villages along the way featured houses that all faced the same direction, backs to the wind. Tea shops sold yak butter tea by the grimy thermos-full. Nomads, wool spinners, herders, pipe smokers, apron wearers—everyone seemed to come straight out of a coffee table book.

Yet we were ready for a rest. It was becoming dark, cold, and wet. The allure of monasteries had faded at the last one, which is famous throughout the country for the practice of “sky burials.” In this tradition, corpses are left on long flat rocks for vultures to dispose of. As we drove up a narrow canyon toward the Tidrum Nunnery, everyone’s thoughts turned toward a good night’s sleep.

Prayer flags greeted us at the end of the road. These colorful cloths, which are thought to promote peace and compassion as their mantras are blown by the wind, stretched far up the canyon and out of sight. From below came the calming sound of a rapid river. “I’ll go check to see what kinds of rooms are left,” said our guide.

The travel agency hadn’t provided much detail about the accommodation. If it had, the description might have sounded like this: “a glimpse of the way most of the world spends the night.” In other words, the beds were basic and public. Though we were off the ground and covered by blankets, I knew that my traveling companions had been hoping for something a little bit less like camping. They definitely hadn’t counted on sharing their unheated lodging with countless Tibetan pilgrims.

The way to make the best of the situation was to remind myself that we’d spent the day enjoying the “real” Tibet, and that this guest house was an extension of that. Dressed in everything I had brought along, and carrying a toothbrush and towel, I headed down a set of slippery stone steps in search of the communal bathroom. What I found was a long open trench covered by a corrugated tin roof. As I brushed my teeth, grateful for the scent of the toothpaste, a pilgrim walked in wearing only a robe and rubber sandals. He nodded at me and straddled the trench. From his hindquarters soon came volcano noises.

I left him to his business. On the way out I noticed other men walking around in just robes and sandals. It seemed an unlikely coincidence that so many of the nunnery’s guests would be both male and out for an evening stroll in the midst of a drizzle. Following them led to my discovery of the antidote for what otherwise could have been a long night. Tidrum Nunnery was home to a hot spring.

And not just any hot spring. These pools were world class. Gently carbonated, just over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, open to the stars—they don’t get much better than that. Joining eight or ten naked, intoning pilgrims, my attitude about the guest house quickly shifted. What at first seemed like a hardship post was in fact heaven.

My springmates stopped chanting long enough to warn me away from the patch of nettles growing along one edge of the pool. One part of me knew I shouldn’t stay too long, but another part was loving it enough to consider settling in until I simply moved on to my next life and could let my body be taken down the road for a proper sky burial.

After about fifteen minutes I looked up at the lone decoration, a framed photograph of a monk. Someone tried explaining the significance of the picture. Or perhaps he was telling me that my formerly white skin was looking lobster-like. I chose to see the one-way conversation as a sign that it was time to go. My sleep wasn’t half bad.

At around 4am I was still blissed out enough not to mind when the pilgrims in the next room got up and loudly ate breakfast. At 5:30, when they came back from their first trip to the pools that day, I got up and took another turn myself. It’s hard to imagine a better way to start, or end, a day.

That guest house will stay in our memories a long time, though each of us will tell a very different story about it. Shortly after sunrise we left it behind. The wide valley of the Drigung Chu River led us back toward Lhasa. Our car slowed for goats in the road. We stopped to take pictures of the yak on the mountainsides, and of their dung, piled high on the village walls in the shape of large cookies, waiting to be burned for fuel.

Tibet: Hill Climb

Today my aunt and her friend went off on appointments they’d arranged long before, taking our guide along as a translator, and leaving me to fend for myself. A small hillside hermitage intrigued me. It sits high above a monastery we’d visited two days ago.

Going there alone wasn’t advisable. Our guide told me that as the holder of our travel permit he would definitely get in trouble if I were ever stopped and questioned while walking on my own in the mountains outside Lhasa. He suggested that a friend of his could stand in for him.

She was a great substitute. Even though her English wasn’t quite as good as his (or perhaps because it wasn’t?), she never complained about the hike. I thought she might roll her eyes a bit after we looked down from our first destination and spotted the switchbacking trail that somehow we had missed on the way up, forcing us to bushwhack. Instead, when I said, “Where to next?” she answered in classic Himalayan fashion, “It’s your wish.”

We followed the contour, admiring the views of the city, finally crossing over a ridge into a new valley. All told we stopped at three different secluded religious places of varying sizes. As was the case at every such community we visited throughout Tibet, the residents made sure we knew that the current census was way down from previous years. The typical refrain went something like, “We used to have 50 monks here, now only two.” Unspoken were the reasons for the drop: restrictions from Beijing that dictate the age ranges and teachings of monastics, and arrests that target monastics during political demonstrations. We never once saw a picture of the Dalai Lama, or heard his name spoken. What if Catholics couldn’t mention the pope?

Tibet: (Dis)connect

This trip is my aunt’s seventh to Tibet. Her cultural literacy impressed me two years ago when we met up in Beijing. She had more Chinese language skills than I suspected, and she clearly knew her way around.

Slowly I’m coming to understand how she comes by that literacy. Her comfort zone is simply way bigger than average. She thinks nothing of striking up conversations with strangers, regardless of whether she has two words in common or 200,000. Sometimes she’ll pull up a chair at a neighboring table in a restaurant, either because those people are eating something that looks appealing, or because somebody there strikes her fancy: an old grandma, a cute baby, a wrinkled face sporting a stylish hat.

Or she’ll reach out to a person she senses is in need. Just today a pilgrim couple stopped outside our hotel’s front step. My aunt greeted them with the customary Tibetan blessing, “Tashi Delai,” which then somehow led to their request, via translation by the front desk staff, for medical help. The woman, probably in her mid-50s, complained of non-specific eye problems.

Talk about asking the right person! As it happened, we had eaten the night before with a person connected to a medical NGO in Lhasa. This friend of a friend soon had us pointed to a free eye clinic on the edge of town, where the woman got seen right away and came away with a year’s supply of eye drops and the comfort of knowing that she doesn’t need surgery. All it cost us was taxi fare and a couple hours of our free afternoon.

Most people wouldn’t have established the connection in the first place, let alone followed up on it. But with just a handful of Tibetan phrases, my aunt was able to pull off a random act of kindness that, if multiplied by just a small number of the travelers currently jetting around the world’s friction spots, could bring peace in those places many steps closer.

Yet my aunt also cried this evening. The loss of the Tibet she saw on her first visit, over twenty years ago, saddens her beyond words. Further, she continues to struggle with the tension between admiring her many Chinese friends and seeing how much discontent their government’s policies and investments have sown in Tibet.

Yesterday the Chinese government stopped issuing new permits to visit Tibet. We weren’t affected because we were already in. The ban will probably last about three weeks, because of fears that the 60th anniversary of the 1949 Communist victory might inspire protests in Lhasa. This kind of thing isn’t rare—foreign travel to the capital has been stopped three times over the last 18 months. I suspect tonight won’t be the last night my aunt cries here, however.

Tibet: But...

The trouble with Tibet is the “but.” It’s beautiful… but. In these days of spiritual emptiness and consumerism and climate change, Tibetan culture is a model that the rest of the world could take many lessons from… but. The level of investment and infrastructure relative to other Himalayan countries appears impressive… but.

The “but,” of course, is always followed by a statement about Chinese meddling. And “meddling” is the mildest of the many descriptions that could be applied to the changes and rules and colonialism and police actions that the Chinese government has brought to Tibet over the years.

The problem is not new. Depending on who’s counting, China has been in charge of Tibet since the 1950s, or since the 1200s. No doubt the Tibetans aren’t 100% innocent in the story of their own destruction. One can also make the case that even without any interference from China, globalization would have altered the way of life here. But…

Even viewed in the most charitable light imaginable, Chinese “support” to Tibet risks smothering its inhabitants. Parallels to the “settling” of the American West aren’t farfetched. Tibetans are long since a minority in their own land. Though no Chinese government statistics are ever made public, the number of residents in the region who can’t speak Tibetan is far above 50%—and no wonder, considering the education system that has been put in place.

Schools all operate in Chinese, teach a curriculum based on Chinese culture, and celebrate Chinese holidays. Many of the teachers are from the “interior,” sent by the government as part of a Peace Corps-like program known as Volunteers Aiding Tibet. Their aims are honorable enough—to serve, to make a difference in a place they see as needing development.

Yet unlike Peace Corps volunteers, very few of these teachers will make the effort to learn the local language. Absent that kind of respect for the local culture, the program, like many other aspects of everyday life in the region, looks to be part of a larger, calculated, shameless effort to make Tibet disappear.

How else to explain the forced display of Chinese flags “celebrating” 60 years of the People’s Republic? Or the bulldozing of an area directly across from the Dalai Lama’s former palace in order to build a Tiananmen-style plaza? And the countless indignities that ordinary Tibetans must put up with at the hands of their “liberators”: checkpoints, near-total Chinese takeover of commerce, Beijing control of religious succession, soldiers in green overcoats stepping carelessly among groups of prostrating pilgrims.

It makes perfect sense (and perfect irony) that the Chinese word for Tibet translates as “Western Treasure.” Far from feeling any embarrassment about its approach there, the Chinese government aggressively counters critics with claims of having improved the lot of the average Tibetan, and bemoans, in classic colonial style, the ingratitude of its victims.

We witnessed a display of this arrogance tonight at a Tibetan “cultural show,” one of those combination buffet and revue affairs that crop up whenever some entrepreneur senses that a way of life is at risk and that a buck might be made in the meantime. In this case the venue featured a line of food tables at the front of a long, rectangular room. Rows of dining tables faced the food, which when removed made room for a stage. A raised area at the back was reserved for larger tour groups.

This evening the large group appeared to come from central China (90+% of visitors to Tibet are Chinese, says our guidebook), although some of its members may have been local Chinese residents entertaining their visiting relatives. Wherever they came from, they were loud. And drunk. Perhaps their loudness and drunkenness was deliberately designed to provoke, like the raucous German singers in Casablanca’s Rick’s Café.

Unfortunately, no Viktor Laszlo stood up to demand the Tibetan equivalent of “La Marseillaise.” Instead, the toasting and carousing continued even after the cultural show began, seemingly in defiance of the scowling, tskking Westerners in the front rows. Aiding and abetting the Chinese was a Tibetan comfort woman, much to the chagrin and disappointment of our Tibetan guide.

I suppose that being the oppressor takes a toll, and at times involves as much stress as being oppressed. People in power need to blow off a little steam now and then, just like everyone else. But I’d have preferred they did their partying in private. By choosing that time, place, and hostess, this gang was grinding the police state’s boot heel.

Tibet: Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

Outside the hotel window is a never-ending stream of devotion. This pilgrim procession flows by quickly. Most everyone maintains a brisk pace, as though they were on their way to an appointment. Perhaps they do see their temple circling that way—hurrying to reach a better incarnation? or to more completely understand Buddhism’s great void of blissful freedom?

I stare for longer than I should. A note at the front desk from my aunt, who has arrived in Lhasa two days ahead of me, says to knock on her door as soon as I get there. Yet this scene is difficult to pull away from. After perhaps twenty minutes, the same faces come around again. Do they do this every evening? Have they been here all day? How far have they journeyed to come to this most sacred of Lhasa’s many sacred sites? minutes? days? years?

And what of these prostrators? They do their circuits half vertically, half horizontally. Each “step” begins and ends with the clapping together of upraised hands. To move forward they drop to their knees, stretch out one body length along the path, then stand again. Their chosen way slows their pace, but in exchange perhaps their merit is multiplied proportionally?

So many questions, so many pilgrims, and alas, so many soldiers. The pair on the roof next door—helmeted, sitting sniper style—ultimately convinces me that it’s time to stop being a voyeur and start being a good nephew. What an introduction! What a reunion!

Tibet is a Teacher

The flight from Beijing to Lhasa, Tibet’s capital city, has its own security check at the Beijing airport. The entrance is marked by the flight number, CA4112, rather than by the destination. But it doesn’t take long to establish that this is the queue for the Tibet Autonomous Region, as it’s known in official Chinese government-speak. “You are going to Lhasa!” says the woman who checks my boarding pass before I walk through the metal detector. It’s not a question, it’s an accusation. I nod yes and start to proceed. She waves me back: “Papers!” she says, not quite shouting.

I know that a special permit is required before going to Tibet. Mine is in my pocket. Nobody requested to see it in Bangkok, where my luggage was checked straight through to Lhasa. I hand it over now, to the woman who might be working for the airline, or perhaps for the airport, or for the Chinese equivalent of the Department of Homeland Security—it’s hard to say. She studies the permit with the care of a jeweler. This doesn’t seem to be a routine bureaucratic transaction.

Soon I’m passed along to the frisker. As with the papers inspector, the message seems to be, “No sudden moves, buster.” The pat-down is very thorough. A few minutes later he sends me on my way, still carrying everything I started with. Something tells me this trip will teach many lessons.