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.