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.