Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (37 page)

I told him and asked him about the pilgrims. They seemed different from pilgrims I’d seen elsewhere in China. They didn’t seem to be praying for wealth, as they did on Tai Shan. Instead, they were distributing wealth inside the temples, sprinkling notes upon the golden statues as they shuffled from room to room.

“The pilgrims come from all over Tibet. They come not just once, but many times. This is a very important place, very important.”

“Do you think the Dalai Lama will ever come back?”

“No. I don’t think the Dalai Lama will ever come back. He left in 1959. It makes us very sad.”

I spent several days in Lhasa, rarely leaving the tight confines of the old town. I could have remained for months, though it’s possible I’d reconsider in January. Perhaps I could move my family here, I thought. Kindergarten in Tibet. That would be cool. And the air was clean up here. Of course, there wasn’t much of it, so perhaps that would be a problem. Is it good parenting, taking kids up to 12,000 feet? Yes? No? I didn’t know. But I could live here, I thought. The Tibetans were kind and affable. I’d expected to find a people crushed by Chinese oppression. The People’s Liberation Army had been in Tibet for more than fifty years. They’d desecrated temples. They’d shot monks. But Tibetans are not crushed. Indeed, they are the jolliest people I’d encountered in China. I could live among these cheerful people. But the last thing Lhasa needed was another non-Tibetan to take up residence in their fair city. Lhasa was bursting at the seams with Chinese.

There are more Chinese in Lhasa than there are Tibetans. And with the new railway linking Lhasa to the frenzied cities of China, more and more Chinese are making their way up into the mountains, thousands of them, tens of thousands. Some are tourists. But many have come to settle in Lhasa, and quickly, so quickly now, Lhasa is becoming a Chinese city.

Except in the old town. I did not leave the old town except to take the bus to the Sera Monastery, a few miles outside Lhasa, where I settled myself in a courtyard beneath mountains dusted with snow and, as it melted in the afternoon glare, I watched the monks debate. I could not say what precisely they were debating. Perhaps it was the finer theological points separating the Red Hat sect of Tibetan Buddhism from the Yellow Hat sect. Or perhaps they were debating the lunch menu. It was unclear. Once there were 5,000 monks in the Sera Monastery, but then, of course, China invaded, soldiers plundered the grounds, and the monks were either killed or exiled. Today, the monastery has been restored and several hundred monks reside there, where they spend their days studying, meditating, and impassionedly debating whether to have the mutton on Tuesdays or on Fridays.

On most days, however, I joined the pilgrims walking the Barkhor circuit around the Jokhang Temple, Tibet’s holiest sight. I liked the exoticism of it. It’s as much a market carnival as a devotional pilgrimage. True, in front of the temple’s doors, pilgrims with prayer mats and boards did their devotions in the dust. And some who did the circuit did so on their stomachs, genuflecting and prostrating themselves as they made their devotional perambulation. And many chanted ancient mantras. But elsewhere, through the twisting streets beside mud-brick walls, there was a lively market.

“Eighteen hundred,” said the vendor when I stopped to consider a prayer wheel. “Look. Gold. Turquoise. Inside very old holy parchment.” She opened it and pulled out a roll of paper with Tibetan writing. It had been browned and burned at the edges. “Very old. Very holy. How much?”

We bargained, until finally I had a change of heart, concluding that the prayer wheel was unlikely to be either very old or very holy.

“Four hundred,” she said, and chased after me. I considered until a passing pilgrim shook his head no. Very helpful, these Tibetans.

Inside the Jokhang Temple, I encountered a Chinese man hawking and unleashing a huge glob of phlegm. “You see these Chinese,” said the monk who took my ticket, laughing. “No respect for Tibetan culture.”

And still he laughed. A Chinese invader had just unleashed a loogie inside the most revered sight in Tibet, and the monk chuckled. Imagine Santa Claus in a maroon robe. Abandon the paunch. Lose the beard. The hair too. Give him a tan. And you have this monk. Unflappable. Mirthful. Always looking at the bright side.

I asked him generally how things were.

“It’s been very hard with the Chinese, though a little better recently. There’s been lots of international attention.”

The Jokhang Temple is more than 1,400 years old, filled with chapels and chambers and statues of Buddha. Nearly all the statues are new. After the invasion, Chinese soldiers ransacked the temple. And then, some years later, the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution trashed it some more and placed a banner on its walls underneath a portrait of Chairman Mao—
Completely destroy the old world! We shall be the master of the new world!

Today, the monks have returned to the temple. The Dalai Lama, however, has not. Inside, I found the Dalai Lama’s big yellow cushion throne, disheveled and empty, and as I made my way up to the rooftop terrace overlooking old Lhasa, where I absorbed a vista of mountains, pilgrims, and palaces, I thought what a shame it truly is that the Dalai Lama and thousands of other Tibetans could not return to this wondrous city in the sky. Like them, I too hoped one day to return to Lhasa.

“Where are you going from here?” Cat, Lachlan’s girlfriend, asked me. I’d met the Australians at a restaurant for lunch.

“I thought I’d head for the Gamden Monastery in eastern Tibet. It was destroyed by the Chinese, but I read that they’re rebuilding it. What about you?”

Cat took a deep drag from her cigarette. “We’re planning on biking to Everest Base Camp.”

“Biking as on a bicycle.”

She nodded. “Should be a bit of an adventure.”

“Aren’t some of the passes above 17,000 feet?”

They nodded absentmindedly. Yeah, I thought, that’s going to end well.

When the proprietor came to take our order, Lachlan remarked with typical Australian bluntness, “I come here for the toilets, mate. You have the best toilets in Lhasa.”

The owner beamed. “I clean them myself. And I do all the cooking. You must have the yak.”

“What’s not to like about Lhasa?” Cat observed.

Yak fatigue, for one thing. The Tibetans, I discovered, are not vegetarians. It is difficult to be a vegetarian at this altitude. There is a need for protein. And so the Tibetans eat yak. And it’s good. I liked the yak. I’d gorged myself on yak. I had yak
momos,
simple dumplings filled with yak; I had yak filet; I even had Yak Bourgogne at a French-Tibetan fusion restaurant. Such things exist in Lhasa. But I’d had my fill. I thought of the yak carcasses dumped onto the sidewalk. And I thought of the chef scrubbing his toilets until they became the pride of Lhasa. And then I thought of one thing that could mar my stay in this beautiful region.

“I’ll have the vegetarian curry,” I said.

Later, I ran into the Australians near the Barkhor Square. Lhasa, authentic Lhasa, is small and I often bumped into the same travelers again and again—many of whom I’d also met in Dali. Perhaps it was the promise of some kind of high that lured backpackers to both places.

“Did you guys get permits?” I asked them.

“No,” Cat said.

“Neither did I.”

It was the bane of traveling in Tibet. There is the Lhasa permit. Then there is the permit for the Tibet beyond Lhasa. And then there are the permits needed to travel on certain roads. And the rules were always changing. Sometimes permits could be had, sometimes not. The Chinese government is very particular about what foreigners are allowed to see in Tibet, and for inexplicable reasons, I hadn’t been able to get a permit for the regions far beyond Lhasa. Perhaps something was happening elsewhere in Tibet. Of course, here we’d be the last to know; not since Hong Kong had I encountered a news source that hadn’t been filtered by a government censor.

“We’ve decided to go anyway,” Lachlan said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Well, you’ll soon find out, I thought. The odds of four smokers biking up to 17,000 feet on a heavily policed road in a region where, technically, their very presence was a violation of national security laws were, I guessed, not particularly high. I wished them the best of luck.

I, however, had changed my plans. Deprived of a permit for eastern Tibet, I would turn southward toward the monasteries in Gyantse and Shigatse. I had hired a driver, a friendly young man named Goba, who had an English vocabulary of about forty words, which he used to express less than enthusiastic opinions about the Chinese.

“Lhasa no good,” he said as we sped past a billboard.
The Developing Zone Is Very Promising.
“In Lhasa, four Chinese. One Tibetan. No good.”

To finish the thought, he took his hands off the steering wheel and made a grabbing gesture. “Chinese take. Take!”

We made our way through the blighted sprawl of outer Lhasa, underneath the twinkling gaze of an enormous portrait of Deng Xiaoping. Soon, we were passed by an SUV ferrying police.

“Chinese police. No good. Chinese no good. Shigatse. Two Chinese. One Tibetan. No good. Gyantse. Four Tibetan. One Chinese. Is okay.”

We drove along a paved highway together with a few other trucks and SUVs. Soon, we had passed the last wispy trees and nearly all the traffic, and the landscape had become even more dry and ethereal, which I had not thought was possible. The mountains that surrounded us were more rugged and the highest among them had blinding snowpacks. The road itself was largely deserted except for the occasional solitary monk on pilgrimage. Up, hands to head. Pray. Hands to knees. Lie down. Up. Hands above head. Pray. Step forward. Repeat. It wasn’t the fastest mode of transport, but I suspected that was probably the point. I had never been anyplace more devout than Tibet. I sensed that people here lived in a different universe from the one I inhabited; it would never occur to me that my spiritual well-being might be enhanced by prostrating myself on a highway in the middle of nowhere. The only other people I’d encountered with a propensity for lying down on roads were Pacific Islanders on payday Fridays. Of course, they were drunk, having found bliss through the bottle. But the Tibetans were sober, and yet still they lay down on roadways.

We followed the Yellow River, which flowed to our right in a blue, icy stream. Soon, Goba began to drive very fast, and I was beginning to regret stirring him up with the China talk. Then I considered. Hey, I’m paying for this. If we run over a monk doing his devotions, it’s going to seriously mess up my karma. So I asked him to ease up.

He slowed to possibly twenty miles an hour. “Is okay?”

Leadfoot, of course, couldn’t keep that up for long, and we flew along the highway until we stopped at a dusty road-stand, where Goba bought me a drink. It was a can of Red Bull, fuel of choice for drivers everywhere. We idled with some local truck drivers.

One pointed at my drink. “Yak piss. Ha ha ha.”

I nodded. “I hear it’s good for the heart.”

Back in the car, Goba inserted a cassette into the tape deck. “Nepali-Tibetan. Okay?”

It was a groovy trance beat overlaid with what appeared to be Tibetan chanting. Together with the Red Bull, all that was missing were the Ecstasy tablets.

“Have you been to Nepal?” I asked him. After all, it was just across the border, albeit a very high border, and if the Tibetans have an affinity for anyone, I figured, it would be the Nepalese. They are both mountain people and Buddhists. Indeed, in the seventh century, before the peace and love of Tibetan Buddhism had set in, the Tibetans had occupied Nepal.