Tibet Before the Tumult
BLISS, WANDA
A Traveler’s Notebook Tibet Before the Tumult By Wanda Bliss The Chinese have heralded the T28 train from Beijing to Lhasa as the vehicle that will pull a backward region of their country...
...Peter’s...
...When mine was ready for boarding, there was much pushing and people climbing over each other—and me...
...Among Tibetans the new rail line represents one more log thrown on a long-simmering fire that exploded this past March 14, and over the next several days resulted in untold deaths and much destruction...
...Then we packed ourselves like sardines into our berths until morning, when we washed again and caused another flood...
...He was surprised when I said I had heard the Dalai Lama instruct his people not to litter...
...But once the talk turned to the Party line (about Tibet’s slave society being saved from foreign exploitation, poverty, and the evil Dalai Lama by its benefactor, China), the professor fit right into the Chinese doctrinal chamber like a snail into its shell...
...I helped one woman get a taxi back when the guide would not assist her...
...The Dalai Lama’s candidate and his family disappeared...
...The Chinese can be noisy, but this crowd was so loud that people from other compartments came to see what was going on...
...As they left a new crowd piled in: two pretty, young professional nightclub dancers, a military man who snored, a string bean of a young man, and a fussy middle-aged man who ordered the stewardess around...
...I suspect this was a joke on the part of the guides...
...They had just come from a tour of Tibet and complained about the accommodations and food like Americans returning from a tour of Romania...
...The Germans were robust, capable of tramping across Mongolia if allowed out of their compounds...
...There are neither accommodations nor restaurants suitable to upscale visitors after Shigatze...
...a Frenchman...
...I was disturbed by the propaganda she occasionally spouted during our conversations...
...Everyone has a calculator...
...Too crowded,” they said...
...The trail for Chinese tourists ends for the moment at Shigatze, because traveling in Tibet is hard going and often uncomfortable...
...The technology for laying tracks across permafrost came from Russia, I said, noting that this was an example of international cooperation...
...Most continue to believe China liberated Tibet from a slave society groaning under the weight of wicked foreigners...
...the card players pulled down the shade...
...Maybe he feared the government would prevent his returning to China if his opinions were too independent...
...Waiters passed regularly with Styrofoam-boxed meals or fruit for sale...
...A third woman sought her help in mimicking a Chinese ad for Tibet travel featuring a simpering young female in local dress, arms spread wide, offering a khata, a white scarf given as a welcome gift or a sign of respect...
...During the first afternoon, a man in the next compartment complained of difficulty breathing...
...Oddly, no one asked how much I earned...
...I told him I had read that it was turned into a pigsty and cadre offices, desecration being a crucial aspect of colonization...
...I entered, and then exited...
...I was struck by our guide’s lack of care for anyone with altitude sickness...
...She was annoyed when I thanked her for asking but said I did not want my photograph taken...
...I walked down the line of cars with my bags, having no idea where I belonged...
...Their reports to friends may discourage tourism...
...Card playing continued less boisterously...
...Soon questions poured in...
...and an Austrian who still believed weapons of mass destruction were buried in Iraq...
...Shirley was well educated, knew Du Fu’s poetry, was aware of international ev ents with a Chinese slant, and at 17 was about to enter a university...
...who had been persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, and his Hong Kong-born wife...
...I thought water burials had been discontinued because of pollution...
...Since most of Tibet is over 12,000 feet above sea level, the high altitude also makes life difficult...
...Chinese tourists appreciate comfort, and their government likes to be in control...
...Her father’s eyes gleamed with pride...
...We were not taken to the second floor, the main chamber where sits the jewel-studded Jowo statue, the most important image in Tibet...
...The threat is Chinese industry and its subsidized, colonizing workers...
...One day a discussion started about how aggressive Tibetans were in selling to the Chinese, while they did not bother me when I declined...
...There were washbasins and a hot water dispenser...
...For lunch and dinner we were bused to dirty barns where monster platters of Chinese food were slung on the tables with such surliness that everyone complained...
...But since the Chinese confine themselves to comfortable tourism, the T28’s population presents more of a nuisance than a threat...
...Was I retired...
...Its outstandingly ugly green and yellow turbines looked like a Martian spaceship in the midst of the rocky plain spreading skirts toward mountains...
...He asked my age...
...The cars looked new and clean, as did the bed linens...
...The only Tibetans my companions had contact with were impoverished women and men selling trinkets at sites we visited...
...Shirley’s family packed to get off at their stop at midnight...
...Where else had I traveled in China...
...Shigatze is for both parties the last outpost of civilization...
...My companions’ physical discomfort made them eager to leave...
...To get into Tibet, I took a Chinese bus tour...
...The Chinese are home people: After generations in another country, they often return to their village of origin...
...Few were drawn to look at the landscape...
...Shirley’s uncle, his wife and their friends played cards on the first level, shrieking, shouting and screaming...
...The young man mumbled something...
...Huge electronic signs in English and Chinese announced trains...
...When the Hong Kong-born woman insisted they take off the caps, they were astonished...
...Not only was I traveling solo, I was old...
...The dry plateau of Tibet was unimaginable...
...A Traveler’s Notebook Tibet Before the Tumult By Wanda Bliss The Chinese have heralded the T28 train from Beijing to Lhasa as the vehicle that will pull a backward region of their country into prosperity...
...Showing my ticket, I was directed up an escalator to a barnlike but clean waiting room, patrolled by police who prohibited feet or luggage on the wooden benches...
...By the time the woman who had wanted us to pose returned, Tenzin had gone for a walk...
...I was bemused...
...Twice a day, once three times, we were taken to cavernous halls, lectured on Chinese herbal medicine, or tea, and let loose to wander among counters replete with tree fungi, deer antlers, dried herbs, or varieties of preserved Chinese food...
...The only Uighurs I saw were tending carts on the platform selling pancakes...
...She found compartment 10, where I had a top berth...
...Another time she announced, “This railroad proves the greatness of the Chinese people...
...Shirley, who hoped to work as an interpreter at the Olympics, translated cheerfully...
...I was told I was wrong...
...all were sullen, perhaps considering their jobs the booby prize of the Workers’ Paradise...
...Food was available on the train, but being leery of Styrofoam-packaged meals, I brought along canned fish, dried yak meat, cashews, almonds, sunflower seeds, and two bowls of dried noodles— the staff of life for travelers in China...
...He asked me loudly what had happened to the Jokhang during the Cultural Revolution...
...The guide spewed misinformation...
...We are an example of Chinese-American friendship,” she said...
...Here I simply want to try to provide a sense of the atmosphere that made it inevitable...
...Hall-shaped compartments had bunks on three levels on each wall...
...Shirley was her English name, after Shirley Temple...
...The station, a nondescript white hulk located slightly out of town, sits behind the usual Chinese minipark that the sun bakes in summer and the wind hurls streamers of dust through in winter...
...At that time it was a dusty home to Uighur Muslims, women in cut velvet scarves, and restaurants selling barbecued lamb...
...The stewardess brought a pair of oxygen prongs that went into his nose, plugged the other end into an appropriate outlet for 20 minutes, and he was fine thereafter...
...The monk, embarrassed, compromised, standing beside her glumly...
...This woman was confused by the monk’s lack of enthusiasm for her presence...
...I am sure this is not true from my own experience, and from another traveler’s report that during his trip the bathroom window remained open...
...For two days they played cards at full volume, napped and ate...
...I said, undiplomatically, that it was a way of expressing anger at the Chinese presence...
...Years ago I was in Mongolia, then a Soviet possession, where East Germans vacationed in yurts...
...Besides myself, the group consisted of five Chinese policemen plus a senior police officer, who noticed everything...
...On the way to Shigatze, we stopped at a spot on the river that we were told was a water-burial site...
...After the Panchen Lama died in 1989, the Dalai Lama approved one new incarnation and Beijing approved another...
...Colonization is another matter: Chinese are paid and given perks to settle in Tibet...
...China, however, is one of the few nations that still maintains colonies—which, you may recall, breed rebellions...
...What was I doing in Tibet...
...He then asked the guide the same question in Chinese...
...As we were waiting for the temple to open, a Chinese woman tried to coerce an elderly monk into posing with her arm around him...
...Our visit to the Jokhang was superficial...
...When I refused to go at one point, the guide pleaded that his pay would be docked because they count those who enter...
...While my guide vacillated between impotent rage and worry about getting into trouble if he did not agree to the request, she was distracted...
...Shirley’s uncle asked how I managed in a market...
...Wandering among the machinery were Tibetans begging from visitors while herding skinny sheep and cows...
...On the second day we passed through Xining, a town I had last visited 15 years ago...
...I rammed one bag under the bottom bed...
...Houses, no longer Tibetan, had upturned tile roofs...
...Everyone washed before bed, creating a minor flood in the toilet area...
...She said goodbye twice, assuring me I would have the compartment to myself...
...Our hotel was a depressing cement block affair at the edge of town...
...I had been in western Tibet and seen very few Chinese tourists, but that morning at the Tashilumphu Monastery, once home of the Panchen Lama, the court before the first temple swarmed with them...
...I pointed out that people surrounded me...
...A Chinese teenaged girl with a ponytail, blue jeans, sneakers, and a purple T-shirt asked a flood of questions while helping me...
...After two days on the train, instead of staying in a dorm in Shanghai, I took a private room...
...I sat across from them at a window watching the white-wrapped mountains of Tibet, valleys with pools of glaciers, occasional villages built in typical Tibetan flat-roofed style with flowers painted around the windows...
...Before long, I hope to be able to report firsthand on the details and repercussions of the explosion...
...My companions cheerfully hefted my other bag to my berth on the top level...
...a Chinese professor now living in the U.S...
...In fact, I found the air quality on the train very poor and walked the platform at most stops...
...In contrast to her intelligent, polite father, Shirley’s uncle was loud and crude...
...The khata is properly offered between praying hands, not spread arms...
...A generation of young Chinese willing to sacrifice comfort for trekking will arrive, but it is not yet here...
...Later I realized this hurly-burly was among hard-berth customers who might have no place to sit if they did not shove their way to the front...
...Once that cat was out of the bag there was amazement...
...Such are the joys of Chinese modernization...
...One young man, who tried unsuccessfully to make time with Shirley, asked if I got lonely...
...One advancing family screamed hysterically at members who had fallen back...
...EACH CAR had a stewardess...
...By pointing...
...They brought to mind the shoe factories once featured on Soviet excursions...
...An English-speaking woman asked me and my Tibetan guide, Tenzin, to take a picture with her...
...The countryside, studded with gold and uranium mines, often off the beaten track, is different...
...Perhaps accommodations will be upgraded after this summer’s Olympics, for which a new road is planned to the Mount Everest base camp...
...The professor said there were two Maos, the first one good because he united China, the second, architect of the Cultural Revolution, bad...
...All of them proudly wore their red baseball caps into the Jokhang Temple, the Tibetan equivalent of Rome’s St...
...Wickedly, I told her the truth...
...Amid the confusion and cacophony a sweet American-accented voice asked, “Can I help...
...She made a face before it even entered her mouth...
...According to a BBC report, the train has “carefully regulated oxygen levels...
...The main feature of the tour was shopping...
...Did I like China...
...Her behavior was a sign that the average Chinese has not only no idea how to treat monks but no idea what their government has done in Tibet...
...When the train made its first journey into Tibet in the summer of 2006, I was in Shigatze, a town half a day’s drive from Lhasa that is on the regulation tour for Westerners and, now, for Chinese...
...Wanda Bliss is the pseudonym of a freelance writer who often visits Tibet— and would like to continue doing so...
...People were discouraged from returning to the hotel if they were ill...
...The bathrooms at the end of the car, squat johns, smelled worse each day of the trip...
...Looking over the cliff edge we could see what looked like a leg in a white stocking...
...I offered Shirley some of the dried yak meat, which tastes like buffalo jerky...
...several young women...
...None of them realized they were being offensive and insensitive...
...THE PROFESSOR was the most interesting of my companions...
...Where did I live...
...What did I do...
...AFTER THE TOUR, I went to arrange for my train ticket...
...We w e re charged an extra $30 to see the Yangpachen hot spring, now a power plant...
...The guide said the police would arrest Tibetans if they were aggressive toward me...
...The policemen were no cruder than their counterparts might be in any other country...
...The poser’s friends suggested adjustments...
...They watched, astonished, as I climbed to the third level on a series of hand- and footholds...
...The next morning, in a totally different country of canals, rivers, rice paddies wet and gleaming in the sun, I woke to bridges, old barges and boats...
...I woke at their stop to hug Shirley a third time...
...The Cultural Revolution was a permissible topic of political discussion— the past being a safe place...
...He brought up his escape several times, waving it in our young guide’s face...
...The colonists mainly move to the cities, now divided between the natives and the newcomers...
...In the West it is seen as a means of furthering the colonization of Tibet and the erosion of its culture...
...Good, even passable, food is scarce...
...Today it is a boomtown, with big blocks of high-rise apartments...
...The landscape altered to mountains without snow and valleys piled with outcroppings of boulders, a bit like Utah, the soil tinged red...
...Prices...
...I asked if they had liked the Jokhang in Lhasa...
...Colonization has long been unfashionable...
...In the course of planning a return trip last year, I decided I would take the T28 from Lhasa and stop at Shanghai...
...Since the trip from Lhasa to Shanghai takes 48 hours, I secured a berth in a hard sleeper compartment...
Vol. 91 • March 2008 • No. 2
