The Land of a Thousand Mirrors: Discovering Modern Tibet (July 2009)
You know you are in mainland China when an official points a plastic gun at your forehead in a train station. She is taking your temperature for H1N1 flu, but no one tells you this.
A sign says “we will provide maximum spiritual and physical encouragement for your cooperation with laws prohibiting the transportation of illegal substances.” Amie, a western artist has already had her fruit confiscated from her bag, and as a result the rest of us are delayed.
Moving Cultures, our group of seventeen Chinese and western artists, linguists, and musicians is a mix especially confounding to officials in a place where Chinese and foreigners don’t vacation together. My collage art materials—shattered glass, bits of paper—will interpret this unpredictable experiment. As foreigners, we must be vigilant self-editors or risk embarrassing our hosts. Painting messages of “free Tibet” means an abrupt end to a trip already postponed a year due to the Olympic protests.
In mainland China, there is nothing unplanned or unaccounted for, no matter how small. In the days ahead we will become experts at confirming and re-confirming our identities and itineraries at every Chinese train station, hotel and point of entry. We are on vacation not business. We will have our passports handy.
Newspapers feature the minority Uegar factory workers in the north rioting against their Han Chinese employers. “Terrorists,” one of our Chinese friends calls them. That word gives its speaker so much power. We Americans casually throw it around without understanding that it often applies to both sides in an armed conflict. Yet, the use of the word is reserved for the winning side. I realize how fast things could change for us in Tibet.
I sit down at a hotel computer to write on Facebook. I get a screen with a paw print on it. Facebook is a banned website. I begin to wonder if someone is watching the content of my e-mails with words like “Tibet riots” and “pro-democracy." A friend who did business here said that the Chinese have a different definition of privacy.
Back in Hong Kong, we were advised not to say, write or photograph anything we wouldn’t want officials to know about. Leaving camera cards and journals in hotel rooms is risky. Surveillance cameras wouldn’t be out of the question.
My friend Alan, a climate researcher, had his hotel room broken into and his laptop searched. Despite the fact that he was merely an academic and not an American spy, he was told to leave. Some of my team mates think I am paranoid. They still can’t quite believe in all of this. Matt, a sound artist from Belfast says this supposed surveillance is a colossal waste of time and effort. “What would we do that could possibly interest them?
The Keys to Lhasa
We are in a cramped train for fifty six hours. We have done our obligatory interviews, smiled appropriately and carefully avoided politics. From my sleeper car window, a movie reel of vertical granite walls bisects rolling hills in mind-numbing repetition. At 16,000 feet we are fast descending into Lhasa, the Holy City of two million people. I am exhausted, stiffly bracing to witness the urban sprawl and militarization.
Two enormous modern concrete bridges frame the tenth century Potala Palace at the foothills of the world’s tallest mountains. It is the city of Denver, only Chinese and communist. The train screeches to a halt at an eastern bloc train station where a dead general might be buried.
We hurry past armed guards, metal detectors, begging Tibetans and taxi drivers. Each of us is handed a white scarf, a gift reserved for lamas, Tibetan priests. This last gesture infinitely depresses me. The Dalai Lama’s former residence is now a strip-mall palace. I am now a part of the tourism machinery.
Mandy our male Chinese tour guide with a woman’s name is nervous. He is on the tour bus microphone which is where we will come to know him best. It is his first time hosting a mixed east-west group. Tibet has been open to foreigners for only three months. He knows the government cancelled our permit once already.
His apprehension transforms him into a drill sergeant. “Tomorrow 6:30 a.m. wake-up call,” he barks. The westerners are in disbelief. Back on the bus the next morning we are scolded for being tardy. Our beginning and end time of one hour inside the Potala Palace will be recorded. Any deviation will be a poor reflection on him and by extension, ourselves.
Soldiers with machine guns perch on every street corner, music blaring. Flies swarm on swaying rib cages at butcher stalls while thick temple smoke clogs narrow lanes. Young Tibetan men in tight jeans, black wool vests and fedoras fondle amber prayer beads. They are going to pray, their angular cheek bones setting off wide dark eyes and red braids.
The Palace’s front entrance is pilgrims and spinning golden prayer wheels. On display are the Dalai Lama’s personal affects—his study, bedroom and eating bowls. The private chambers are crowded. Some whisper prayers to a leader who left them over fifty years ago. His replacement, a picture of the Panchen Lama, is the sanctioned substitute for a man whose photo will land you in jail. “If only Mao’s son had taken over. . . ” Liuke, a Chinese painter's voice trails off. "The Tibetans need to worship someone.”
Next it's Tibet’s holiest monastery, the Jokang. In an act repeated across all holy places we buy tickets and pay for photos with monks. Tour directors lead Chinese masses craning their necks to see jeweled statues in glass cases. How can anyone meditate here? Monks spend their days picking up cigarette butts and trash. They count currency left at the feet of idols, the logical endpoint of Chinese communism and spiritual enlightenment. Would the Buddha, like Jesus, turn over the temple money tables were he to witness such a scene?
Disobedience
Jesus is what our eastern friends call Hugh, a tall long-haired sound artist from Australia. The two of us are in a darkened assembly hall. Mandy warns us of plain-clothed police at the Drepung Monastery. Some monks enjoyed last year’s riots, he explains. Thinking back to the press images, I can’t imagine a monk enjoying the act of setting himself on fire.
Hugh and I share a similar, growing dislike of this tour. We’ve managed to break away, pausing in front of a barrel shaped candelabra illuminating a giant Buddha head. A low resonance from Tibetan mantras reverberates across tall chambers and heavy red drapes.
A Chinese student approaches us explaining how he doesn’t agree with his government’s treatment of Tibet. The Dalai Lama’s forced exile is wrong. He speaks louder and faster in English which the guards cannot understand. “Not all of us like what is happening in Tibet. The government forces us to give up our religion, to believe only in Mao or Karl Marx. Do you know about Confucianism? We had to give it up,” he says quickly.
He points to his Tibetan friends who are smiling, not understanding a word. He is urgently telling complete strangers things which cannot be uttered in Chinese. I ask him if there are others who think this way. “Yes, but they censor us in university,” he says, weak with anger. I feel an iron anvil lift and I can suddenly breathe for the first time since I arrived in Tibet. Quickly realizing that our departure will be noticed, we exit in mid-conversation. The anvil descends.
Reconstruction
I am finally free in Lhasa, having abandoned our group. I have luxuriously slipped into art making as the unknown, anonymous tourist.
Early the next morning, a drunk man is out alone on an empty street, Lhasa Beer bottle in hand, steadying himself on a shop girl’s stand. I walk past the guards, the army convoys, the suave Tibetan men and the humming old women to find yak hair.
A textile dealer has led me upstairs in his home where the animal skins are hanging. White fur and yak are everywhere. A small crumpled tiger skin lies in the corner. I suddenly realize that I am in an illegal animal trade. “800 yuan”--$130 dollars--he punches on his calculator. Walking away shaking my head no, he lowers the price two-thirds. The American is driving a hard bargain. “I don’t want it,” I repeat, confident that my brisk departure is the only thing he understands.
Outside I purchase synthetic hair, candle wicks and incense sticks. These objects will adorn my miniature gold dusted buddhas bought from a decrepit ceramicist. For weeks I have been breaking apart paper, glass, sticks and gluing them back together. My back is sore. What does this act of reconstruction mean?
Thousands of Tibetan monasteries were burned during the Cultural Revolution. Temples became pig pens, scriptures toilet paper. The remaining holy places are shadows of what they once were, with the greatest crimes reserved for those who would make them whole.
Then the regret of it all. The massive undoing and re-doing of the Tibetan culture. Its wholesale revival for tourism and Chinese assimilation.
Each collage I construct requires a weak part: a shred of paper, a stick of incense. To become beautiful each piece must unite with the whole, as in the riots when each Tibetan became part of something larger and unimaginably violent.
Art in the cover of darkness
It is opening night. The cinder block gallery is across a jade green river at the foot of a mountain in a Tibetan neighborhood where kids are riding bikes and people are dong laundry.
We have worked hard to make sure the government knows nothing. The consequences for our soft-spoken Tibetan gallery director who walks with a limp are significant. They risk everything in their contact with us. They are serious about art: making naked red babies trapped in nets and Tibetan beauties painted on the US dollar bill.
The digital black and white print I buy of a surreal midnight garden with a red chair breaking up the idyllic scene is one of these pieces. Fecundity and death. Just like one of my endangered species portraits. “Maybe this is the last garden left,” the photographer says of this print made during the riots. I tentatively ask if the turmoil was near our hotel at the city center. He kindly explains that it happened all over Lhasa.
The Tibetans are here and so is the beer. My buddhas and collages of Chinese train workers and temple sweepers are pinned on the wall. “This work is for you, the Tibetan people.” I tell them how I am profoundly moved by a culture broken apart and put back together again.
They inspect my work. I am suddenly self-conscious of my lecturing to a people I barely know about a subject they comprehend better than me. “Maybe the culture has reformed to make something new,” one of them ponders.
A rain storm drives us into a bar after the opening. Sarah, an animated Australian is toasting Budweiser from shot glasses. She calls our lovely drinking mom “Tibetan Bjork” with her wide smile, porcelain skin and toddler son folded in her skirt.
The Chinese soldiers march outside the bar at midnight. Tibetan Bjork pauses, trying to recall last year’s riots. She looks away, her eyes wet as she stumbles to find the words. “The whole world saw,” Sarah tells her.
The music starts. The bar owner, a Tibetan musician with closely cropped hair and a long Chinese ponytail is strumming a three-stringed guitar and belting a low, throaty mantra. “It is a Chinese folk song—the mens—they know it,” our Chinese translator Ivy tells us.
I am surprised. This is a Tibetan bar. I assumed they play Tibetan music. Then I realize that there are Tibetans and Chinese at our table. They are friends. They drink together and laugh together. They make and sell art together. Tibetan and Chinese, they are living and loving side by side.
Finding Lhasa
The roof of the world. It is a cliché on beer labels, shop signs and restaurant menus. At 12,000 feet, Lhasa is one of the highest cities in the world but that is where its isolation ends. Johnny Cash twangs through speakers of the Summit Café serving French roast and internet instant messaging. Scantily clad Chinese lingerie models slither on billboards facing the old market.
Where is the Tibet of our dreams? Eastern or western, we superimpose our spiritual ideals upon the landscape of Tibet. The reality of Lhasa is another story.
On our last day Hugh and I decide to climb above Lhasa. We head into the hills above Sera Monastery which once housed five thousand monks at multiple colleges. Stale meat lingers in a plain kitchen painted black. Silver shafts of light illuminate blackened vats like half-moons. The fact that the kitchen worker doesn’t understand why we are there is why I love this humble place.
A half hour later we are climbing. A dapper Tibetan elder in a suit and hat is ahead of us. The pilgrim is showing us the way. Blood thickly circulates. The steep climb we share with livestock fills me with fear. He points to a modified phallic rock gesturing that people pray here. For children, for health--we cannot know. “Before they die, they build a house for the soul as it ascends to heaven,” Hugh tells me of the piled stones.
Breathless, we reach the saffron-stone hermitage built into a cliff face. It is partially burned. No one is there. Lhasa’s massive sprawl of government housing, rock quarries and military barracks are a thousand feet below.
The detonated earth shakes beneath us. Flocking vultures spread their wings as I lie down on the narrow path, exhausted by this balancing act. Will the raptors descend upon me thinking I am carrion? The Tibetans generously leave their unburied dead for them as the ultimate gesture of reconstitution, a comforting thought as I drift off.
We round the corner of the knife edge path. Blazing maroon boulders the size of trucks open up a fluted valley and another narrow hermitage. “Should we look inside?” Hugh asks as he draws the stiff black door curtain back. Probably not, I reply as an ancient man emerges confused. Hugh says we should leave. I am certain he is beckoning us in.
We move slowly onto a bench of wool rugs. The old man is slurping a bowl of thick rotten cheese, the white substance rolling in his mouth. Deep chasms line his dark brow. He stares at us in silence. He pours two cups of yak butter tea. To refuse is an insult. “He is a hermit,” Hugh says. Thick, salty tea lines the inside of my throat and he refills our glasses twice more. The old man points to my bare legs. Quickly I spread my rain jacket across my thighs. He hums a lyric and spins the wheel clockwise. Time never goes backwards. The hermit stops, mouth open, staring. We are utterly alone.
After descending into blazing wheat fields late that afternoon and hitching a ride in a miniature army truck, Hugh and I begin to wonder about him, his isolation. He had a map of the world. Yet, he was up there for a reason.
“Think of all he has seen,” I said. The 1.2 million dead. The destruction of thousands of temples. The flight of the Dalai Lama and the abandonment of his country to outside forces. Suddenly it didn’t matter if we were the first or the last to see him. What mattered is that he had found us and through his silence we finally found Lhasa.