Escape from the Land of Snows (33 page)
Read Escape from the Land of Snows Online
Authors: Stephan Talty
Tags: #Tibet Autonomous Region (China), #Escapes, #Bstan-Dzin-Rgya-Mtsho - Childhood and Youth, #Tibetan, #Tibet, #Dalai Lamas, #Asia, #General, #Escapes - China - Tibet, #Religion, #Buddhism, #China, #Biography & Autobiography, #Religious, #History
“There’s no question that his legend is tremendous inside Tibet,” says Paul Jeffrey Hopkins, the Tibetan scholar. “So many of the people there have one wish: to see His Holiness before they die.”
Lhasa exists around an absence. The Chinese have outlawed anything to do with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama—books, photographs, everything. But everywhere I looked, men and women were bowing and praying to him as if he had never left. The irony is that Tibet had for centuries been kept secret by the Tibetans. Now it is again off-limits, secluded in a new and more menacing way by its occupiers.
And spending more time with Sharma, I began to see him differently. Walking around Lhasa with him was, in some ways, like walking around Tuscaloosa, Alabama, with a black man in 1954. When he talked with other Tibetans, his voice was normal. He even snapped at our local driver for forgetting his driver’s license—you do not, apparently, want to be a Tibetan caught on
the roads without proper ID. But when he spoke to a Chinese, any Chinese person, his voice and his posture underwent a sickening transformation. His face took on a worried, almost pleading look. He seemed to shrink inside himself. His voice became hesitant and soft, question marks floating up at the end of all his sentences. The nerve endings in his face seemed to go dead, as if his unrehearsed self was too dangerous to display.
And the Chinese often treated him as if he were an unpleasant fact of living in Tibet. Businessmen cut in front of him in lines. Clerks angrily waved him away when he tried to ask a question, only to look up attentively at the next Chinese customer. Sharma took it all as meekly as a lamb.
In his own country
, I thought.
I was coming to the end of my trip, but I had to see the Norbulingka. As we drove to the site, I remembered what had happened on this road fifty years ago, sixteen-year-old Yonten and the masses of Tibetans running toward the palace and everything that followed that wild, unscripted moment. That cycle—oppression, protest, crackdown, casualties—had repeated endlessly ever since.
When he first saw the plains outside Lhasa, the landscape shocked the young Choegyal because it looked so much like Palestine, “arid and flat.” And soon after the escape, Tibet was grouped with the Middle East as one of the earth’s insoluble, godforsaken messes. But what the Tibetans want—autonomy, the Dalai Lama to return, respect and support for Tibetan religion and culture—isn’t particularly exotic in Chinese terms. Most of the people in Mongolia or Shanghai get much the same already, not abstract freedom but a practical one, so long as they don’t challenge the Communist Party. Freedom of religion is written into the Chinese constitution; it isn’t an alien concept here at all.
Tibetans tell jokes about their odd status. One goes like this: The Dalai Lama is pushing for “one country, two systems”—for Tibet to remain within China but to be governed differently—while ordinary Tibetans themselves want “one country, one system.” That is, they just want what everyone else in China has. And, of course, to see His Holiness.
When we got to the Norbulingka, I was astonished to see that the open square in front of the palace where the 1959 protests had begun was now a park cut into an intricate pattern of small hillocks and ponds. The park was exquisitely crafted, but obviously a mass rally would be impossible here. What looked like a gift to the Tibetan people had the added bonus of keeping them from rioting.
We walked along the yellow-and-red walls where so many Tibetan rebels had died. As we passed through the groves of poplar and bamboo trees that shade the Norbulingka’s grounds, I saw a young, thin Tibetan man walking to our left. Sharma was on the phone again. I let him walk ahead and fell in stride with the Tibetan. I couldn’t see any cameras or microphones in the grove of poplars that surrounded us.
I nodded. “Hello?” the man said. “English?”
I pretended to look at the trees and ask questions about them. But we talked about the situation in Lhasa. As I walked alongside the young man, I mentioned the troops in Lhasa, the rising tension. The man nodded. “They’re worried there’s going to be trouble,” he acknowledged. “It’s worse than it’s ever been.”
I nodded. “What about the Dalai Lama?”
“We want the Dalai Lama to return,” the man said, smiling slightly, his voice ragged with emotion. “But sometimes it seems hopeless.” Many old farmers and nomads couldn’t afford the visas that would let them travel to India, he told me; their last wish was to see the Dalai Lama, but they would die without looking
on his face. A Westerner must imagine the spirit of Christ alive somewhere in the world, and a Christian unable to go and see and be touched by him, to really get a sense of what Tibetans feel, the almost physical pain the separation causes them. Not to see the face of their Precious Protector is like passing through life as a restless ghost.
I looked ahead of us. Sharma had pocketed his cell phone and was waiting. I nodded to the man and hurried to catch up with my guide.
That night, Sharma and I went out for Losar, the Tibetan New Year. It seemed that Lhasans were intent on ushering in the Year of the Female Earth Ox by burning their city to the ground. There was fire everywhere. Girls ran by with torches lit with thick flames, sending a brief wave of heat across our faces as they dashed down the alleys. Roman candles shot up from street corners where people, reduced to slim silhouettes in the darkness, stood by boxes packed with what looked like every firework known to man. Enormous bonfires burned in the middle of the streets, and young men ran up to them and tossed in fistfuls of fireworks, which exploded in an earsplitting roar as the men danced into and then away from the flames.
Glowing beneath the dark dome of sky, the city felt alluring, incendiary, free. The people were smiling, and hawkers were selling sweets. But this was a party, not an insurrection. The Chinese troops, some of them wearing white dust masks, ghostly in the gloom, followed behind the young men who were spiking the bonfires, dutifully putting out the flames with brooms and shovels as the clock ticked toward midnight, like conscientious parents making sure the house didn’t go up in a blaze.
Tibetans, their faces happy and entranced, watched the orange
flames as they licked the night air and fell back. Sharma and I walked the Barkhor, circling the darkened Jokhang. For a few hours Lhasa seemed transformed. It was for a moment no longer an occupied capital with an empty throne sitting at its heart.
Sharma and I walked in silence. There was nothing to say that could be said.
amban:
A representative of the Chinese emperor.
bodhisattva:
A person who has attained complete enlightenment but postpones Nirvana in order to help others obtain liberation from suffering.
Chenrizi:
The
bodhisattva
of Infinite Compassion, the deity whom each Dalai Lama manifests in human form.
choe-ra:
A common area in a Tibetan monastery where teaching was often conducted.
chuba:
A long sheepskin coat made of Tibetan wool; a common outer garment worn by Tibetans.
Dharma:
The body of teachings expounded by Buddha; the essential doctrines and practices of Buddhism.
dob-dob:
One of the Dalai Lama’s bodyguards.
dzo:
A Tibetan hybrid of a yak and a cow.
geshe:
An advanced degree earned by a Tibetan monk.
kalön:
A
Kashag
member; a cabinet minister.
Kashag:
The Tibetan cabinet, or council of advisers.
kata:
A white ceremonial greeting scarf.
Khampa:
A Tibetan from the eastern region of Kham.
kora:
A walking pilgrimage, often around a Tibetan holy site such as a temple or
stupa
.
lama:
A Buddhist teacher.
miser:
Depending on the context, either a Tibetan serf or a citizen of Tibet. Used here in the former sense.
Mönlam:
Mönlam Chemmo, the Great Prayer Festival, held annually in Lhasa at the beginning of the first Tibetan lunar month.
palanquin:
A covered sedan chair carried by teams of men.
stupa:
A structure containing Buddhist relics or the remains of a
bodhisattva
or other revered person; a burial tomb.
Tendra:
An enemy of the Buddhist faith.
thamzin:
A “struggle session” orchestrated by the Chinese authorities, designed to humiliate and persecute perceived “rightists” and “splittists.”
Three Great Seats:
The three most important monasteries in Tibet—Ganden, Sera, and Drepung.
tsampa:
The basic Tibetan staple, a dough made of parched barley flour.
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