by Kate Harris
“The number one ingredient in packaged food in China?” said Mel. “LIES.”
“The number two?” I said between bites of unbearable sweetness. “SUGAR.”
Given that the Chinese energy bar we ate next listed “loosening” and “meat flavouring” on the label, we sure hoped lies and sugar were the primary ingredients, though the latter would mean I’d finish this Silk Road with nine cavities for souvenirs. We offered some snacks to Philippe, who politely declined, preferring instead to preserve his smile. By now he’d decided not to risk the ride to Lhasa. Instead, he would head toward Yushu, a part of the plateau that was ethnically Tibetan but beyond the TAR, meaning he didn’t need a permit and guide or stealth tactics to travel there.
Mel and I were sorry to see the Swiss lay monk go, especially when the quiet gravel side road he turned down looked far more appealing than the paved highway we faced, edged by enormous powerlines that made the sound of knuckles cracking. To reach Nepal before our Chinese tourist visas expired, Mel and I needed to cover seventy-five kilometres a day on this road, across relentlessly high altitudes, into fierce headwinds, wearing face masks, dodging the law, for twenty-one more days. No time off, no room for error, and no resupplies—not because grocery stores and restaurants weren’t widely available in eastern Tibet, but because we didn’t dare stop for fear of getting caught. For the same reason we concealed our camp each night, which wasn’t easy in a land of huge horizons.
At least biking in stealth mode became less suffocating once we cut breathing holes into our face masks. Whether we smiled or rode along with our mouths open, breathing hard, the mask gave us each a leering rictus, which seemed an appropriate greeting for Chinese police cruisers. At first I panicked at the sight of those gleaming white SUVs with red lights on the roofs, but none slowed to stare as they passed: we blended in with the sundry Chinese cyclists on this road, though to my eyes our distinctions were obvious. For one, their bikes usually had only two panniers, compared to our four, because they were able to eat at restaurants and sleep at guest houses along the way. They also tended to pedal in an extremely high gear at a hard grind, compared to our speedy twirling in a lower gear. And despite this being a paved highway, the Chinese cyclists all rode mountain bikes with at least front, if not dual, suspension. The sole exception we saw was a forty-something mother from Beijing, who rode a folding bike with a few piddly gears. Somehow she managed to keep pace with her teenage son, who rode a mountain bike, at least for the hour or so Mel and I rode alongside them at their invitation. They’d wanted to practise their English, which they knew we spoke from the moment we said “Ni hao!” to them with an obvious accent. But if these Chinese cyclists were aware that we shouldn’t have been on that road without a guide, they kindly didn’t say so.
Despite our resolution to not stop anywhere, all vows have a breaking point. Mel’s and mine was a Tibetan antelope rehabilitation centre on the side of the highway. The reward for our flagrant incaution was being mobbed by dozens of orphaned baby antelopes with bulging brown eyes and adorably matted tan fur. Their stilt-legs always looked bent, so that they seemed to walk on tippy toes, and they nibbled delicately on grass as if they weren’t sure they liked the taste. On our previous bike trip, we’d seen wild Tibetan antelope, or chiru, waft like smoke across the western plateau. This migratory species is endemic to the Tibetan Plateau and severely endangered from poaching for their soft, silky underwool, or shahtoosh, which ounce per ounce is worth more than gold and diamonds. To their credit, the Chinese government has cracked down on illegal poaching, and they’d generously raised sections of the Qinghai-Tibet railway to allow passage to the nomadic herds. Unfortunately, the state had also embraced wilderness conservation as a convenient excuse to force Tibetan nomads off traditional lands and into soulless subdivisions.
Another day, another pass, each higher than the last. Some days we did two passes, both over 16,400 feet, such as when we formally left Qinghai and entered the TAR. The border is marked by Tanggula Pass, which evocatively means “mountain on the plateau,” but in reality was a desolate circus of cars and trash. The plastic wrappers and bags fluttering on the pass were parodies of prayer flags. A stone monument depicted what looked like a pair of soldiers, one of them talking on a telephone. Piles of human excrement sat at the base of it. Mel and I left as quickly as we could.
It wasn’t until a few days later that we felt more truly back in Tibet, when we crested the top of another pass that was marked with prayer flags. Yak skulls carved with “Om mani padme hum” were tangled among them, and there was no trash, no crowds, no people until a few Tibetan men showed up on motorcycles, looking like funky cowboys in their wide-brim hats, dinner jackets, and pointed leather boots. They turned coldly away, and only as they drove off did I suspect why. Of course. I looked Chinese.
The flags we flew and the face masks we wore were essential, the only way to bear witness to the Tibet that China didn’t want us to see: the checkpoints to restrict Tibetan movements at the entry and exit of each town; the traditional homes flying Chinese flags, bright as bloodstains against the white stucco buildings; the concrete statues of police officers looming at regular intervals along the road, their faces frequently smashed featureless, their necks slung with beer bottles and white prayer scarves; and the road signs featuring the Tibetan language in tiny script below much larger Chinese characters, reinforcing subordination right down to font size. But as we rode through towns we were too paranoid to stop in, camped out of sight each night, and met Tibetans on high passes who didn’t even glance our way, I felt like I was living at a subtle yet ineluctable remove from “reality.” What I saw in Tibet was not Tibet but some blurred, partial rendition of the place, distorted by the limits of my mode of exploration. I was effectively behind Plexiglas.
Alexandra David Néel also disguised herself to see this forbidden land, but it dawned on me that she was a Buddhist, meaning her pilgrim’s garb reflected a deeper truth. Repeating “Om mani padme hum” across the plateau was genuine prayer. As we biked past Tibetan families gathering barley from stubbled golden fields, or flossing mountain passes with prayer flags, the urge to explain myself, to apologize, fevered through me. Instead I kept quiet and kept pedalling, and in the silence of my passing I could hear the pennant flapping on the tail-end of my bike, a kind of shame trailing red and loud behind me.
—
Roughly halfway through Darwin’s journey on the Beagle he was ready to quit. The seasickness, isolation, and physical strain were grinding him down. “I am sometimes afraid,” he confessed in a letter home, “that I shall never be able to hold out for the whole voyage.” I was sometimes afraid of the same thing halfway across Tibet, where all the wrongness in the world seemed wide-angled. Holing up in a countryside cottage began to sound awfully appealing, especially when the imperative to hide our tent meant we camped, at one point, in a garbage pit. It was full of random debris—broken crockery, old pill packages, a plaid shirt, lonely shoes. That night a storm flung rain at the tent with such force it sounded like bits of gravel. At any moment I expected to be buried alive, and I was too tired to care. After just a few weeks on the Tibetan Plateau, Mel and I looked gaunt, strung-out, with leg muscles like wads of gum stuck on bone.
“Every body part aches,” Mel groaned the next morning on a rest break. “But I’ve learned the secret to overcoming this…”
“Do tell,” I said.
“Don’t listen to your body!”
But when my mind screamed Stop now, my legs chorused their agreement. I missed jeans, couches, pizza. I missed waking up eager to see what lay around the next bend, rather than doubting whether I wanted to know. I missed feeling like a real person, rather than a ghost, something I often complained about to Mel. But at my first opportunity to interact with Tibetans I promptly melted down. One day we couldn’t find anywhere flat or hidden enough to camp, so we hesitantly accepted a family’s invitation to pitch our tent behind their home. Mel and I worried abou
t implicating them in our illegal stunt, but the campsite was hidden from the road, among yaks grazing in shaggy skirts, so it seemed unlikely we’d draw attention. It was a glinting, gorgeous day, and barely mid-afternoon when we set up the tent, but I crawled into my sleeping bag and couldn’t bear getting out again. I felt evicted from the trip by tiredness, as despairing and world-weary as Rimbaud—enough seen, enough known, enough had, enough.
But even lying there with my eyes closed I heard the Chinese flag flapping from the Tibetan home, not to mention the ones on our own bicycles, sprawled in the grass outside. I could picture military convoys trawling the highway and spewing propaganda. I imagined nomads being herded into subdivisions while chiru ran free in wilderness reserves. I saw a chilling, sterilized land in which no horizon is unmarred by authority, no movement goes unmonitored, and every hint of peaceful protest is crushed beneath the heel of the state. And there I was, joyriding through this oppressive landscape, a tourist in a regime Tibetans literally set themselves on fire to protest and escape. Eleven people self-immolated the year of our bike crossing, men and women in their twenties or thirties who shouted, “Tibetan people want freedom!” or “Long live the Dalai Lama!” before pouring kerosene over themselves and lighting a match. Eighty-six did the same the following year, which was also when the Chinese government confiscated passports from TAR residents and made it extremely difficult for them to obtain new ones, effectively imprisoning six million Tibetans. Such injustices sickened me, as did my relief at being able to leave. I couldn’t wait to leave. Mel went to visit with the Tibetan family without me, explaining that I wasn’t well.
Yaks grunted and snorted around the tent, munching closer and closer. I shook the tarp to provoke a retreating thunder of hoofs. Against the distant drone of traffic I could hear the delicate pinging of flies trapped between the tent’s inner and outer walls. I lay in my sleeping bag, aching all over, and fervently hoped humans never made it to Mars. We didn’t deserve a new world; we’d just wreck it all over again. As a kid I’d genuinely believed that the discovery of alien life, whether sentient beings or microbes, would change lives, incite a revolution near-holy in its repercussions. At the very least people would be kinder to each other, knowing we’re all of a kind, earthlings every one, whether Turkish or Armenian, Indian or Pakistani, Tibetan or Uyghur or Han Chinese. We’d collectively awaken to the fact that we’re all lost in this mystery together.
Now I wasn’t convinced. Discovering extraterrestrial life wouldn’t change a thing, just as learning to fly didn’t lift us higher as people, just as Voyager’s pale blue dot photograph failed to dissolve nationalism the way it should have if we’d truly seen it. “Look again at that dot,” Carl Sagan pleaded. “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives…on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Meanwhile we’ve discovered microbes eating sulphur in boiling vents at the bottom of the ocean, Earth-size exoplanets orbiting distant suns, proof everywhere of the rarity, ingenuity, and resplendence of life in the universe—and such facts haven’t budged our priorities an inch. What is the point of science and exploration if people persist in living and dying as they always have, namely selfishly, obliviously?
Maybe infinity begins at the point we can’t see past, can’t love past. How small we are when this point is ourselves. The problem with borders, I was beginning to realize, isn’t that they are monstrous, offensive, and unnatural constructions. The problem with borders is the same as the problem with evil that Hannah Arendt identified: their banality. We subconsciously accept them as part of the landscape—at least those of us privileged by them, granted meaningful passports—because they articulate our deepest, least exalted desires, for prestige and permanence, order and security, always at the cost of someone or something else. Borders reinforce the idea of the alien, the Other, stories separate and distinct from ourselves. But would such fictions continue to stand if most of us didn’t agree with them, or at least quietly benefit from the inequalities they bolster? The barbed wire begins here, inside us, cutting through our very core.
I heard footsteps approaching the tent. The door zipped down and Mel poked her head in.
“You okay?” she inquired. “I thought I heard crying.”
“Must’ve been the yaks,” I lied, thinking, All explorers must die of heartbreak.
—
The oracle-bone script of ancient China recorded the world as it plainly was: a fire was a fire, a fish a fish, a mountain a mountain. This earliest form of Chinese writing was so pictographic that you can almost guess at the meanings of divinations carved into turtle shells and animal bones during the Shang dynasty of 2000 BCE. Modern Chinese characters evolved from these symbols, and though the current incarnation of that writing is less literal, more esoteric, you can still read a lot into it. The symbol for gradually, for example, is based on pictographic forms that showed water cutting through stone.
This has been the Dalai Lama’s gentle but persistent approach to freedom from China. Although the Chinese government vilifies the exiled Buddhist leader as a terrorist, the “simple monk” I listened to at Oxford wasn’t even advocating for Tibetan independence, merely a truer autonomy for Tibet within China. His non-nationalistic, non-violent approach frustrates certain Tibetans, who see it as too soft, a cop-out, when what they want is their country back. The Dalai Lama has now “retired” as the head of the Tibetan government-in-exile, and he instituted a democratic system of governance in his place, meaning his leadership responsibilities now are strictly spiritual. And in this capacity, as the human incarnation of the bodhisattva of compassion, his job is to end the suffering of not just his people, but all people. Instead of seeing good Tibetans and bad Chinese, as Pico Iyer noted in The Open Road, the Dalai Lama sees potentially good Tibetans and potentially good Chinese. I tried to be that nuanced and open as I biked across the Tibetan Plateau, but everything I saw built a forceful case for bias.
It was only late August, but the poplars were already flaring gold. Fallen leaves crunched beneath our wheels, and the paper prayer flags scattered on mountain passes made a similar noise when we biked over them. Tibetans threw the colourful squares into the sky in a bid for good fortune, and if nothing else, this had the immediate effect of collaging a dark road into something brighter. On one pass a bus drove past me just as its passengers threw the papers out the window, so that prayers stormed down all around me. One of them caught on the brim of my helmet without ever hitting the ground. I tucked the gritty, sage-coloured square into my journal for good luck. Depicted on it was a wind horse, or lung ta, a pre-Buddhist symbol for inner wind or positive energy shown as a horse lugging a jewel on its back. When someone’s lung ta decreases, the Tibetans say, they are grounded by negativity, and when lung ta increases they see things more positively and soar. “The very same thought can lead to a state of freedom or to a state of confusion,” wrote a Tibetan monk, “and the direction it takes depends upon lung ta.”
Headwinds made descending the pass almost as hard as climbing it. I willed them to change direction, and when that didn’t work, tried nudging my wind horse another way: Why should this bike trip be easy on me? I’d read about how the Chinese character for presence is derived from earlier pictographs showing a hand eclipsing the moon, which made me wonder if I hadn’t been giving Neil Armstrong enough credit. Maybe what the astronaut had really been saying, in covering the earth with his thumb during the Apollo landing, was something like, Be present, utterly present. This world deserves your deepest attention. Read along similar lines, what a difficult road says is, Wake up. Keep your eyes focused on what’s bigger than the sadness directly in front of you, the sadness that both hides and gestures toward some larger enigma. So I did, which is how I saw the pilgrims.
You couldn’t really miss them, flattened on the pavement as though hit by a car, except for the relieving and life-affirming fact that th
ey periodically stood up. The Tibetan man and woman placed their palms together at their chests, raised them to their crowns, and lowered them to their foreheads, throats, and hearts in a fluid sequence of gestures. Bending at the waist, they slid their hands, knees, bodies, and then foreheads to the pavement, with traffic screeching a few metres away. Then they stood up, took a few steps forward, lifted clasped palms above their heads, and repeated the ritual. They would repeat it all the way to Lhasa or enlightenment.
Mel pulled off her face mask and sunglasses when we caught up to them and I did the same. Their eyes widened at her freckles and my dirty blond hair, then they laughed. We shook hands, beamed at each other, and exchanged what few words we had in common. Mel and I prided ourselves on travelling light, with just enough warm layers, camping gear, and instant noodles to last us across the Tibetan Plateau, but these two carried nothing but the clothes they wore. Thick wool sleeves protected their arms, leather aprons their knees, and wooden paddles their hands. We offered them a Snickers bar and I tried not to stare: in the middle of each of their foreheads was a coin-sized callous, a third and unblinking eye, caused by the friction between pavement and bone.
Eventually we said goodbye, tashi deleg, and continued down our respective roads. In my handlebar mirror I watched them shrink on the highway behind us. I held my breath as transport trucks swerved near their prone figures, and whistled with relief when I saw them rise again. Dust and fumes rose like incense from the road. Speeding vehicles sprayed pebbles into the gutter. With every step, every repetition, the calluses on their brows must have grown thicker, denser, the skin hardening to a darker and more permanent shine. Sometimes scars are a kind of protection, making prayer possible. Sometimes even wilderness needs a wall. The pilgrims disappeared from view and I pedalled on, nothing in my pockets but stories, wind, all kinds of weather.