Around the World in 80 Trains

by Monisha Rajesh

  Leading us through huge timber doors, Jhampa guided us around the shrines, keeping well out of the monks’ way. I tried to merge with the shadows in the hope of being less conspicuous. Visiting Tibetans brought plastic containers of butter and oil that they poured onto the lamps to keep the thousands of wicks and candles flickering in the dark. Here, the interiors felt safe and cocooned from reality. By the glow, I watched the monks busy themselves carving sculptures out of butter, shuffling through the piles of small denominations that littered the floor like dry autumn leaves. One monk crouched down in front of a little girl whose hair was pulled into a number of bunches, and blessed her with a smudge of ash on her nose. I’d seen a few young children with it and had wondered what it was. The injustice of brutalising such a harmonious culture rang hard in my ears as we walked through the halls, redolent with burning butter. Epic tales of Buddha and monks covered the walls in the form of floral, curly brush strokes, outlining temples, lotuses and mountains, all of which were painted in the richest reds, oranges, greens and blues. Knowing that hundreds of monasteries like this one had been reduced to rubble to make way for real estate was deeply depressing. I hovered for as long as possible with the dread that in the not-so-distant future the last candle would melt and these walls would collapse, leaving nothing but smoke and memories.

  Jem was standing on the edge of a wall looking out over the city. ‘What’s that veil of yellow in the sky?’ he asked Jhampa.

  ‘Factories,’ he replied, his hands in his pockets. ‘Lots of mining companies here now.’

  Marc slung his camera over his shoulder. ‘It’s just China now, isn’t it? This whole place is just China. Tibet’s never going to be free. You’d need a full-scale, UN-backed military invasion to undo all of this. It’s so far gone. It’s like Lhasa Vegas.’

  Jhampa smiled at the ground, kicking a pebble at the wall. A Chinese couple wielding their selfie stick had moved to within reaching distance of Jem, and I thought he was going to push them over the wall. Whereas foreign tourists like us had to jump through hoops to obtain special permits, and could travel for only a limited number of days with an organised guide – and journalists were banned – China’s domestic tourism push had gone into overdrive. Chinese tourists filled the city, hankering after sightings of these quaint little people with their bright clothes and red cheeks; it wasn’t unusual to see an elderly Tibetan holding beads and cowering from a group with video cameras. Tibetans had been commodified by the Chinese, their home turned into a zoo-like compound for the curious. To add insult to injury, Han Chinese migrants now ran most shops, cafes and hotels, depriving Tibetans of the chance to at least eke out a living and find some benefit from the boom in tourism. We’d had a stroke of luck with Jhampa. Tour groups were often assigned Chinese guides who had no concept of Tibet’s history and made up facts as they went along. In the year the Qinghai railway had opened, Adrian, my friend in Beijing, had travelled to Tibet without a permit, and wandered around freely with local Tibetans helping him avoid security checks. He’d seen no more than a small Chinese quarter in Lhasa but could sense that the railway link had been built to serve as a catalyst for the ‘Hanification’ of Tibet, as he called it. It had taken less than nine years for his prediction to come true. The Chinese government already had plans for a second service, a high-speed train between Chengdu and Lhasa that would cut the journey time to fifteen hours. There was no hope of Tibet ever shaking off China’s clutches.

  Security cameras on the street clicked and swivelled as a group of pilgrims went by swinging Mani wheels – wooden prayer wheels fitted to spindles. The lady at the front was wearing a pair of red New Balance, much like the pair Jem had left on the train. Marc read my mind.

  ‘Everyone’s got to wear shoes. What they going to wear? Yak skins?’

  I realised that, despite my brownness, I was veering dangerously close to developing a white saviour complex. Most of the monks wore branded trainers and used iPhones, but then, so did I. What gave me the right to text and tweet and stroll about in a pair of Adidas Superstars, then lament that they were doing the same? Perhaps I was just as guilty as the Chinese, willing these doll-like people to live in the past in some sort of colonial quest to find an authenticity that no longer existed. Before I had a chance to consider it further, a dog leapt up from where she had been sleeping and launched herself at Marc, who was leaning over a pair of her adolescent pups. Her teeth just made it through his Gore-Tex trousers, leaving a tiny scratch, but it was enough for him to spend the rest of the afternoon convinced he’d contracted rabies.

  On a beautiful morning, the prayer flags fluttered wildly as we walked through the main marketplace. Lacquered windows twinkled in the light and chocolate mountains peered above the rooftops. In the centre of the square, a crowd of traders wearing skullcaps and pinstriped suits with jumpers underneath had gathered around baskets brimming with what looked like dried yellow chillies. Descended from Kashmiri Muslims who had arrived in the seventeenth century, these men were predominantly butchers selling caterpillar fungus to buyers from Guangzhou. Picking up a broken one, Jhampa pinched the caterpillar between two fingers and held it up. One end was just a brown stalk, while the other was covered in a fungus that had devoured the body of a caterpillar larva. Known as yartsa gunbu, which translates as ‘summer grass, winter worm’, the caterpillars are hunted by nomads on their hands and knees on the most fertile heights of the Tibetan plateau, and bought cheaply, before being sold at market in China for more than their weight in gold. Yartsa gunbu is believed to alleviate all kinds of ailments, ranging from heart disease and asthma, to HIV and erectile dysfunction. A pound of the top-quality grubs can sell for around £30,000.

  With so few work opportunities for ethnic Tibetans, the lucrative trade had caused in-fighting between villagers, keen to make the most of their resources, but also between Tibetans and Han Chinese poachers looking to cut out the middle man. The haggling process involved a ritual from the buyer who moaned about how terrible the samples were, and the seller shouting back. It ended with the exchange of money through a sleight-of-hand movement, and looked quite a fun way to pass the morning.

  The rest of the market featured the usual suspects: butchers selling curtains of purple yak meat hooked to rails, the mournful head of the yak covered in flies; greengrocers with shiny pomegranates; jobless men in leather jackets; and a number of mannequins that looked like Brigitte Nielsen – one of which had been doodled with a miniature goatee. Sidestepping puddles of meaty water, I wandered around the corner and came face to face with a lovely old bookshop. If there was anywhere in a new city that felt like home, it was a bookshop. After definitely not looking for my own book – which no writer ever does – I gazed at the covers, like a big kid in a sweet shop, wondering which world to open up. The shop was lit by paper lamps and stocked with an unusual amount of Lonely Planet guidebooks that a number of young people had taken from the shelves and were reading in the window seats. Foolishly, I approached the man at the counter and asked if they had a copy of Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet. A young woman browsing nearby looked up and came over.

  ‘They don’t keep that book here,’ she said, pushing her huge glasses back on to her nose. ‘The book is not allowed. How to say … the police, they do not allow that book. They don’t approve.’

  Surprised by her honesty, I thanked her and backed away. I hovered around the shop for about ten minutes, pretending to look at the postcards, before approaching the woman and asking if she wouldn’t mind talking to me for a few minutes. She agreed to go for a drink to a nearby bar that served Belgian beer and spaghetti. Two students were watching a show on a MacBook Air as we took a seat and the woman ordered a po cha – butter tea. ‘Lucy’ felt safer with a pseudonym even though she gave me her Tibetan name and talked far too loudly for comfort. Born in the north of Tibet, the twenty-five-year-old was half Tibetan and half Han Chinese, explaining that her Chinese grandfather had come in 1959 to ‘help encourage the Tibet
an people to go to university’. I asked her outright about book censorship.

  ‘They have some English books, but … how to say … they have a special company that edits the books and they allow some, but not the other books. Before we travel to other countries, if they don’t understand something or if it is about Buddhism or the Dalai Lama, they take the books away.’

  ‘Do you follow the Dalai Lama?’

  ‘I am Buddhist because I am Tibetan. It is according to your heart, if you believe or not. But you can’t keep pictures of the Dalai Lama. In people’s homes they have a room to pray and we have the photo of the Dalai Lama, but we cannot show people, especially the government. I think old people still believe in the Dalai Lama, but now most of the monks are very young so the government teaches them to not believe.’ She took a sip of her tea, which gleamed with spots of butter.

  ‘How do you feel about the monks who have burnt themselves in protest and all the police in Lhasa?’ I asked her.

  ‘Last time was maybe 2008 in Lhasa they burn, but most people don’t know what happened. At that time the government took all the monks up to the mountain for one month, but the government would not allow them to take food. After 2008 everywhere they put the police to watch everybody. In the beginning the people felt: “I was living here, I was born here, why you want to check me?”   They check the ID if I went to the temple. At the beginning, we feel very uncomfortable. It seems like I am a bad person. I am not a bad person but after few years it becomes normal. Otherwise it is very safe in Lhasa. Especially in the night, if a girl is just one person walking around the streets it is very safe.’

  Lucy’s glasses were slipping down her nose again and she pushed them back up, tucking her bobbed hair behind her ears.

  ‘Is it difficult for you, being part Chinese?’ I asked.

  ‘Now it is very mixed, it is very normal. I have a lot of friends who are half Chinese and half Tibetan. Tibetans begin to learn Chinese when they are very small in school so it’s not very difficult.’

  ‘But how do you feel about people coming into Tibet to visit if you are not allowed to leave?’

  ‘The people coming to Tibet? For us it is okay. Tibetan people like foreigners, they like talking to you, because the government not allow us to go outside. For young people, they are very angry for this. Before, I met a friend, a boy who was nineteen, and we drink the tea together and he was very angry because of this. The old people they don’t care about this. We have a door controlled by the government. They let a few foreigners come in, but we cannot go out. The most important reason is they are afraid the people will go outside and follow the Dalai Lama. But it wasn’t always this way. Deng Xiaoping allowed Tibetans to go out.’

  ‘Do you think the Dalai Lama will ever come back?’

  Lucy shook her head. ‘No, never. So now we are talking about when he die, who will be the next one? Will he be chosen by the Chinese government or by the Dalai Lama? If chosen by the current Dalai Lama the next Dalai Lama also not come to Tibet. If chosen by the Chinese, he will be allowed to come to Tibet.’

  The Dalai Lama had issued a statement in 2011 that if the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama should continue, and there was a need for the 15th Dalai Lama to be recognised, ‘no recognition or acceptance should be given to a candidate chosen for political ends by anyone, including those in the People’s Republic of China’. So there was no chance of a new Dalai Lama ever coming to Tibet.

  ‘If you can’t leave, how do you find out about the outside world?’ I asked.

  ‘We have the Lonely Planet, so we read many. Some people come in just to look and read them.’

  Remembering the young people in the bookshop, I felt suddenly depressed. They came in to read the Lonely Planet guides just to learn about countries they would never get to visit. Then Lucy told me something that cheered me up.

  ‘Some Tibetans, we can go outside to university. I have studied French in France. I lived in Nice. We can apply to other countries’ universities, and if we have a letter of acceptance, then we take that to the government, then we can apply for passport. I have a passport as a student, but when that passport has run out I cannot have a passport again.’

  ‘Do you feel like Tibet is a part of China?’

  ‘For us Tibet is a part of China. For you it is very difficult to understand. Foreigners they think that Tibet is a country. China took the Tibet for themselves. Foreigners think that it is a country and it will be free, so the government is worried about these foreigners who come here. When I was in France, they don’t think I’m Chinese, they think I’m Tibetan. Tibet is one part of China, we think like this. I don’t know why the foreigners think that Tibet is a country. Now for us we live with very peace. It’s much more better than before. My grandma tell me before is really bad. Now the old people their living is very peaceful, very good.’

  I wasn’t sure how much Lucy was brushing over Tibet’s history, and I wanted to ask what she thought had made living in Tibet so very bad, and why it went through a period of unrest, but the moment didn’t feel right and she was too kind to antagonise.

  ‘What do you think of the Free Tibet movement?’ I asked.

  ‘I was talking with my friend with this problem. We think Free Tibet is not a good thing. We need things from other cities. Like before in Tibet, people don’t know how to grow the fruits, so all crops are from Chengdu. Now people know how to grow that. Also, some skills like how to use washing machines and things, also internet. In my family, the first washing machine my father brought from Guangzhou. Before that we don’t have that. There are many good things.’

  Lucy’s final answer frustrated me. Having a washing machine, knowing how to grow fruit, and using the internet didn’t have to come at the expense of thousands of lives.

  Despite Lucy’s insistence that they now all lived in peace, I struggled to reconcile my feelings. Jhampa’s sister had fled in the 1980s and he hadn’t seen her since, nor had he ever met his nephews and nieces. He couldn’t speak freely for fear of reprisal, and there was no hope of seeing his sister again, when he, like almost every other Tibetan, was forbidden from leaving the country and she wasn’t allowed to return. Within a year, Lucy herself wouldn’t be allowed to leave Tibet once her student passport had expired, nor could anyone else in her family. That was not living a life of peace. That was living with Stockholm syndrome. Since our chat, I’d become obsessed with making sure everything we bought was Tibetan, that our money went only to Tibetans, and that every yak momo that passed our lips was pressed and steamed by Tibetan hands. That afternoon we’d insisted Jhampa take us to one of his favourite restaurants for lunch. Looking a bit surprised, he’d driven us to the edge of town, parked down a quiet lane and led us to a barber shop, next to which was a discreet doorway hung with an old curtain, where a girl and her mother brought out steaming metal plates of yellow yak curry that made us sweat. It was the best meal of our whole Tibetan trip.

  On our final evening, Jhampa walked us to the home of a Tibetan couple who ran a restaurant from their two-roomed apartment, known as Tibetan Family Kitchen. A couple of hand-painted signs on crooked arrows took us down Dan Jie Lin Road, with a sharp turn into an alleyway, through a courtyard, up some stairs, past a few old people with missing teeth, and into a kitchen where a couple wearing bodywarmers and jeans were making tea and tossing greens in a wok. We’d come for a cookery class with Lumbum and his wife Namdon, who originated from the region of Amdo. They had worked there as English-speaking tour guides for eight years, before moving to Lhasa in 2009 where there was more business. But after tourism dried up, they decided to open up their home as a restaurant.

  While the couple finished clearing away after their previous customers, I wandered through to the next room, where the walls were scribbled with messages from happy diners; I’d just begun nosing at them when I was suddenly aware of something moving on the table. A fat bundle of baby extended a tiny arm from where she was sleeping while her parents worked. Sh
e started to cry, so I gathered the blankets together and brought her into the kitchen while her mother balanced their other daughter, five-year-old Tenzing Yandon, on her hip, flash-frying yak meat that roared in the flames. Lumbum put a cup of ginger milk tea in front of me while six-week-old Tenzing Wampo drooled in her slumber. Jem and Marc rolled up their sleeves and began chopping spring onions and celery while Jhampa kneaded the flour for the momos, which would be stuffed with yak meat and steamed. With the altitude, there was no need for a pressure cooker as water boiled at around 70°C. The atmosphere was like that at my parents’ home on a Friday night: the men were busy dicing with Namdon, Jhampa was rolling out dough, and Tenzing Yandon was playing with an Acer laptop on top of a rice cooker, while trying on a new pair of socks. She checked her sleeping sister from time to time and shot me coy looks from behind her computer. The couple were also catering for a group of ten German diners in the next room and had had to turn away another group. Foreign tourism was no bad thing for them. I asked Lumbum how he felt about the controversy over foreign tourism, and described to him some of the comments I’d had from friends who disapproved of my visit.

  ‘No, you have to come, you have to feel,’ he said. ‘This is the twenty-first century, you have to be open, you have to have communication. You can’t just read the media and believe. You come here and you feel. Life is happy, it won’t make us rich, but we are happy.’

  It reminded me of Lee’s speech on our last night in Pyongyang.

  ‘Yes, it is true that life is not great for everyone here. And there are troubles. But this is a great job for us,’ Lumbum said, ‘because we can be at home with the children and we really want people to come and learn about our culture and our lives.’