by Bruce Kirkby
“Look! I’m drinking oxygen up my nose,” Bodi beamed, looking like an ER patient. “And it tastes so, so good.”
“Me too,” Taj hollered. “I’m drinking oxygen too.”
“This all makes me feel nervous,” Christine whispered as she squeezed in beside me.
A few days earlier, Taj had collapsed in the back seat of our rental car while crossing a mountain pass, though it wasn’t clear if this was due to the flu or altitude. After descending to thicker air, his rambunctious ways quickly returned. In the days that followed, I had carefully monitored his blood oxygen saturation, using a pulse oximeter—a tiny device I’d brought from home that clips to a fingertip, commonly seen in hospitals—and his readings, like Bodi’s, remained in the high nineties, a sure sign the pair was adapting well. We would pass even greater elevations on the train journey, but with pressurized carriages and personal oxygen supplies, I felt confident that Taj would be fine.
“Rationally I know that,” Christine agreed. “But once this train leaves the station, there is no turning back.”
At that very moment, the carriage lurched forward.
* * *
Constructed at the staggering cost of 4.2 billion dollars, and inaugurated in 2006, the new Qinghai–Tibet railway is a marvel of modern engineering, with elevated bridges traversing swaths of permafrost and long tunnels piercing the tall ranges.
It is also another nail in the coffin of free Tibet, for the railway has allowed China to consolidate control over the far-flung province, accelerating the pace of resource extraction. But its most insidious objective appears to be drowning Tibet’s ancient Buddhist culture with relentless waves of Han Chinese immigration.
I have always felt outraged by China’s treatment of the Tibetan people, but now as we peered from UV-shielded windows, watching the forlorn Tibetan Plateau slip by, I recognized the uncomfortable similarities with what had occurred in North America, where Indigenous peoples were subsumed by a flood of immigrants eager to exploit the resources of the New World. Why did the Tibetan situation tweak my fury while issues in Canada felt easier to overlook? Perhaps because my culture had done the flooding at home? And was our presence on the train making us complicit in atrocities here? There were no easy answers.
Hour after hour passed. Occasionally we spotted shaggy yak wandering the barrens, and small herds of slender gazelle, but far more common were uniformed soldiers, standing poker straight outside grubby tents, saluting the passing locomotive.
Later that night, as the train lumbered over the 5,231-metre Tanggula Pass, Bodi and Taj delighted in racing between carriages, oblivious to the stumbling Chinese tourists who clogged the aisles. Many, having been dragged straight from sea level in Beijing, were collapsing in pools of vomit.
* * *
We reached the Forbidden City of Lhasa at high noon, having completed in twenty-four hours a journey that had thwarted even the boldest explorers for centuries.
Battalions of Chinese soldiers marched in formation through the cavernous new train station. Outside, our government-assigned guide waited beyond barricades, a short Tibetan woman who gently slipped khata scarves around our necks, welcoming us with a whispered Tibetan greeting, “Tashi delek, tashi delek.”I
The midday sun was blinding, and around us, gleaming office towers rose in every direction. The newly paved streets were a mess of billboards, fast-food outlets and malls. The city had swollen to twenty times its size since I’d last been there a decade earlier, and stationed amid the squalor, our guidebook advised, were 224 karaoke bars, 685 brothels and three hundred thousand Chinese troops.
But still the Potala Palace floated above the fray on a distant prow, and my heart soared. The magnificent fortress of the Dalai Lamas is home to some thousand rooms, ten thousand shrines and two hundred thousand statues. Eagerly, I recalled to Christine and the boys the wonders I’d witnessed there. The snaking lines of sheepskin-clad nomads carrying buckets of yak butter, which they spooned into flickering candles. The pilgrims crawling on hands and knees beneath shelves of scripture, in the belief the knowledge contained within would shower down and bathe them in merit. The impoverished herders tossing bills at golden statues of Buddha until the money fell like snow, only to be swept up by Chinese caretakers, stuffed in bulging garbage bags and carried away.
While the television crew checked in to a marble hotel on the city outskirts, we headed to the old town and to a colonial guest house appointed with teak and mahogany. In a courtyard shaded by chrysanthemum and hollyhocks, Christine and I sipped tea while the boys lay on their bellies beside shallow ponds, watching lazy schools of koi. A pamphlet on the table advertised Blind Tibetan Massage, and Christine quickly arranged for a treatment.II Within twenty minutes, a sightless man stood at our door.
Leaving Christine in peace, I took the boys to wander cobblestone alleys, joining streams of pilgrims. Toothless men in cowboy hats shuffled past on bowed legs. Elderly women wearing pigtails and colorful aprons bowed wordlessly to our boys. Families of nomads with electric eyes and tangled hair had travelled from the distant reaches of the Chang Tang plateau, some five hundred kilometers away.
Some pilgrims prostrated themselves with every three steps, throwing themselves across the cobblestones, then rising and taking three more steps before repeating the process. Wearing crude wooden boards affixed to hands and knees, these devout souls were using their physical body to draw an unbroken line across the surface of the earth, connecting distant homesteads with Lhasa’s sacred sites. One man bore a callus as thick as a heel on his forehead, where it repeatedly grazed the ground.
A hand-held prayer wheel. The brass drum has been embossed with Om mani padme hum, and Buddhists believe that spinning the wheel creates the same meritorious effects as chanting the mantra.
Bodi and Taj delighted in spinning the long rows of brass prayer wheels adorning the walls of temples and shrines. Soon a group of elders had gathered around them, stroking their cheeks, giving me the universal thumbs-up sign. A few yanked mobile phones from their robes and photographed the pair, who now danced gaily in their midst.
Meanwhile on rooftops overhead, silhouetted against a darkening sky, soldiers stood stock-still, gripping combat staffs and rifles. A Chinese flag fluttered above the Jokhang, Lhasa’s holiest Buddhist temple, like a raised middle finger.
* * *
How could we describe to our boys the tensions at play here?
Amid a complex history, perhaps the place to start was the eighth century, more than a thousand years after Buddha’s life on the plains of India, when his teachings first began drifting northward across the Himalaya. Carried by wandering mendicants and scholars, Buddha’s message spilled across the high plateau, absorbing local customs and faiths as it went.
Eventually the colorful tradition of Tibetan Buddhism emerged—known as Vajrayana, or the “thunderbolt path”—which bore fleeting resemblance to the more established and staid schools of Southeast Asia. Depicting a fantastical world where tigresses soared among the clouds, gurus left footsteps in stone and horses rode on the wind, perhaps the most defining characteristics of this new doctrine were the radical meditation techniques, which promised the possibility of swift enlightenment, possibly even in a single lifetime.
Grand monasteries rose, a quarter of Tibet’s male population became monks and with time, the reclusive country closed its borders. Gradually, a society emerged different from anything the world had previously known: a nation where the ideals of non-attachment, non-desire, material renunciation, compassion and transcendental wisdom were institutionalized. Shrouded in secrecy, Tibet became synonymous with a lost paradise or Shangri-La—a sequestered land of simplicity and peace.
All that changed in 1949. Following the formation of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong wasted little time exerting territorial claims over Tibet, which lay nestled on China’s western frontier. Forty thousand troops were dispatched to the cloistered kingdom, which at the time possessed not a
single airstrip and just fifty artillery pieces. When Tibet’s spiritual and political leader, the fifteen-year-old Dalai Lama, appealed to the United Nations for support, his calls went unanswered, and the small nation had no choice but to submit. For several years, an uneasy truce endured.
A decade later, when rumours of a Chinese plot to abduct the Dalai Lama began to swirl, disgruntled Tibetan peasants took to the streets in protest. China’s crackdown was swift and severe. Amid the ensuing upheaval, the young Dalai Lama slipped away, disguised as a soldier, travelling by foot across the Himalaya toward sanctuary in India, launching a diaspora that continues to this day.
Far greater horrors were to follow.
As China’s Cultural Revolution swept across the plateau, in a period stretching from 1966 to 1976, Tibet’s great monasteries were systematically laid to waste by artillery fire until just thirteen of an original six thousand stood intact. Religious artifacts were stolen. Scripture was incinerated, or used by soldiers as toilet paper. Nuns were forced to publicly copulate with monks. Others suffered forced sterilization, electroshock and rape. Parents were made to applaud as children were executed. Crops failed and starvation ensued. In the space of a generation, one out of every five Tibetans perished—more than a million in total.
Today the cultural genocide continues, but now rifles have been replaced by state-sponsored immigration programs that flood Tibet’s cities and villages with Han workers. Travellers are warned of recording devices in hotels and soldiers disguised as monks who infiltrate monasteries, rooting out subversion. At schools, Tibetan youth are taught in Mandarin under the steely gaze of Mao’s portrait.
As I watched my own children dance among the beaming pilgrims—with closed eyes and outstretched arms—I wondered: Should my boys know this sad history? Might it later inform their own behaviors at home? Or was it better, at this age when they still believed in magic, that they simply saw with their own eyes and felt with their own hearts?
In the days ahead, Christine and I would relate some of Tibet’s dark history to the pair, but we chose to largely focus on the wonders of this still-enchanted kingdom.
* * *
The next afternoon, our family visited Drepung Monastery on the outskirts of Lhasa. Once one of Tibet’s great learning institutions and home to ten thousand monks, there were just five hundred in residence now (by Chinese decree) and the massive complex felt more like an abandoned movie set.
We were wandering slopes above the temples when Bodi spotted a cave. Inside was an altar littered with scarves, water bowls and flickering candles. A grubby cushion sat on the dirt floor.
“What is this for?” he asked.
“Cave very special place,” our guide explained. “From ancient days, senior monks here coming to meditate.” The monastery’s founder had spent seven years sitting here in silence, she told us. Did Bodi want to try?
To my surprise, our fidgety boy agreed and settled on the cushion. Our guide crouched beside him, showing him how to clasp his hands in prayer, mindful to leave a small space for Buddha between his arched fingers. I glanced around for Christine, but she’d sprinted off with Taj in search of an outhouse.
“Just rest now,” the guide urged, “and your mind will become very clean. Very pure.”
Bodi closed his eyes, and his breathing settled to a gentle rhythm. He remained motionless for what seemed like an eternity. At first I thought he was pulling our leg, or putting on a show for the television cameras, but as minutes ticked by, and Bodi didn’t budge, I began to suspect something unexpected— maybe even profound—was transpiring.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. From an early age, Bodi had always displayed an uncanny ease with all things spiritual, particularly Buddhism. When I brought home a pewter statue of Buddha from a photojournalism assignment in Cambodia, he placed it at his bedside and buried the figurine beneath a pile of offerings: glass beads, feathers, pebbles, necklaces. On family canoe trips, he gently shooed mosquitos from our tent, sobbing if he ever caught Christine or me surreptitiously swatting an intruder. His resistance to harming any living being reminded me of Tibetan monks I’d seen in archival documentaries, on their hands and knees outside the Potala Palace, painstakingly plucking earthworms from irrigation ditches as local farmers dug.
Even Bodi’s name was a nod to a mythic Buddhist figure, the bodhisattva, one who upon achieving enlightenment chooses to forsake Nirvana and instead returns to earth to assist others on their own journeys toward enlightenment. (In fairness, I had originally suggested the name as a reference to Patrick Swayze’s freedom-loving surfer character in Point Break, a Hollywood bank heist film; however, Christine was drawn to the bodhisattva slant, and thus the name pleased us both.)
Half an hour later Bodi blinked. Slowly opening his eyes, he sat silently for some time.
“I forgot where I was,” he finally whispered. “It was like I was nowhere.”
Then he jumped up and ran to join Taj, who had just returned from peeing in bushes, while I tried to explain to Christine what I’d witnessed.
* * *
Packed into a Toyota Hilux, our family set out the next morning for Nepal, some eight hundred kilometers and five days distant. We followed the Friendship Highway, a lonely ribbon of asphalt weaving across the southern edge of the Tibetan Plateau.
Upon reaching the dusty outpost of Tingri, we took a detour and emerged from a constricted valley below the towering north face of Mount Everest, its crystalline summit piercing an unblemished blue sky.
I’d previously visited the mountain several times from the south, but this iconic view left me unexpectedly overwhelmed—the site of so much mountaineering history. Until becoming a father, I’d never been much of a crier. But now I seemed to well up at the slightest provocation: acts of kindness, sad songs on the radio, even cheesy television advertisments. Tears leaked from my eyes.
“What do you think, Bodi?” I asked with wavering voice.
“It’s OK.”
OK was his standard response for every question I asked, and had become a joke between us.
“OK? Seriously? It’s Mount Everest! What would it take to make it a good day?”
“Winning the lottery, I suppose. Getting elected president. Or maybe getting married. If I’d been looking for a long time.”
“And what about a great day?”
“Dad! You already know that,” he yelled, voice tinged with frustration. “Going to Mars would be a great day.”
“Well, that takes a long time,” Taj interjected. “It would be more like a great day and a great night.”
Bodi rolled his eyes.
* * *
The next morning, the Friendship Highway plunged off the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, dropping into the Sun Kosi gorge. Ahead of us lay the jungles of Nepal, and beyond, the scorching plains of India. In just a few kilometers, barren plains were replaced by thick forests. Waterfalls floated down from above, hammering on the Toyota’s roof as we passed beneath.
Caught in congested traffic near the border, we bid our driver farewell and tipped him generously. Then we leapt out, racing onward by foot, duffel bags bouncing between us and boys tumbling alongside. The TV crew struggled to keep pace, burdened with a mountain of their own gear. We reached the border bridge just as steel barriers were lowered for the night. Slipping underneath, we stepped into Nepal, drenched in sweat.
A beaming customs agent stamped visas in our passports, then draped garlands of marigolds around our necks. Moments later, a goat darted out from beneath a tour bus, grabbed a hold of the flowers around Taj’s neck and almost dragged our poor boy away.
We spent three days in steamy Kathmandu, wandering markets, eating cake from German bakeries, visiting the iconic Boudhanath stupa (a massive Buddhist shrine adorned with all-seeing eyes) and later a local orphanage, where our boys joined a game of barefoot soccer and both picked up a stubborn case of warts.
Then we pressed on, toward India.
* * *
Despite frantic efforts, the television crew members were unable to obtain working visas, and found themselves turned back toward Kathmandu. Only Wes and a clandestine camera operator managed to sneak across. An interim crew of Indian camera operators was arranged, and the jolly men waited for us on the far side of the border, beneath a mango tree.
Travelling by rental car—Wes and his camera operator packed alongside our family, the crew of Indian videographers in a separate vehicle behind— we followed dirt roads through unruffled villages, past mud-brick homes and shady banyans, where the dusty air was scented by charcoal, paraffin and dung.
In Prayagraj, we boarded a rickety wooden riverboat and set off down the Ganges River towards Varanasi—a journey of 150 kilometers and two days. The boys jousted with pillows on a cushioned deck above the wheelhouse as we slipped past gaunt cattle and white egrets, past glistening fishermen who poled slender boats, past wispy cooking fires on sandy banks. A riotous symphony of frogs and crickets bid the flaming sun farewell.
Sadly, our makeshift berths in the cramped bilge reeked of diesel and were plagued by mosquitos. A bedside thermometer read thirty-eight degrees Celsius, and that sweltering night marked the most uncomfortable of our journey—perhaps of my entire life.
The boys rose sodden and cherry-cheeked before dawn, having slept little. Wes appeared haggard too, but the Indian camera crew, who had spread out on the wooden deck without even sheets protecting them from insects, were no worse for wear.
Temperatures were crippling by the time we reached the ancient city of Varanasi. Tossing our duffels into a tuk-tuk, a three-wheeled auto rickshaw, we negotiated a fee then raced off toward an air-conditioned guest house, which Christine had carefully booked in advance.