Outside the courtyard, the river that last night was just a whisper now speaks with a full voice to the morning light. The road crosses the river and runs off between two fields, but I leave the road and stay with the river, walking on its rocky bank. A stream splashes down from the mountains and joins the river, and I turn and follow the tributary uphill. At a narrow point, I vault over the stream, onto the higher bank. On a grassy knob where the bank is flatter, a woman is lying supine, completely still. I draw closer and see that her shirt is pulled up, exposing her brown stomach. Her head faces away from me, but I can see her fingers clutch and release a few blades of grass. I’m tempted to get closer and to talk to her, but I’d probably scare her.
The dirt path I’m on widens to a rocky road, and after several bends, weaves between three brown adobe homes. In a lush meadow, four monks in burgundy robes boot a soccer ball, and a man in a brown bowler hat leads a donkey down through the game, towards the river. Past the meadow, I crest a hill and the village of Xiahe spreads out below me. Enchanting and smaller than Linxia, it is more a large meeting of brown homes. Presiding over the community is Labrang Monastery, a majestic white palace stacked with green roofs.
A girl with dirt-streaked cheeks rushes up to me in the vegetable market at the edge of town. “Yoppee!” she shrieks. Two more children happily chime in behind her: “Yowpee!” I play with them for a moment, slapping hands with them, asking them what country they’re from. They follow me halfway to the monastery.
Labrang is a stunning sight to behold. Its whiteness stands stark against the green mountains, the eight columns of its portico are vermilion red, its roofs are forest green, and its three shimmering, sky-piercing spires are radiant gold. Robed monks come and go through its doors, passing me where I stand in the large dusty square. A tour bus rolls up in front of me and disgorges Chinese tourists in predictable bland garb and yellow visors, yet this time the domestic Chinese tourism conjures a vision of Americans: us, visiting ersatz Native American teepee-and-wampum parks, marveling and laughing at the pitiful spectacle we and our forefathers have created. Am I, like these Chinese visitors, now complicit too?
Monks walk silently, diligently, their hands turning ornate vertical cylinders. Prayer wheels. I draw closer. According to the LP, the monks walk clockwise and spin the sacred wheels in a precise tradition as a way to cultivate harmony, peace, and compassion throughout the universe. I watch them, falling in love with their endeavor, smiling at the sensation of being anonymously cared for. I imagine for a moment what it would be like to work so earnestly in order to grant others peace. Unlike teaching, perhaps I wouldn’t worry whether I was effective, whether it was working. Two monks, then three pilgrims, then two more monks, pass before me, moving along the colonnades, and I file in behind them, softly turning each wooden wheel with my own fingers. I feel their painted surface, their creaky rotation, the grains of dust in their axles, and my heartbeat slows. Everything slows down. My thoughts float away, pass and separate from me on their own trajectory. I do a whole circuit, then another, unaware of the passage of time. When I grow tired, I stand back and watch as the monks continue.
A back staircase takes me and my curiosity up onto the monastery’s hardwood porch, and I peer through fuchsia curtains into a room where several monks sit in a circle on a polished wood floor. I tiptoe to a railing and take in the view of the steep hillside behind the monastery. Two dozen tiny huts are perched on knobs of the slope, perhaps for solitary meditation. Higher up, a crowd of black mountain goats munch the grass. Then, way up, atop the summit, I spy a little tent, a white dot against the blue sky.
Inspired, I leave the monastery in search of a way onto the hillside. I try a small alley between two homes, and sure enough it turns into a path that leads back to the earthen steepness. Setting a foot on a thick clump of grass, I begin to climb, not going too close to the white huts, thinking people may be meditating in them. The incline is steep enough that I can no longer see the white tent up top, and I have to scramble at times, lunging for handholds, letting the rough grasses bite my fingers. I turn and gaze back down at the monastery and the village. My bag, camera, and water bottle swing around and throw me off balance, and I pitch forward, off the hillside. I grasp a protruding rock and catch myself. Exhaling, continuing upward, I decide not to look down again. The sun burns cosmically hot and close, and I feel lightheaded as I clamber up. Resting with a hand on the slope, I swallow the last of my water. The mountain goats have moved up and off to my left. Goldmund’s words ring in my mind, over and over: “What else is there than to live and roam, to feel summer and winter, to taste beauty and horror, to experience the world?”
The summit. A grin ripples across my face, and my fingertips fly up towards the heavens to touch the exploding yellow sphere. I turn and gaze back down, over the brown brick town, and it’s nestled so nicely in the hills, its roofs so close together, that they seem to be one enormous, flat, brown home. The sight is soothing, and my mind reels backward to Peizheng, to my students, to the concrete dormitories, to the memory of standing under a tree, to the sound of children playing basketball, to pure listening.
The summit is a grassy plateau ten yards wide; the hill declines more gradually on the other side. The white tent is actually a low-slung tarp perched a hundred yards away. When I draw close to the tarp, I see that two men in red robes sit cross-legged on beige blankets beside it: an older man under a black parasol, and a thinner man partially under the tarp. Both face down to survey the town and its spellbinding valley. They turn to watch me as I arrive.
“Nĭmen hăo,” I greet them in Mandarin. The older monk, who has a flabby neck and big round sunglasses, smiles and motions for me to sit down. He speaks slowly, but I don’t understand. I sit cross-legged beside them on the grass, letting a minute pass, feeling my legs gratefully relax. “How long have you been here?” I ask. The older monk replies, but again I can’t comprehend. I smile in embarrassment when I realize they watched my foolish, flailing climb. The younger man, who has a flattened nose, ladles out a large mug of tea from a black pot and offers it to me along with a yellow roll sprinkled with dark scallions. I refuse, though I could practically kill for a glass of cool water. He insists several times, so I accept the tea and leave it to cool. I bite into the roll, and it’s crusty, dry, and salty. The older monk, his head shaven clean, the sleeves of his robes pushed to his shoulders, smiles warmly at me again. The two men exchange words, and I realize they’re speaking Tibetan, not a sacred, incomprehensible dialect of Chinese.
Silence falls, a complete silence, a silence that I probably disturbed. Breezes gently lift my T-shirt from my sweaty back, and I watch a feathery, flat-bottomed cloud come right for us. The air—the wind and our breathing—flows around us, in and out, endlessly surrounding this perch, pushing the grasses and the clouds in a harmonious, unified motion. My awareness heightens as it dissolves into the brightness and the mountaintops, the sky and clouds, the earth and grass.
Some time later I hear a child’s voice. I turn and spot a woman’s head bobbing over the gradual hillside behind us. The older monk looks at me with a laugh and points at them. I realize his point. I climbed up the stupid way. I nod and finally smile. The woman arrives with a child and some food; she places a green ceramic bowl on the ground and scoops bowlfuls of soup for the men and the boy. I decline forcefully, presuming the soup needs to last a full day or two for these men. A different temptation seduces me. My camera begs, beckons, beseeches me to snatch some of this experience, as if I might own it and hold it. I’ve decided to bring the device with me only every other day, but it’s with me now, and the adorable boy waddles toward me in an orange floral shirt and cowboy hat, smiling at me with a mouth full of soup. Snap! The old master turns to look at me with his benevolent laughing eyes. Snap! It’s like a duty I don’t believe in, but I obey nonetheless. No one else seems to mind.
Perhaps this shame is as useless as the mistrust I suffered with Qiu.
The wom
an and the boy leave, and the great silence returns. The clouds swim in our direction and then part before me like a vast human torso opening its arms. Gazing at the clouds, I hear an internal voice whisper to go further, to be like these clouds, to let go of the fog and fear, to walk through the world this way I’ve stumbled upon: eyes open, trusting more things, trusting more feelings, experiencing the odd, delicious, concrete knowledge that whatever happens is good.
The easy path takes me down the sun-baked back of the mountain, winding around hills and through pastures, and I carefully avoid the countless brown piles of yak dung. Yaks are the sacred animals of Tibet, the creatures trusted in these mountains for food, fuel, transportation, and inspirational fortitude during long winters.
I descend on the other end of town. Three laughing Tibetan monks and two Hui men chat in the shade beside a restaurant. Two Han Chinese women giggle at me, one shielding her face from the sun with a purse. I cross a small bridge over the Daxia River and wander into a shop full of shawls and cloaks that are made of black wool woven with bright oranges, lime greens, azure blues, and hot pinks. It’s rougher work than the silk tailor’s in Linxia. We’re at a higher altitude. I examine other goods—fur-lined boots, cowboy hats, prayer flags, yak-butter pots, and fragrant piles of Tibetan incense. The shopkeeper greets me, and when I ask about a long brass trumpet, he steps over to it and sounds a deep hum through it. He laughs at me, at the idea that I, this lăowài, could want to take it home. Further on, in the center of town, I come to a long row of extra-large prayer wheels painted with vivid images of friendly animals and Buddhist saints. Monks and laypeople stroll or shuffle by, chanting, spinning the wheels one by one. Three young women prostrate themselves in the dust, standing, kneeling, lying face down, kneeling, standing. They wear black smocks and use wooden paddles strapped to their hands to avoid getting dirty. After a few minutes, they stop and sit on the raised floor of the prayer wheel colonnade, eating watermelon in the shade, spitting seeds into the dust. One glances at me, smiling, and she motions me to sit beside her. I do, and accept a slice of watermelon. There’s a chopping sound as they slice more melon on a cutting board. Biting into the sweet mess and swallowing the droplets of sugary pinkness, I answer her questions and point up at the tiny white tent. “I scrambled up there,” I tell her. “I’m pretty foolish. It’s a little tarp. There are monks meditating. The view is beautiful.” She listens, catching a drop of juice at her chin. She drops her rind in the dust. “Why don’t you pray with us?” she asks. I point to her wooden paddles and say I’m not equipped. She insists, so I go for it, watching her elbows as she prostrates, and then emulating her as best I can: I press my hands together by my nose, then by my heart, then I kneel, do a push-up, then I’m up again. On it goes, up and down, a rhythm overtakes my body, and I release into the mindlessness of motion. Growing tired, I wonder whether they do this all day long. I smile at myself, me, this confused Christian Buddhist, this pilgrim, this man attracted to and confused by another Chinese woman. I prostrate over and over. Méi guānxì (no matter), I tell myself, letting it go, disappearing again into the serenity of the movement.
Further down the street, I push through saloon-style doors into the Brilliant Café. The cool concrete room is crowded, and I spot an open back door onto a grassy courtyard. There, I find an unobstructed view of Labrang Monastery, and in a flash, I know this is the place Colt described when we sat under the willow at the Old Summer Palace. “A veranda,” he mentioned, and it’s in a small grassy yard under tall cedars that I find an open table. I snack on noodles with radishes, scallions, and lamb. It isn’t exactly what I ordered, and buzzing flies descend to share my meal, but my frustrations and expectations seem to ask to be released with the rest of my ego. A bearded white man and a robed monk emerge and sit at the table beside mine. They discuss Hong Kong and the huíguī, and I listen a while before interjecting my own comment—that the huíguī was like a wedding where everyone was happy except the bride. They laugh at my joke. The Frenchman explains that he’s here to study the art and history of the monastery, so he and I listen together as the monk recounts what he knows about it: Labrang Monastery was built in 1709 by Jiamuyang, the “Living Buddha,” who was born nearby. It became famous quickly for its beauty and tranquility, perhaps because of its surroundings, and the monastery grew. After just two hundred years, Labrang had become a Tibetan Mecca with over four thousand monks in residence. “During the Cultural Revolution,” the monk sighs, his voice softening into the Mandarin syllables, “the PLA bombed the buildings.”
Two Han Chinese tourists join us, a man from Beijing and a woman from Hong Kong.
“Many people were killed,” the monk continues, watching them sit. “Labrang was reduced to 250 monks.”
I shake my head, murmuring. The Frenchman pounces on me, claiming America has done things far worse over the last century. He attacks me about bombing Japan and Vietnam, about invading Iraq, about ignoring Rwanda. The group polarizes, and I’m pushed into the role of representing the U.S.’s self-righteous might. The Frenchman is the conceited European who has everything figured out. The Hong Kong woman is a surprisingly fierce defender of China.
“OK,” I finally admit. “Still, it’s horrible what happened here.”
“The Monastery is doing well now, right?” queries the Hong Kong woman.
The monk nods. “In 1985, a fire burned down the main Prayer Hall. The government helped us rebuild it in 1994.”
“That’s ten years later,” I say.
The monk adds that the government still won’t rebuild the nunnery—so the nuns fend for themselves in the teensy huts on the hillside. But Labrang is now back up to 1800 monks and is thriving again as a major monastery of Tibetan Buddhism’s main sect, the Yellow Hat; Xiahe is once again a magnet for pilgrims in vivid raiment.
“It always looks like a festival here,” exclaims the Beĭjīngrén. “It’s better than Lhasa.”
The monk tells us that the government doesn’t harass Labrang anymore, and that the community observes every festival and offers an undiluted Buddhist education in five departments: Law, Medicine, Astrology, Theology, and Mysticism. “No politics, though,” he says, and smiles.
We step inside, reconciled, and feast together on pork dumplings, peppery tofu, potatoes, lamb sautéed with bamboo shoots, fried rice with bean sprouts. Sharing food fosters amity in no time.
Stuffed, I wish them well and return to the streets. The monastery’s gold spires glisten in the late afternoon light. I marvel at these different feelings—politics stirring the waters and meditation settling them.
“Fried dough twists,” a street vendor calls out. “Sweet and warm. Four mao apiece!” I watch a pair of girls buy two golden cakes while behind them a mountaintop nibbles on the orange sun. When I look again, the sun has been consumed completely. The twilight around me fades from transparent to dark, and I wander back into the Brilliant Café for a mug of tea. In Narcissus, Goldmund has become a sculptor with precocious skill, ready to ascend to mastership in the guild. On a walk in the countryside, however, he rejects what he sees as the pitiful ability of human hands; only that mystery behind the best sculptures still amazes him, whereas “the fame and settled life of the sculptor seem to lead to a drying up and dwarfing of one’s inner senses…The gold in the eye of a carp, the sweet thin silvery down at the edge of a butterfly’s wing are infinitely more beautiful than sculptures.” And in that instant he changes course and leaves the guild, the town, the women he has loved, the art into which he has poured his spirit, and he sets out again alone on the road in search of a more formless beauty.
“Can I sit with you?”
A young woman is speaking accented English. I nod, and she shrugs off her purple backpack and sits in one of the last open chairs in the restaurant. In Mandarin that is better than mine, but not fluent, she orders noodle soup. I ask in Mandarin whether she’s traveling, and she looks at me curiously. Michiko, from Kurashiki, Japan, nods and unleashes her hair fr
om a bun. She tells me she’s between semesters at Beĭdà, Beijing University, the country’s most prestigious university.
“I haven’t seen any other women traveling alone,” I say.
“Not many,” she nods.
“You must be brave.”
“Brave?” She smiles, as if trying on a hat. “Maybe I’m not as scared as I should be.” She laughs as her soup arrives. I watch a waiter stuff logs into a wood stove in the center of the restaurant, and I feel the air suddenly, palpably change. The day’s warmth surrenders completely to a bolder coldness than I’ve felt so far in this country, touching me through my one and only long-sleeve shirt. “We lăowài need warm clothes up here,” I remark.
She nods, intent on slurping the rest of her noodles. When I ask whether learning Chinese is easy for Japanese speakers, and whether Japanese would be easy for, say, me, she stops and smiles. “Your Chinese is good! I bet you’d pick it up quickly.” Pronouncing Japanese is easier than Chinese, she explains, but Japanese grammar is much harder. She drinks the last of the broth, and asks if I’m staying for another cup of tea.
After noticing that she too wears just a thin shirt, I suggest we go on an expedition for warmer clothes. She agrees, and we wander down the street together. A wooden hut is crammed full of black coats embroidered with the distinctive Tibetan hues: bright pink, sky blue, pumpkin orange. They’re woven as thick as blankets, and she briefly models the day-glow fashions for me and other passersby. I give her a connoisseur’s glance and ask her to turn, and her smile cuts through me. I feel self-conscious and wander outside. She doesn’t buy anything. We move on, passing a store of real, fresh furs, and as the wind whistles around us, we stop to browse at an outdoor stand of wool sweaters. She likes a dark green sweater, but there isn’t one small enough for her. She really is quite small. I find a perfect blue turtleneck for me and haggle with the young salesman, referencing food twice, settling on 65元, and giving him a high five when I pull the thick wool over my head. The insulation feels fantastic. Michiko dances from foot to foot, visibly cold, and decides to head home. I rub a palm up and down her left arm, rapidly, to warm her, and a thrill like electricity charges up my own arm. She grins like a cat. “At least one of us is warm.”
Double Happiness: One Man's Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China Page 20