Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid

by J. Maarten Troost

  I had decided to travel to Lhasa, the longtime abode of the Dalai Lama on the high Tibetan Plateau. Lhasa is the spiritual home of Tibetan Buddhism, though of course it is no longer the home of the Dalai Lama, who fled into exile when China crushed a rebellion among Tibetans in 1959. There are two ways to get to Lhasa from Zhongdian; there is the overland route that involves a 4 × 4 and a week of navigating perilous dirt roads over some of the highest mountain passes in the world. Or one can fly. I’d considered the overland route, but after the short drive from Tiger Leaping Gorge to Qiaotou, I’d abandoned the thought. The prospect simply combined too many fears I had in China involving driving and heights. And so I’d fly to Lhasa.

  I waited at the Tibet Café for a ride to the airport. Technically, only foreigners in tour groups could get permits for Tibet. But there was a local fixer at the café who had helped me obtain a permit from the Office For Granting Permits For Tibet To People Who Really Should Be Part Of A Tour Group But Aren’t. Soon, I was joined by familiar faces.

  “Look who’s here. Where’s the Republican?”

  It was my cross to bear on the backpacker circuit, to be the guy traveling with the Republican, that oddity. I’d met the two Australian couples in Dali, where we’d shared a meal and beers and had all sorts of convivial fun.

  “His politics are a little daft,” said Lachlan. “But he’s all right.”

  High praise indeed from an Australian.

  It was a short flight to Lhasa, a short flight over the greatest mountain range on Earth. There were, however, snacks served on board. Shalom, said the package, which further informed me that I was eating a Hot Pickled Mustard Tuber and that it was a Ningbo Special Product. As I ate this Hot Pickled Mustard Tuber, I gazed out the window and was surprised to see that even though it was early October, all but the very highest mountains, the ones that stretched to tickle the fuselage, were barren of snow. Here and there I could see glaciers distinctly retreating, leaving huge barren half-pipes, a skate park for giants. This was not good, of course. Three of the world’s great rivers begin in Tibet: the Mekong, Indus, and Yangtze Rivers all find their source here in its high mountains and glaciers. Those rivers are born of snow. But there was little snow now, and as I stared at the austere wilderness below, I couldn’t help but feel that here, in the forbidding mountains of Tibet, was compelling evidence that the planet was changing, and I tried to squelch that gnawing feeling that we are on the cusp of unsettling times.

  And yet, in barren valleys and clinging to precipitous mountains, there were scattered villages. I could see terraced brown fields. I could see no evidence that anything actually grew in Tibet, but there were, in any event, terraced farm fields. Rarely, however, did I see anything resembling a road. The isolation of these Tibetan villages must be unforgiving. But that, presumably, is how the Tibetans prefer it.

  But Lhasa is no longer quite so isolated. As we rode a bus from the airport over the lunar plains of central Tibet, a flat, rocky expanse surrounded by lifeless hillsides, I noticed that nearly every building, every home, was festooned with the Chinese flag. Subtlety, clearly, was not a strong suit for the Chinese government. But on the dusty hills there was Buddhist graffiti and thousands of prayer flags, little celebrations of color in this world of brown. And there was a sky so blue that you’d swear you were no longer on planet Earth, but elsewhere, far away, in a place with a different sky. But, alas, I was still technically in China, and it manifested itself in the outskirts of Lhasa with the bleak clutter of an ever-expanding Han city of drab apartment buildings, noodle shops, and karaoke bars. Surely, there was something more to this place. This was Lhasa! The fabled city on the rooftop of the world. Isolated for centuries. And yet there were car washes? Billboards?

  At the bus station in the center of town, we were soon besieged by beggars—hunchbacked beggars, burned man beggars, monk beggars, women beggars, child beggars—but strangely, they were all jolly. I had not encountered happy beggars elsewhere in China. But here in Lhasa, the beggars couldn’t have been more mirthful, even though the Australians were not particularly forthcoming with their kuai.

  “Well, if they had puppies, maybe I’d give them something,” Lachlan observed. He and his girlfriend had been traveling the world for a year. They’d become hardened by the road. And yet the beggars didn’t begrudge them this. They smiled and waved and said a little prayer for us.

  I made arrangements with the foursome to meet them later and took a pedicab to my guesthouse. I couldn’t imagine a more grueling job up here at 12,000 feet than biking a heavy pedicab full of people. And not only was the driver shuttling me onward in the thin air of Lhasa, he smoked while cycling, a dazzling feat of lung power that left me awestruck. But I, too, was feeling fine with the altitude. Clearly, this was the upside to our brief stay in Shangri-la. A few days at 9,500 feet, and suddenly 12,000 feet just wasn’t a problem.

  At the guesthouse I was told that my room was on the fourth floor and that there wasn’t an elevator, and so I huffed my pack onto my shoulders and made for the stairs, where soon, several flights up, I could be found with my arms on the wall, chest thumping, desperately gasping for air. My body had suddenly realized that circumstances are indeed different up here at 12,000 feet. There is, for instance, a lot less oxygen up here—40 percent less, as a matter of fact. But I’ve been acclimatizing you, I said, breathlessly, to my heart, which thumped alarmingly. Dali, Lijiang, Shangri-la—I’ve been slowly going higher just so we could avoid this unpleasantness. Air! said my heart. More air!

  One should always listen to one’s heart. So, it appeared, we would go slowly today.

  Lhasa, as I had seen from the bus, is surrounded by drab, could-be-anywhere-in-China-except-I-can’t-breathe suburbs, but in the old town around Barkhor Square, it is a different place. There are warrens of white, mud-brick houses and shops, and streets of monks—monks begging, monks giving, monks in swirling maroon robes and running shoes—and sidewalks covered with the carcasses of giant yaks. It is a town of pilgrims, and there were Tibetans from distant valleys who had spent weeks traversing the rugged paths to get here. In front of the Jokhang Temple, a monastery of mud bricks and gold that is the holiest sight in Tibet, I watched ruddy-faced pilgrims doing the Barkhor circuit, a clockwise perambulation around the temple that took them through a market maze and tables of prayer wheels. Dozens of people knelt and prostrated themselves before the temple’s heavy wooden doors. Hundreds more were walking the circuit, spinning their own prayer wheels. Some had braided hair; others wore cowboy hats. And all had the distinctive ruddy red cheeks of the Tibetans. I thought of Jack. A little farther and he would have found his Other.

  The late-afternoon light was ethereal, a darkening blue, but the mountains flared with sunlight. If Mars had been colonized by Buddhists, it would look like this. I felt awfully close to space here. I walked past bored-looking Chinese policemen playing cards at a table and headed across the square toward the Mandala restaurant. I had no expectation of finding good food, but they had a balcony that overlooked the colorful scene below. I climbed the staircase as if I were summiting Everest itself, a slow, arduous ascent with deep, labored breathing. Something told me to order vegetarian. This was a holy place, I thought, and perhaps I’d defile this holiness by eating flesh. I had no idea whether that was true, but it seemed like the right thing to do. California Buddhists eschew meat, ergo Tibetan Buddhists must avoid meat too. Also, the enormous yak carcasses strewn about the streets outside encouraged a vegetarian approach. I plucked at my noodles and vegetables and noticed two Tibetan teenage girls wildly out of control on a moped. They careened into another moped, sending everyone to the ground. I waited for the arguing, the screaming, the inevitable demands for compensation. I’d seen this show a hundred times in China. But no. They laughed. Everyone laughed. There was so much laughter. Oh, I thought. Oh, oh, oh. This is different. Laughter? After a crash? When there is damage? When there are dents? Scratches? When somebody has to pay for repairs? An
d they laugh about it in Lhasa?

  Clearly, I’d entered a different world.

  In the morning, when I awoke, the mountains were dusted with snow. But the air was very dry, dry enough to elicit the need for lip balm. I’d never felt the need for lip balm before. I am not a lip balm man. But here, up here, way up here, I had a need, and so I wandered into a Chinese pharmacy. The attendants were dressed all in white, as if this were a sanatorium, or possibly a lunatic asylum. I mimed what I needed and she understood completely. I was in need of skin-whitening cream for hands.

  It’s always interesting to see the enduring persistence of this fair skin nonsense. Presumably, once, not so long ago, fair skin was indicative of class. A mandarin, of course, certainly didn’t work the fields under a blazing sun. One would think that the triumph of the proletariat would have dismissed the idea. But I liked my dark hands. It suggested the presence of sunlight, something urban Chinese rarely encounter. I again pointed to my lips, whereupon I was led to the lipstick display. Close, I thought as I set off to wander the aisles on my own, where soon I found a tube with a goo-like substance and decided that whatever this was, I was going to put it on my lips. This was because I was crackling apart in air that did not seem to possess even a hint of moisture.

  And there was the sun. There is an awful lot of sun in Lhasa. You’re so much closer to it, for one thing. I slid on my sunglasses and headed toward the Potala Palace. If there is but one image people have of Lhasa, it is of the imposing Potala Palace, this mount in the sky with the thousand rooms and two hundred thousand statues. It towers over the city, but it is not merely a majestic, looming presence. There is something whimsical about it as well. Let’s paint this part white, I imagined the builders thinking. And over here, how about maroon? Maroon is good. And this part up here? Yellow. Yellow is perfect. The Dalai Lama adores yellow. And it’s such a nice contrast to this blue, blue, sky.

  As I stood before it, admiring its rambling contours, the way it seemed to encapsulate a people born of the mountains, I was joined by Tibetan women with veiled faces: Ninja curio sellers.

  “You are very nice,” one said, reaching for my face. “Like the yak.”

  I had grown a beard. It is, of course, de rigueur for Western men traveling to Tibet to grow beards. I have no explanation for this. But Sir Edmund Hillary had a beard when he climbed Everest. Brad Pitt had a beard in Seven Years in Tibet. The two Australian men I’d traveled with on the flight to Lhasa had beards (their girlfriends didn’t, however). It is baffling; Tibetan men don’t typically have beards, so it’s not as if we all collectively went native. And it’s not merely Western men. I’d met two Japanese backpackers in my guesthouse. They both had beards too. All I can say is that if you are a foreign man considering a trip to Tibet, you will grow fur on your face. Resistance is futile.

  Pleased though I was to have been favorably compared to a yak, I declined the women’s offerings and returned my gaze to the palace. Built in the seventeenth century, the Potala Palace was originally the winter home of the Dali Lama. I could see why the current Dalai Lama wanted to come back. It’s not a swanky palace. This was no Buckingham Palace, no Neuschwan-stein, the fairy-tale castle built by Mad King Ludwig. It did not exude luxury. It was not a place for formal balls. Instead, there was a hominess to the palace, a sense that this was somehow the collective home of the Tibetan people. It was a mountain palace, built by devout people with their heads in the sky. It was not a home for kings or tyrants. It was the home of a living god, the Dalai Lama. But he couldn’t go home, not now, not while the Communist Party was in charge. Indeed, to make the point that the Dalai Lama wasn’t welcome—or at least a Dalai Lama that didn’t kowtow to Beijing—the Party had razed the old town in front of the palace to put up an enormous Glory to the Communists monument.

  They make things so awkward, these Communists. I was trying to lose myself in the moment—this Tibetan moment—and yet here, in the middle of Lhasa before the towering Potala Palace, I was obliged, simply by the mere presence of this monument, to acknowledge that I was standing in an occupied country. Tibet was an independent country when China invaded in 1950. And, as evidenced by the soldiers still present in Lhasa, the Chinese have no intention of leaving. Visiting the interior of the palace thus leads to very mixed emotions. On the one hand, you know you’re not really supposed to be there. It is someone’s house, after all, someone who’s been called away for urgent business—that urgent business, of course, being the preservation of Tibetan independence. In the years after China “liberated” the Tibetans from themselves in the 1950s, more than a million Tibetans died. And it’s not as if there’s an excess of Tibetans around. Today, there are a little more than 2.5 million Tibetans occupying the land. Another 4 million find themselves living in neighboring provinces like Sichuan, Qinghai, Gansu, and Yunnan. When China invaded, countless monasteries were shelled into oblivion by the People’s Liberation Army. The Dalai Lama, together with a 100,000 other Tibetans, fled.

  But it’s not merely political independence that’s at stake, it’s religious independence too. Just as the Chinese government appoints cardinals for the Catholic Church, so, too, it dictates who, precisely, can be incarnated as a lama, or teacher of Tibetan Buddhism. In China, Tibetan Buddhist lamas need a permission slip from the government in Beijing before they can be reincarnated. Indeed, when the Dalai Lama announced in 1995 that the eleventh reincarnation of the Panchen Lama, Tibet’s second most revered lama after the Dalai Lama, had been found in Tibet, Beijing became so ticked off that it sent a Politburo member to Lhasa. In the Jokhang Temple, senior Communist leaders put the names of three boys in an urn and chose by lot the official Panchen Lama. The boy chosen by the Dalai Lama has since disappeared. So, too, has the monk who found him.

  By buying a ticket to the Potala Palace, one is tacitly conceding that the palace belongs to the state. But what also makes it just a little more awkward is that the palace is one of the most important sites for Tibetan pilgrims. At first, after I’d entered, it felt like a dusty museum. There were even cats prowling in the hallways. And then, just as I was admiring a fine golden statue of someone in a blissful state of enlightenment, in came a family of braided pilgrims, dipping yak butter out of tin cans and placing it in candle holders. And then they would shower the room with fluttering notes of money. Every holy room was graced with hundreds of images of Mao.

  But the monks inside seemed jovial enough. In one chapel, I found two monks, one chanting, the other poking at his cell phone. Then the pilgrims entered. The chanting monk gave the other a look that seemed to say, Hey, put away the cell phone. It’s showtime. And indeed he did put it away, and he began to chant with a reverence reserved for visiting pilgrims, if not tourists.

  In another chapel, an elderly Yoda-like monk approached me. “Where are you from?”

  I told him and asked him about the pilgrims. They seemed different from pilgrims I’d seen elsewhere in China. They didn’t seem to be praying for wealth, as they did on Tai Shan. Instead, they were distributing wealth inside the temples, sprinkling notes upon the golden statues as they shuffled from room to room.

  “The pilgrims come from all over Tibet. They come not just once, but many times. This is a very important place, very important.”

  “Do you think the Dalai Lama will ever come back?”

  “No. I don’t think the Dalai Lama will ever come back. He left in 1959. It makes us very sad.”

  I spent several days in Lhasa, rarely leaving the tight confines of the old town. I could have remained for months, though it’s possible I’d reconsider in January. Perhaps I could move my family here, I thought. Kindergarten in Tibet. That would be cool. And the air was clean up here. Of course, there wasn’t much of it, so perhaps that would be a problem. Is it good parenting, taking kids up to 12,000 feet? Yes? No? I didn’t know. But I could live here, I thought. The Tibetans were kind and affable. I’d expected to find a people crushed by Chinese oppression. The People’s Liberation Ar
my had been in Tibet for more than fifty years. They’d desecrated temples. They’d shot monks. But Tibetans are not crushed. Indeed, they are the jolliest people I’d encountered in China. I could live among these cheerful people. But the last thing Lhasa needed was another non-Tibetan to take up residence in their fair city. Lhasa was bursting at the seams with Chinese.

  There are more Chinese in Lhasa than there are Tibetans. And with the new railway linking Lhasa to the frenzied cities of China, more and more Chinese are making their way up into the mountains, thousands of them, tens of thousands. Some are tourists. But many have come to settle in Lhasa, and quickly, so quickly now, Lhasa is becoming a Chinese city.

  Except in the old town. I did not leave the old town except to take the bus to the Sera Monastery, a few miles outside Lhasa, where I settled myself in a courtyard beneath mountains dusted with snow and, as it melted in the afternoon glare, I watched the monks debate. I could not say what precisely they were debating. Perhaps it was the finer theological points separating the Red Hat sect of Tibetan Buddhism from the Yellow Hat sect. Or perhaps they were debating the lunch menu. It was unclear. Once there were 5,000 monks in the Sera Monastery, but then, of course, China invaded, soldiers plundered the grounds, and the monks were either killed or exiled. Today, the monastery has been restored and several hundred monks reside there, where they spend their days studying, meditating, and impassionedly debating whether to have the mutton on Tuesdays or on Fridays.

  On most days, however, I joined the pilgrims walking the Barkhor circuit around the Jokhang Temple, Tibet’s holiest sight. I liked the exoticism of it. It’s as much a market carnival as a devotional pilgrimage. True, in front of the temple’s doors, pilgrims with prayer mats and boards did their devotions in the dust. And some who did the circuit did so on their stomachs, genuflecting and prostrating themselves as they made their devotional perambulation. And many chanted ancient mantras. But elsewhere, through the twisting streets beside mud-brick walls, there was a lively market.