The New York Review Abroad (52 page)

The old Tibetan economy, before “liberation,” had been, like so much else in Tibet, an integral part of religious life, for the monasteries were more than spiritual institutions; they managed real estate, acted as brokers and money-lenders, and ran schools and other public services. These functions have all been replaced by government institutions. There was once a Tibetan merchant class, too, trading
mostly with India and Nepal, but I was told it had pretty much disappeared. Trade with India has been blocked by the Sino-Indian border problems, and by the government’s successful policy of making Tibet dependent on China. Merchant families have either fled abroad or found jobs in the government.

In one of the Tibetan restaurants around the seventh-century Jokhang temple, where pilgrims and tourists mingle with hawkers of incense, jewelry, and religious objects (“hello, look look, cheap cheap!”), I met two Tibetan friends, both in their twenties. They spoke Tibetan in the way well-educated Indians speak Hindi, or Hong Kong Chinese speak Cantonese, spraying their native language with words, or even entire sentences, from the language of the colonial power. Chinese is the language of their education, their workplace, and some of their social life. Both were doing well working for Chinese financial institutions. One rode a fine Japanese motorcycle. They said it was people like themselves who benefited most from Chinese education, for it had opened up a wider world, of technology, economics, politics, and even some Western ideas. Tibetans in the countryside, they said, still led traditional lives, getting by on very little, and derived no benefit at all from China.

One of the men ordered a pizza, the other had Chinese noodles. Then, what had begun as a quiet conversation about the economy turned into an argument, in which I was merely a passive bystander. Perhaps for my sake, out of courtesy, they spoke Chinese, but with more and more Tibetan words thrown in. They disagreed about religion. The more studious of the two friends believed that religion was important. Without it, he said, the human spirit withers. He explained that without religion most Tibetans would never have survived the harsh conditions of living in arid, icy highlands, with little more to eat than dried yak meat and clumps of stamped barley. But
affluence, he said, creates a thirst for religion too; you cannot live on materialism alone. I thought of Richard Gere and the other Hollywood Buddhists. But then his friend took the opposite, more conventional Chinese Communist line: religion was out of date; contemporary problems could only be solved by science. Science, in his view, had replaced religion.

It seemed to be a straightforward clash between a man of faith and an atheist. In fact, there was more to it than that. For the “atheist” was from a Muslim family. And although he didn’t believe in religion himself, he still stuck to many of his family traditions. He did not eat pork, and said he would marry a Muslim girl. He even said he might go on a pilgrimage to Mecca one day, as his parents had done. It was a way to see the outside world. Religion to him did not carry the same meaning it did for his Buddhist friend. Muslims had been persecuted in the past by Tibetans who wanted to keep Tibet “pure,” that is, purely Buddhist. Buddhism, to a Tibetan, cannot be separated from nationalism—to be Tibetan is to be Buddhist—which is why the Chinese government wishes to control it, and those from religious minorities view it with a sense of unease. In a way, Muslims occupy a position in Tibet similar to Jews in Poland under communism, when the Pope acted as the Dalai Lama of Polish nationalism.

Later that evening, the Buddhist and I repaired to a Tibetan nightclub. These are good places to talk. They are noisy, and there are few Han Chinese around. The décor looked vaguely Tibetan, with white curtains lined with blue, green, and red stripes, and the singers, some in traditional dress, sang Tibetan as well as Chinese songs. There are rules about this: the number of Tibetan songs and their content are strictly controlled, so as not to provoke unwelcome outbursts of nationalism. Video screens showed clips from Hollywood movies. I saw
bits of
Titanic
and the burning of Atlanta in
Gone With the Wind
, as well as stock images of Tibet, copied perhaps from videos promoting tourism: the Potala, country dances, yaks grazing, monks blowing horns, and horse fairs. A reproduction of the Mona Lisa hung on the wall next to the plastic head of a bodhisattva.

I asked my friend what went through his mind when he saw how Tibetan folklore was presented at official celebrations in Beijing, those pumped-up occasions for endless parades on Tiananmen Square. Between the tanks and the missile launchers and the adoring schoolchildren, the fifty-five official “minorities,” including Muslims, Mongols, Miao, and Tibetans, are always in attendance, dancing in colorful costumes for the leaders waving from their platform in front of Chairman Mao’s portrait. He said it was both ridiculous, because many of the details were wrong, and outrageous, because it was so patronizing.

Despite the noise from the stage, where a woman in a red ball-gown was singing a Chinese song in praise of the Tibetan mountains, my friend lowered his voice and studied his knees. The trouble was, he said, that it had become almost impossible to study Tibetan culture seriously, especially religious culture. And without the latter, you could not possibly understand Tibet. To take a serious interest in religion invited suspicion of political subversion. You might be denounced as a “splittist,” a promoter of Tibetan independence, splitting the country from the “motherland.” And the monasteries were no good anyway, because the monks were government employees who knew little about religion. Yet my friend wanted to know about his own culture and to be more literate in Tibetan as well. He spoke of his sense of shame at not mastering his mother tongue. The fact that he was compelled, because of his own education, to read about Tibetan Buddhism in Chinese made his situation even more galling. The Tibetan-language textbooks he had read at school were all about
the glories of Chinese communism, and the few books he had studied about Tibet were written by Chinese. I glanced at the video monitor with its tourist images of yaks, horse fairs, and white mountains, and couldn’t help wondering whether in the end Tibetan culture would be reduced to this: the commercial equivalent of the folk dancers on Tiananmen Square.

On another night, at a similar nightclub in Lhasa, this one with a small dance floor lit by a revolving ball reflecting speckles of blue light on the dancers, I got involved in another discussion about the Tibetan “identity.” There were video screens showing the same stock images of Tibet as at the other club. A rather fey young man, dressed in the garb of a Tibetan herdsman, sang a folk song, prompting a female admirer to wrap a silk scarf around his neck in the traditional Tibetan manner of showing respect. After his act, he came up to me and told me in English that he was an art student. He sat down and I asked him what kind of art. Any kind, he said, oil painting, Western art, any kind. What about Tibetan art? He hesitated. Yes, he finally said, Tibetan art too. But he wanted to go to the United States, to work with computers. What about his art? I asked. He shrugged and said he couldn’t express himself in art. I asked him why not. He drew closer and whispered in my ear: “Politics.” He wanted to do Tibetan painting, but was not allowed to study religious art, and without that, Tibetan painting made no sense.

After the singer had gone back to the stage, where he started a comedy routine in Tibetan, which failed to provoke much laughter, I sat awhile nursing my glass of beer. Couples were dancing under the revolving ball, men with women, women with women, men with men, some of them going through well-practiced moves of Western ballroom dancing. I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Where you from?” asked a neatly dressed man of about thirty. He looked Han Chinese,
which was indeed what he turned out to be. He had been living in Lhasa for three years and was almost due to go home. He wanted to know what I thought of the Tibetan situation. Not knowing who he was, I made a banal remark about every place having its problems. He nodded gravely. Then he asked what I thought of human rights in China. Again, I erred on the safe side. And what about democracy? Well, living in a democracy myself, I had to say I was rather in favor of it. He nodded, and said the one-party state was no good. There was too much corruption and abuse of power. China needed more political parties.

I was surprised to hear this, especially when he told me he was a Communist Party member and had been sent to Tibet by the government. But nothing had prepared me for the next question. Did I think Tibet was like Kosovo? I gulped, took a long sip of beer, recalled the nationalist fervor in China after the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and asked him whether he meant China was like Serbia. He looked me in the eye, and nodded quickly. That is what he meant. Living in Lhasa had opened his eyes to many problems, he said, problems of nationality and human rights. “In the West,” he said, “people are allowed to chose their own governments. Here in Tibet, the government chooses its people.”

I noticed another man, on my other side, who was straining to hear what was being said, a thin man with a dark brown complexion. He was a Tibetan friend of the Chinese official. Now it was his turn to talk. He cupped his hands around my ear and said in perfect Chinese that he was working for a Tibetan company. What did I think of human rights in Tibet? Once more, I played it safe: human rights were important everywhere, in the rest of China, as much as in Tibet. “No, no,” he said, “we have a special problem in Tibet. We are losing our language, our religion is controlled, our culture is disappearing. You see, the forces of economic modernization are directly
opposed to our own traditions.” Still trying to be as bland as I could, I mumbled something about national traditions having survived modernization in other countries. This made him agitated. Surely all foreigners understood, he said, that Tibet was special: “As long as we are part of China, we cannot survive, we are like a man who is thrown into a lake without being able to swim. We are drowning. You foreigners must help us.”

There was nothing much I could say. All three of us drank in silence. We all felt helpless in our different ways. The Chinese official had told me that others in the Party shared his views, but lacked the power to act on them, or even mention them in public. His friend just repeated that I should let the world know about Tibet. The world should come to the rescue. And I knew that the world would do no such thing.