My Arrival in Lhasa, Tibet

Flying over Tibet, I see tippy-top peaks of snow-capped mountains peaked out of the clouds. Cloud formations included what looked like a panda bear sticking its tongue out. Another cloud resembled someone resting, perhaps a reclining Buddha, and another cloud was too reminiscent of a mushroom cloud. I must have seen the top of Mount Everest, but there were so many mountain tops that I don’t know which one it was.

Germans surrounded me on the plane, and when they spoke English, it was with a British accent. A Tibetan guy across the aisle (I had the window seat) asked the German guy next to me if he’d put a book in his bag. It was a hardcover book and pretty big, and he bought it in India and no doubt it was not a pro-Chinese occupation kind of book. The German guy was dubious about it, since he didn’t want to get in trouble either. He turned to me and asked, “Do you speak English?”
I smiled and said, “Yeah.”
“Yeah. You’re British?”
“No, American,” I admitted. He then explained the situation to me and asked if he should take the book, and I said I wouldn’t do it, just to be safe. I then explained, “If he’s caught, he’d get into worse trouble, though. He could be imprisoned. But you’d still get in trouble.” At the airport near Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, my bags had to all go back through a security check, even though we were arriving rather than departing. This young guy in a green Chinese uniform and wearing clear plastic gloves searched both my carry-ons but not my suitcase. Stuff I got in Dharamsala and that I don’t want the Chinese to see is actually in the suitcase, so I lucked out in that respect—so far, anyway. I guess they’re more concerned about what we bring than what we take to an airport for departure, since this is fascist Chinese-occupied Tibet.

The soldier even flipped through pages in my books and notebooks, probably to see if I brought pictures of the Dalai Lama. I’m so glad I didn’t purchase any such pictures in Dharamsala, after all! I’ll wait and get some when I return to Kathmandu.

What the tall, stern and unsmiling Chinese soldier didn’t do is read the smallish print on the front cover of my spiral bound photocopied edition of the Tibetan Dhammapada: there are lots of words on the cover, and toward the bottom is a paragraph specifying the Dalai Lama’s teachings in Dharamsala and the dates of the teachings. Of course this was all in English, and I suspect that he wouldn’t have understood many of the words on the cover. I don’t think Chinese or Tibetan people speak English as much as people from India and Nepal do, since in those countries it’s taught in school even when they’re little kids. That’s the best way to learn more than one language: start in elementary school; I wish we’d do that in America.

I recall reading that, for whatever reason, China doesn’t allow you to bring more than twenty changes of underwear. When I read about that, I imagined what it could be like when a Chinese authority looks through my suitcase.

“You have too much underwear! You are a member of a splittist faction!” “No, that’s just a rip in the seam.” “Why you have Dalai Lama pictures in your underwear?” “I figured of all the places that would least likely get looked at carefully…”

This is so crazy—I’m in Tibet for real! I’d like to take a picture of a yeti, but I won’t be out in the wild, and I doubt a yeti would be circumambulating the Jokhang Temple.

Gyantzing is my tour guide, a guy. I was hoping for a female tour guide. After this trip, I’ll want a one-way ticket to Herland. I was relieved to leave that mean boy in a green uniform and head toward this big open space devoid of furniture with the one exception of a sort of table on which I had to place my Chinese visa, an eight and a half by eleven inch piece of white paper with black ink and an official-looking red stamp. A middle-aged Tibetan guy in a dark jacket approached me and asked if I’m Susan, and I smiled and said, “Yes!” He gave me a khatta, a white Tibetan greeting scarf that’s sheen and printed with auspicious Buddhist symbols. It has a very long silky fringe on each end, and the fringe tangles with everything.

Writing in the minivan while riding from the airport, I took notes in a horrible scrawl, while Gyantzing gave me information:
The airport is at 3600 meters above sea level, and Lhasa is at 3700 meters above sea level. All I know about meters is they’re approximately four feet. I didn’t do the math; I just know it’s big numbers.
The river near the airport is the Brahmaputra, and it’s winding like turquoise arteries. From Mount Kailash to India is 60 kilometers. The Yellow Valley is sandy with short, spiky brown and red plants.
Barley, wheat, and peas are the main crops. I know they can grow potatoes and other root vegetables, though, and they’re actually capable of growing quite a number of vegetables and flowers during a couple of summer months, at least on the plateau. Nowadays there are greenhouses, but oddly they looked empty as we rode past them from the airport. It seems to me like this would be a great time of year to put the greenhouses to use.
Lhasa Gytsu is the central river, and it goes to northern Tibet. ( I wouldn't be a bit surprised if I totally misspelled that.)

Twenty percent of Tibetan males were monks, and two percent of Tibetan women were nuns, before the Cultural Revolution. Or to be more accurate, this was before about 1959, since the Chinese had already invaded and done a great deal of harm before the Cultural Revolution and kicked plenty of monks and nuns out of their monastic lifestyle. However, the tour guide isn’t supposed to say that: the official Chinese bull shit propaganda story is that the invasion was “the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet” (yeah, just like Georgie Porgy and his minion’s invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq were “Peaceful Liberations”) and it’s absolutely verboten to point out that the invasion was in fact very violent and oppressive, not a peaceful liberation at all. Not to mention that buildings like monasteries were bombed; monks and nuns raped and murdered, that sort of thing. Peaceful liberation, indeed.

400 nuns—biggest number in Tibet—on mountain. 600,000 = population of Lhasa, 40% Tibetan. New buildings are coming up in Chinese style. Tall glass skyscrapers, I notice. China has certainly lifted its leg and pissed on Tibet.

I see on the river reddish brown ducks with pale yellow heads, black-tipped wings. We passed greenhouses, where people grow tomatoes, cucumbers, etc, and a group of people planting trees with a cart loaded with branches. We passed Western-looking cows and sheep. I’m kind of surprised that the cows aren’t more like Indian cows.

We passed an 11th century monastery, Ballendesh, built in typical Tibetan style, whitewashed with slanting walls. Pretty. Cremated, ashes in stupa—brought ashes back in 1960’s (I’m not sure if this comment refers to an abbot or to the monks of that monastery in general or not—too bad my notes weren’t more detailed). We came to a mountain with carved and painted Buddhas. Around the time of the invasion or the Cultural Revolution, there was a request that the central government (as in Beijing) not destroy the monastery, so here it stands. (We were still south of Lhasa while I scribbled these notes, while the tour guide was speaking in the jeep.)

The military base, a big tall scary building a few minutes down the road from the old monastery, is three years old. I looked up at the looming rectangle, a very modern building, and thought: That’s a sign that you’re in an oppressive fascist police state. It’s such a power-tripping symbol to have a military base right there, on the outskirts of Lhasa. It disgusts me but doesn’t really surprise me. I seem some green military vehicles in front of the building, around which is a fence with a gate where a stiff green-clad soldier stands. He looks like he’s frozen in place; he may as well be an android rather than a person.

We stopped to see the beautiful, bright Buddha paintings on a mountain, and the ducks on the lake across the road were talkative in and at the edge of the snakelike winding little bits of river. Before we walked up to the mountain and looked at the big bright Buddha, we went through a colorful gate painted in Tibetan symbols, and we stopped at a juniper stove. It’s whitewashed and probably made of earth, and it’s shaped rather like a vase or like a Tibetan stupa, with curved sides and a curved aperture where the juniper is placed. Inside the aperture, the surface is burnt black and has remnants of the plant, and a little bit of smoke still issues out. I’ve seen these many times in photos of Tibetan architecture, and I could tell they were stoves, but I never knew exactly what they were. They’re located in front of all monasteries and temples, and they are used for burning offerings of juniper every morning. I hope they grow plenty of juniper bushes nearby.

The Buddha is indeed huge and painted and slightly carved on the mountainside. It’s low enough that the artist or artists could have been standing on the ground while making it, rather than standing on scaffolding. It’s not smooth and sophisticated but rather has the rough texture of the rocky mountain and has a folk art look to it. Colorful deities, smaller than the Buddha, are painted on the mountain, and I recognize Green Tara, a Goddess of compassion who has one foot down from her lotus throne, like she’s about to get down and help people out. I wish she’d come help me, but I have to help myself.

A few yards past the big Buddha mountain, we passed newly-built summer houses. Although the houses have Tibetan-style murals, the walls are filled with very large greenish glass windows; they are deserted little vacation houses presumably for Han Chinese invaders. They consist of modern architecture despite the murals, and the architect has made no attempt at imitating traditional Tibetan architecture; the little houses look like they might only have one room, maybe a little more than that, and they have peaked roofs. Given what the climate is like, I don’t think people would stay in them for more than a couple months. Would they really enjoy it?

I see plenty of modern versions of Tibetan houses. They have garage doors like Indian and Nepalese buildings but also ornate red Tibetan doors. They have grey walls made of what looks like big stone or cement blocks. They can have large front picture windows, probably for the living room, and they also have plenty of other windows, with glass. Traditional Tibetan windows didn’t have glass but had shutters—given the climate, I’m thinking you’d have to be bundled up all the time, even in the house. Of course, the Tibetan beer chang would warm people up, as would hot food and a fire.

We came to traffic police, who are Chinese in fancy blue uniforms, before we passed bulldozed (or more likely bombed) and graffiti-decorated older Tibetan houses. If they were destroyed in the fifties or sixties, I’m surprised nobody’s cleared away the evidence and instead has left these reminders to inspire resentment and to perhaps inspire some Tibetans to be suspicious of the official Chinese version of their history. I’ve read that Tibetans living in Tibet aren’t getting the real story, and this is not surprising; though if they have parents or grandparents around who remember what really happened, then I suspect they learn from them.

We passed under the new railroad and saw the station in the distance. We passed the notorious train station, which mimics traditional Tibetan monastic architecture and was completed in 2006. I’ve read that global warming means the permafrost is melting, and this will make the train tracks sink and crumble in a short time. Really smart thinking. But of course, the Chinese are in denial about so many things. I’ve also read that while the official story is that the railroad is good for Tibet and that building it gave many Tibetans jobs, the truth is that the better jobs were given to Chinese and that Tibetans had the worse and lower-paying jobs on the railroad. And of course it also means that all the more Han Chinese can move into Tibet, as if there aren’t enough. They don’t even have the lungs for this climate—I can’t think they’d be all that much at home.

On the left we passed a cement factory, which according to Gyantzing is one of the first factories that the Chinese built in Tibet, in the 1960’s, causing the worst pollution in Tibet.
Also on the left, after we’ve entered Lhasa, we passed Drepung Monastery. It is on a mountainside beyond shops and looms up looking quite large and impressive, all whitewashed walls slanting inward so that the base of the wall is wider than the top, just in all traditional Tibetan architecture, and the monastery has the obligatory black-framed windows. Sera Monastery is in Lhasa and Ganden, which houses the yellow-hat sect, is in Gyantse. It dates to the 11th-12th centuries, 14th century. The last sect only dates to the seventeenth century and is a reformist sect thanks to the fifth Dalai Lama. He got other orders to change into the Yellow Hat (Gelugpa)—most monasteries in Tibet are now yellow-hat. The second through the fourteenth Dalai Lamas had their education in this monastery, Drepung. It’s a big and special place. I’ve had the impression that lately the reason there are so many more Gelugpa monks and nuns is because of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s charisma, but it sounds like it predates him.

We’ve passed countless Chinese shops on the outskirts of Lhasa. I look at the signs over the roll-up doors and see scarcely any Tibetan script, all Chinese. Yes, I mentioned roll-up doors; I didn’t expect Tibet to have the same sort of entrances to shops that India and Nepal have, but there it is. I’m guessing that China also has shop doors that look to Westerners like garage doors, because under the circumstances Tibet is much more influenced by China than by India, although Buddhism came from India to Tibet and therefore in the past India had a huge influence on Tibetan culture. We stopped at the Bank of China, a remarkably new-looking building (like so many) but they’re not taking US dollars at this hour, so we’ll go back tomorrow morning to exchange some of my money.

I saw a very skinny and young Chinese woman sitting behind a guy on a motorcycle. She wore tight jeans and a purple jacket, and I noticed that she had tall black boots with spiked heels. I guess it was the boots, plus things I’ve read about modern Lhasa, but I strongly suspected her of being a prostitute sitting behind a customer. The motorcycle was at a wide intersection and zoomed off around a corner to the left. The streets are so wide and clean here, nothing like the narrow, dirty, and chaotic streets in Kathmandu.

As we drove past the towering and impressive Potala Palace, I gasped and gawked and the tour guide told me a few things about it. The Potala has thirteen stories and a thousand rooms. On the façade different sections are painted different colors: red, white, or yellow. The red rooms are the Dalai Lama’s and for politics. The white rooms are for the monastery. In other words, the Potala has a color-coded façade. The yellow section is a courtyard between the special white section, which contains among other things the Dalai Lama’s rooms, and the red. This isn’t tourist season, so we can spend more time in the Potala; normally tourists are only allowed one hour in the Potala and it is crowded.

The Potala sits on top of a mountain, the Marpo Ri or Red Hill, and it looms over Lhasa as if it’s giving the Chinese government the finger. I’m not one of those Shangri-la people who think that Tibet has been nonviolent for the past hundred years; I know it has in that time been just another patriarchal country, and according to the history books Tibet has had wars with China and even battles between different sects, different monasteries. Nonetheless, I figure that since the mountains are still standing, the Potala is still standing, and the Jokhang Temple is still standing, Tibet still has some magic.

I don’t think it’s possible to be a radical feminist and be a Shangri-la person, someone who sees Tibet and Tibetans through rose-colored glasses. If you have feminist consciousness, then shortly after you start learning about Tibetan culture it becomes really obvious that it’s male-dominated, and you might also suspect the monastic system of being somewhat power-tripping in general, not just in its contempt for women and nuns.

Actually, the monastic system isn’t all to blame for that, but rather the social structure in general: parents encourage their sons to go to the monastery, which traditionally was where you got the best education. But parents highly discourage their daughters to become nuns and thereby get a comparable education to the boys; they’re encouraged to get married and give birth to children. Even if they do become nuns, they have a tendency to do domestic chores around their parents’ house or for the monks, so that they still don’t get the kind of education and training that monks get. Nuns are not fully ordained bhikkunis and are totally considered subservient to the monks. Also, in Tibetan tradition, monks perform rites and ceremonies for the people, but nuns totally don’t. It’s so misogynist and hateful, and every time I read or think about power-tripping males in Buddhism I find it terribly ironic, given what Buddhist practice is supposed to be all about. Cultivating male ego has no resemblance to cultivating egolessless, quite the contrary. I should perhaps mention that of course my male and androcentric tour guide didn’t mention any of these things; my comments come from many books I’ve read about Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism.

The Yak Hotel, where I’ll be staying, is just down the street from the Potala itself, on the main drag, Beijing Street. It is a very wide and very modern and clean paved street, again in sharp contrast with what I’m accustomed to seeing in India and Nepal. The streets in Lhasa are indeed reminiscent of a Western street, and the steering wheel is on the left side, just like in America. In both India and Nepal, it’s on the right, and traffic goes on the left side of the road.

The Yak Hotel, which I started to mention, is at least two stories tall and has a grey concrete façade. Facing the main drag is a wide doorway into the lobby, and the doors are open and display two door curtains, or whatever they’re called, that are white with blue trim and appliquéd with big blue Buddhist continuous knots; we had seen some for sale at the nunnery in Dharamsala, and Marsha purchased one in the gift shop. To enter the hotel parking lot, we actually drove through a gateway that led to a courtyard where other vehicles are parked. The courtyard is surrounded by tall grey walls that imitate traditional Tibetan architecture but have straight walls rather than the truly traditional ones that slant inwards.

This neighborhood, where my so-called budget hotel is located, is the Old Lhasa neighborhood, where most of the Tibetans live and where the architecture at least pretends to be traditional Tibetan architecture. The street is flanked on both sides with tall, grey stone or concrete block buildings, with black-framed windows and flat roofs. Along each side of the very wide street is a lane for rickshaws that have striped canopies imitating the top horizontal of Buddhist flags or Tibetan banners; that is, the canopies have a nylon ruffle all the way around, striped in red, yellow, and green, but they’re cheap and faded-looking compared to the rich brocades that you would see inside a Tibetan temple.

Before I parted with Gyantzing in the lobby, he gave me a brief run-down on tomorrow morning. For breakfast, there’s a fifth floor rooftop restaurant. At 9:45 I’ll meet with Gyantzing in the lobby.

Most of the hotel staff apparently consists of very young and thin Tibetan women. A skinny girl in a mauve padded nylon jacket took my wheeled suitcase and carried it up a flight of stairs to my room. Also a boy helped out in the room, and between them they introduced me to the heater with its white plastic remote control and someone turned it up for me. I tipped them and looked around the room with a grin.

My hotel room is so not my idea of what you would expect in a budget hotel. This is so much fancier than a Motel 6! The room even has complimentary white terrycloth bathrobes hanging in the closet, and the bathroom contains complementary toothbrush, shampoo, bath gel, and a comb, each in its individual little cardboard box. And on a small table by the windows are a teapot, tea bags, and Chinese-style white porcelain teacups with lids and decorated with a Yak Hotel logo illustrating yaks. There’s a mini bar, but it just has a few beverages—pop in red and white cans like Coca-Cola, Lhasa beer, and four bottles of water; I’ll definitely drink all the water. There’s a Western toilet and bath; I figured in a budget hotel I’d be squatting for both the toilet and a bucket bath. Furthermore, the décor isn’t plain and drab; the room is beautiful—it is brightly painted with Tibetan Buddhist murals, including the Wheel of the Law. The ceiling is also brightly painted with ridges like those in the architecture of Tibetan monasteries. The only thing budget-like that I can figure out is that there’s no elevator. I don’t think there’s room service either, but I’ve never used that anyway.

I am in Tibet! I am so dizzy! I ate some dried fruit and hazelnuts that I brought, and I took the Chinese herbal medicine and an altitude pill. I’ve only been to a dozen countries, but I somehow suspect Tibet is the weirdest country in the world. I hope the aroma of incense and butter lamps will be stronger than the smell of hygienically challenged pilgrims.

I should mention, thanks to a glance back at my scrawled notes, that when we got to the old Tibetan neighborhood, which is called—guess what—the Old Tibetan Neighborhood, there are shops with lettering in both Tibetan and Chinese. Again, the shops have open fronts like in India and Nepal, and when they close for business, they roll down the “garage” door.

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With altitude sickness and a cold, I went to bed at 8 pm tonight. I just woke from a dream in which I was outdoors with a happy group of people holding hands and dancing around a pine tree… or maybe we danced around a player piano that mostly played automatically but you could push keys and make some music. I was dancing with the Dalai Lama! He was on my left and let me hold his pinky while everyone danced. The dancing style seemed rather more Jewish than Buddhist, like at a Jewish wedding.