Long Days Make Secrets Escape

by Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

My mother had wanted to introduce Tibet and her family to me. She had been the only one in her family to escape to India in 1959. She had seen many people killed along the way, many die of fatigue or sickness, and she said she wanted to return, because she didn’t want to be separated from those she loved. She was not prepared for a life in exile. She was only 20 when she entered Nepal with her husband. The fate of her family left behind haunted her. We planned a trip to Tibet for June, 1994, but she died in a car accident that January 1. I went to Tibet that summer for the first time.

Now, for the second time, I am on my way to my mother’s nomadic home in Nangchen, in the eastern province of Tibet. I stop long enough in Lhasa to light butter lamps and make offerings at the sacred sites: the Potala, the Jokhang, Sera and Drepung monasteries, and the small shrines tucked away all over the city. It would be unacceptable for any Tibetan to leave Lhasa without making these gestures. I am not a knowledgeable Buddhist, but I have been brought up to regard sacred places as sacred. Besides, it seems an apposite ritual considering the long journey ahead.

A road trip to Nangchen takes four days and three nights; the fastest way is to fly into Xining. My cousin-brother Abo, and his mother, Tayang, who is my late uncle’s wife, are waiting to receive me in Xining.

I find out from Tayang that Xining is considered the very essence of modernity and reasonable altitude. Many Nangchen nomads tell me they don’t quite have a vocabulary for Beijing’s tall buildings and busy subways, but they are comfortable with Xining’s big-city indulgences, because they maintain a small-town familiarity. Xining, they say, is big enough to allow for anonymity and small enough to bump into nomads when you want to. In fact, increasing number of Tibetans from the towns of Cherku, Nangchen, and Zatou are choosing to spend more time there after their retirement. They buy apartments in Xining and say the milder winters and lower altitude agrees with them. This is so, especially so for those who suffer from hypertension and high blood pressure, and there are many who do.

We stay in Xining for two days so we can visit Kumbum monastery, which used to be the fifth largest in Tibet. Chinese from the mainland are encouraged to travel into Tibet, and Kumbum is one of their destinations.

We arrive with a busload of Chinese tourists. They wear bright caps, and large cameras. The guides, in loud voices, explain the history of the monastery. They also explain the Tibetan people, their Buddhism, and their habits.

A naked Tibetan boy crawls in the corner by the entrance. He grins and bares two teeth.

While we are making sure that all the members of our party are present, a woman comes up to ask if we need a guide. She is dressed in a blue suit, her skirt opening a little over her calves to enable her to walk in quick short steps.

An elder tells her we do not need the Chinese to tell us our own history. She seems confused for a moment and then walks away without revealing how the words have affected her. Her hair is knotted into a tight bun. It hugs the base of her neck. Her neck is very white and slender, and she holds it stiffly as she walks away from us. I see her smiling at another group as she leads them through the large metal doors into the monastery, where a monk greets them in Chinese.

For a moment, we enjoy a little victory. Small victories are all we can hope for and yet this feeling, too, is ungrounded.

There are more Chinese tourists this day than Tibetan pilgrims. We must accept this joint venture between tourism and spirituality. The world here has been upset for a long time, and the people I am with are used to losing their way. I follow them. My little nephew prostrates himself at the altar and recites a prayer. We are led to a shrine hall with statues of Buddha and Chenresig, the deity of compassion. We spend the day offering butter lamps and praying to the gilded faces, praying for all the beings who are alive and those who have left us but are in their new bodies.

Early next morning, we leave for Cherku, the capital of Yushu Prefecture and home to most of my cousins. It will take about 20 hours by car to get there. The high grasslands go on and on in hypnotizing uniformity. We drive for four hours without seeing a single living person.

At 15,000 feet, miles and miles from Lhasa, the insistent whistle of wind is heard passing through land that has not seen grass for six months. It is June, the snow has melted, but the ground is still cold, and I think it must be a painful process, this period of thawing, even for stones and mud. Soon the grass will grow tall and inhibit easy walking, and then it will be impossible to think of the grasslands as being any other color but green. And yak and sheep will be unable to separate their dreams from their waking wanderings, thinking of summer as heaven’s vast feast.

The plains in Golog, Amdo, and Kham are wild and terrifying to those not used to open spaces. The Chinese must think them strange places for habitation, even impossible, with the unending monotony of land and the sky in its abandoned stretches. Yet they are everywhere—the Chinese. They have restaurants, they have billiard rooms, and they have stores where even cattle would beg not to be kept.

The uncommonly expansive beauty of the landscape seems incapable of deception, but under its calm deportment are winds so brutal that yaks are known to die grazing, while their jaws are in chewing bliss. Then there are the sudden changes in the sky—like a genius who cannot help but be offensively whimsical—or the abrupt downpour of hail or rain. Suddenly here, suddenly gone. Sometimes mild and sometimes brutish.

Tibetan nomads believe they can predict very little of nature.

Wild clematis, aster, delphiniums, and edelweiss dot the fields. They sprout at the most indeterminate places, as though their existence is due to factors other than wind and sun. The flowers are made for the goat, the flowers are made for the sheep, the flowers are made for the mountains. When the last of the year’s flowers prepares to leave in October and when everything else burrows into the soil and turns ochre, nomads say she will sing to the snow mountains and to the air:

Goodbye, goodbye, you stony mountains and hills. I leave you for a while, but I will be back.

She has the body of a bell. She is petite and succulent and keeps her promise every year. Beloved is she and called the turquoise of the grassland....

Tsering Wangpo Dhompa is staff writer for the American Himalayan Foundation. Her new collection of poems, Rules of The House, will be published this fall by Apogee Press, Berkeley. E-mail: dhompa@yahoo.com