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Tibet Travel Journal These days in Tibet, I probably spend more time with Jarvis than I do in bed sleeping. Jarvis is, unfortunately, not Iron Man’s artificial intelligence system, but rather the name of the much less impressive voice-activated assistant in our Toyota SUV. As a territory with mostly natural wonders, we average about 400km a day in car rides, which, if you include all the bathroom breaks, three meals, and our off-road tangents to lakes and wild animals, totals to a 10-12 hour drive daily. I sleep around 7 hours on a good day. Our off-road trips on dirt paths slowly but surely rearranged my internal organs. I’m not sure these Japanese imported cars were meant to be used as planetary exploration rovers, as the old V6 engines struggled to climb even the smallest hills, making a humming noise I can only assume is a reminder that we’re all gonna get arthritis if we don’t stop and get out of the car to slowly approach sheep and yak for a bit, with cameras. We made one of the longest trips anyone could reasonably take in Tibet — the Ali route. Our trip began in Lhasa, taking us all the way westward to the borders of Nepal and India, which at the closest point we were no more than 60km from both countries, plus the casual vertical distance of the Himalayan mountain ranges, a.k.a the Great Southwest Wall of China. Alongside my trusty sidekick Jarvis, I was awestruck at the two polar opposite sides of Tibet — the Chinese-influenced political Tibet, and the ancient, local Tibetan culture. As some of you may know, the history and political status of Tibet is complex and controversial. China, unlike most other countries, is united not by its people’s ethnicity, as there are more than thirty ethnic minorities within its borders. It’s not religion either that unites the country, as the Cultural Revolution wiped out any trace of religions during that era, with the exception of maybe ancestor worship. Although, Buddhism, along with Confucianism, have been making a comeback as China struggles to grasp at a legitimate philosophical backing for its non-Marxist, perhaps even antiMarxist communist status. China’s national identity comes from what I can
only describe as a shared history and common struggle of the people. Any how, I’ll reserve my political judgement for an untimely comment at an awkward dinner table conversation. The fact is, modern Tibet falls under Beijing’s control, and the logical thing for a single-party state to do in a politically turmoil area is, well, establish stability.
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I usually stray away from the word “propaganda” because as a Chinese American who grew up in China under British/American education, I see very clearly from both sides that the term is used by either side to label or marginalize an ideology that disagrees with the country’s political or cultural beliefs. Truth is, anything can be propaganda. But as I stepped off the train into a disembarking station with loudspeakers screeching “please stand in a single-file line and keep order” over and over again, echoing in the big, white cuboid chamber that is the building I’m in, I couldn’t help but feel like I’m in a dystopian film. Fast forward to a couple days later, we’ve journeyed into the wild lands of Tibet, and every occupied building had the red Chinese flag flying on the rooftop, mandated by the local government. Billboards on the road don’t advertise products, rather slogans that placed me right in the middle of my history books of 1980s China. My wildest discovery was perhaps the glorified “70th Anniversary of Tibet” posters found in some restaurants, that had the faces of all Communist China’s Premiers — Chairman Mao, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jingtao, and Xi Jinping on top of Beijing’s Tian An Men Square. The entire color scheme looked like a remake of the old revolutionary posters produced during the Chinese Civil War era.
On the flip side, perhaps a week into our journey, I vaguely remember discovering that in addition to our luggage we took on the trip, there were additional packages that looked like sleeping bags. We initially assumed that our drivers, in case our planned stops don’t have enough hotel rooms for all of us, would instead sleep in the car and use the sleeping bags. A couple of days later, we rode through a small village, and the drivers slowed down to tell us that this was one of the most rural regions of Tibet. Children would
come out from their huts to wave and look at us, which was quite normal in rural areas where outsiders rarely pass through. However, we decelerated from our usual driving pace, then to a complete stop, and our drivers stopped and got out of the car. They explained that every time they pass through this town they would bring supplies for the kids — sometimes, their previous customers would donate certain items, but most of the time it was out of their own pockets. What we initially thought were sleeping bags were actually down jackets for when the weather got cold, which to me was honestly every night, since the altitude here was so high. Rolled up inside down jackets were sweets which weren’t available in smaller supermarkets in town, as well as school supplies, shoes, and they even had a brand new backpack in the trunk.
One would perhaps assume that with the strict level of Chinese political influence penetrating every level of society in Tibet, that people would be numb to a lot of emotions and focus on a repetitive daily routine, just like a dystopian film, which I certainly thought was the case. Casting my prejudice aside, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of awe at our drivers’ kindness, plus a touch of shame that the idea of charity and the wealth gap in Tibet never once crossed my mind during this trip. — J
fin.