the power (and weakness) of one

Like Adela Quested in A Passage to India, I always hope to learn about the "real" people of a foreign country by going off on my own. But in China, I discovered that it's also a good way to learn about stereotypes.

For most of this trip, I was with a tour group, which I'm not really used to. Usually, whenever I've traveled abroad, I've gone out of my way to try to do everything on my own, which, in one respect, means making as many decisions and creating as much stress for myself as possible. But sometimes it was exhausting to be part of a tour group, which seems counterintuitive to me. I mean, here I was staying in a five-star hotel, eating a buffet breakfast, being chauffeured around in an air-conditioned bus from preselected site to preselected site and somehow, I found the whole thing exhausting. I don't know if it was the effort that we had to expend listening to the many instructions delivered in accented English to ensure that we moved efficiently as a group, or just the typically inchworm-like progress the 22 of us made as we traveled together, always having to be conscious of who's in front and who's at the end, but it often made me, and everyone else, tired. However, while others would take the few precious free hours in the afternoon before dinner to do sensible things like lie around at the hotel or get a massage, I'd often strike out on my own into the city. This may not seem like the most relaxing course to choose, but for some reason, I felt compelled to do so. And I have to say, perhaps the most relaxing day I had was my free day in Lhasa, when my friend Jane and I got up (fairly) early, took a pedicab to the old quarter, rented bicycles, and biked all over town.

This was the day that we chose to see our third Tibetan monastery, after we thought we'd heard all there was to hear about statues of Shakyamuni Buddha and Lantern Buddha and the fifth Dalia Lama amid the burning of incense and the flickering of yak butter lamps. Yet we had a very lovely day, probably because there were just the two of us. Whenever we opened a map, a Tibetan would come up and look over our shoulders, trying to help us puzzle it out. As we negotiated the convoluted paths through Sera monastery, Tibetan pilgrims gestured to us and showed us where to go. The monastery, which had suffered great damage during the Cultural Revolution, still lay partly in ruins, and we peered into doorways leading into shells of buildings overgrown with weeds.
As we walked up one path, we heard the sounds of talking and digging and then came across a group of Tibetan workers singing as they worked on restoring a wall and a walkway. We stepped into an empty chapel and looked around and met a brown-robed young novice monk, perhaps 11 or 12 years old (although I'd been told the government strongly discourages training boys to be monks these days). He led us around the chapel using signs and gestures, told me his name (which I couldn't repeat correctly) and let me take his photo. He reminded me of Minky, the nun who had the day before led me through the old quarter of Lhasa trying out all her English on me.

The best (and some of the worst) memories I have, of course, are one-on-one encounters in China and Tibet. Being a tourist, and being Caucasian, I always stood out, even in places like Shanghai or Beijing, where there were lots of Europeans in tourist areas. Much of the time, people noticed me. (Sometimes, thankfully, they didn't, like the mornings in Shanghai that I snuck around the streets near my hotel watching workers eat dumplings and steamed bread off little plastic tables on the sidewalk.) And when they did, it was often to a) practice English or b) make money off of me. It may not be fair to generalize on such a short stay, but I think the latter happened more among the Chinese. My guide called them the Hello People. They'd be standing or sitting quietly, and then, as soon as our group came walking by, they came alive as if they were animatronic figures and we had triggered the infrared light beam that sets them into motion. "Hello!" they'd say in the tones of a native English speaker. Then it would be "Hello! Look!" or "Lookee! I sell you cheaper!"

Certainly there were Chinese people who said hello just to be friendly or to practice English, but nothing compares with the ingenuousness and joy of the Tibetans who would look at me and say something in English and laugh to hear me respond, as if I were an exotic bird or a talking koala.

My last few days in China were spent in Beijing, and I began to feel once again like a marketing target for people with all sorts of scams. Young, earnest-looking students would tell me about their artwork currently being exhibited in a nearby gallery--but I'd been warned about these sorts of appeals and just walked briskly on. It was easy to spot a prostitute -- "Do you need a lady tonight?" -- but sometimes I was unsure of what to make of the fresh-faced young women who would come up to me and simply ask me to talk to them for a while. We had been told people would sometimes want to practice their English, but we had also been warned that sometimes these are scammers, so each time someone approached me, I'd slip away.

Then finally, on my last afternoon, I went out to try to find some posters on a nearby shopping street, when I met Jenna and Lucia, two Chinese teachers probably in their early 30's who seemed like decent, earnest people who just wanted to practice their English. They were hoping to receive government appointments to teach Chinese abroad, possibly in the U.S. I'd heard of the program they were talking about. A number of school districts in the U.S. are hoping to get some of these teachers in order to jumpstart their Mandarin programs. They took me to a tea shop in a nearby mall and offered me fruit and sweets and told me about their lives: where they came from, what they hoped to achieve, what they knew about America (they had initially thought I was English or Dutch because I didn't fit the stereotype of the fat American). Jenna was from somewhere far in the southwest, in a minority region, and her parents spoke a very obscure dialect. She even had a sister, a rarity in China except among minorities. Lucia came from the northeast, not far from the city of Harbin. They told me they had just come back from a short hiking trip (they had taken a bus; they had no car) which they can do because as teachers they're on summer vacation. They asked me about my family and I told them about my boys, and I asked them to speak to my boys on video. I don't doubt that everything they said to me was genuine.

But then the bill came and I pulled out a few dollars (I was out of Chinese yuan at that point) to pay for my share. Lucia said, "Oh that won't be enough, what else do you have in there?" I was determined to pay for only 1/3 of the bill, which I did, but it was only later that I realized that the bill had been so exorbitant that it must have been a scam. I wound up paying over $20 for some tea and fruit and sweets in a country where is it no problem to eat a filling dinner with beer for $5.

I was depressed and angry for a while (although I didn't have the presence of mind at the time to follow them for a while to see if they returned to the tea shop), and was sorry to be leaving the country with such a bad taste in my mouth. But after a while, I was able to put it into perspective. Yes, I had been duped. I hadn't fully heeded the advice I'd been given.

But this was probably a case of stereotypes meeting stereotypes (which is often what happens when individuals meet individuals). These two were very likely a good illustration of the current story unfolding in China. They are part of the vast wave of internal migration to China's coastal cities, people who come to make the most out of their lives. Perhaps what they did was a bit deceptive and immoral. Apparently, with money and success as the new dogma, many Chinese have been left spiritually rudderless. Maybe they have a hard time getting by on their state salaries, perhaps because they're sending remittances home, and so they have to hustle a little to make some extra cash. When they saw me, they probably saw a lucky American who is rich enough to travel abroad, someone for whom $20 or $30 or $40 is not really a big deal. Which is true: it's as if I had a slightly pricey New York lunch or saw a movie with my wife or impulsively bought the latest bestseller at Barnes & Noble. It's really not a problem.

It's just one of the things that can happen when you're on your own.

warriors: terracotta and flesh

Xian, the ancient capital of China, is the place where you see the famous terracotta warriors, created for emperor Qin Shihuang in the 3rd century B.C.E. After the well-preserved, picture-postcard-shot city walls of Xian (constructed wide enough to allow an entire army to march on top of it and with gates that can trap an opposing army), the warriors seem to be the thing to see in Xian. They are amazing, astounding. And there are so freaking many of them! There are several buildings' worth, there are officiers, horses, charioteers--and they still haven't finished digging them up! When we were visiting them, on a typical, hot, grey, humid Chinese day, we were constantly held up because, as our guide, Joe Yu, put it, "a big potato" was visiting the site that day. Squads of green-uniformed Chinese soldiers marched in formation, and after seeing the first building, we had to wait to see the second. Immaturely, I wondered why we had to see the second or third building's warriors. Were they any different? (They were not.) Apparently, he created this army to protect him in the afterlife, which probably was a good idea for him because he was very much hated when alive. But why so many warriors? Why 8,000, or whatever number it is? Why not 1,000? Or 100? Couldn't he have deployed them in a way that belied their numbers but would still scare off any vengeful ghosts that came to attack him in the afterlife?
But maybe this was a good reintroduction to me to the rest of China after Tibet because it was a reminder of the numerousness that pervades every aspect of Chinese life. They just have a lot of everything, of every kind of person. Moderate-sized cities, of 6 million or so souls, abound in China, and are so unremarkable that most Americans don't even know their names. And when I think of some of the scenes that left me dumbfounded -- the hordes of bicycles crossing intersections in Chengdu, the swarms of people at the train stations in Xian and Beijing, the endless crowds of people waiting to enter the Forbidden City, the throngs of daytrippers filling up every last shaded seat along the miles of lakefront in the enormous Summer Palace -- they all have in common the theme of overwhelming numbers of human beings. This is why, in parks around China -- around West Lake in Hangzhou or the Temple of Heaven in Beijing -- people claim their own few square feet of space in which to exercise or practice calligraphy or ballroom dance or squat and stare into space. And this also offers some insight into some of the greatest manmade wonders in China like the 1,000 mile Grand Canal, the 2,000 mile Great Wall, and the 750 acre, hand-dug lake of Beijing's Summer Palace -- all of these are astonishing feats that were accomplished with vast numbers of laborers (sometimes slave labor) that Chinese emperors were able to command.
Today, this army of people is producing the huge piles of cheap goods that we Americans are always buying; these are the entrepreneurial warriors that assailed us, continually trying to sell us things as we traveled all over China.

third world

Last Tuesday, somewhat to my surprise, I came back to China. I flew from Lhasa, Tibet to Xian, in Shaanxi province, an ancient Chinese capital and the site of the famous terracotta warriors, and in so doing, left a third world country and was catapulted into a more sleek and developed future. This probably sounds stupid; everybody knows Tibet is a different country.
But China had been such a surprise, such a shock to the system that I really didn't expect Tibet to be all that different, in relative terms. Besides, so many Chinese had moved to Tibet, wasn't it practically Chinese already? Not quite yet.


This was brought home to me the day I visited the Tibetan Buddhist nunnery in Lhasa and lingered at the gift shop while my tourbus pulled away. Alone, I had a chance to talk to the two crewcutted nuns who sold me two pendants and a prayer wheel. As one of them tied a complicated movable knot in the string that held the turquois "Om" symbol that I bought, the other showed me a dirt-smudged elementary school English workbook and asked me to help her read the instructions. Then, when I asked for directions back to the Jokhang temple, the second nun volunteered to walk me the many blocks through the maze-like Muslim quarter of Lhasa, on the way trying out all the English she could think of. (This is not to say we haven't met very friendly Chinese--including a man outside a grocery store in Hangzhou who walked his bicyle over 5 blocks to help a fellow traveler buy a new memory card for her camera -- but there was something especially innocent and friendly about the people on the street who spoke to me in Tibet, vs. the many people in China who have seemed to want something from me.) As she walked me through the Barkhor, the nun asked me if this was my first time in Tibet. "Yes," I replied, "in fact this is my first time in China!"
"I have never been to China," she replied, "what is it like?"
Duh.

On my first day in Xian, I noticed the difference: as I strolled from my elegant French-run hotel past immaculate People's Square, I met none of the beggars I saw in Tibet who held dirt-smeared sleeping babies up to me and bowed down with their hands held out for money; nor did I have any runny-nosed five year olds tugging on my shirt chanting, "Hallogivemoneyplease." The white-fringed pedicabs were absent, although there was still a good quorum of bicycles. I wouldn't call the streets exactly clean, but I saw a lot fewer bodily substances make contact with them. Instead of open stalls of tightly packed goods, the shops hadt elegant glass facadeds that kept in the airconditioning surrounding artfully displayed merchandise.


OK, there are similarities: people are selling street food all over the place, people squat on the sidewalk and watch the world go by, there is the occasional beggar, and while there are actually "walk/don't walk" lights, vehicles seems to take them with a grain of salt.

But somehow, China just seems much more familiar than Tibet, which now seems like it is truly the other side of the world; children, when they dig, should aim for Lhasa from now on, it seems to me.

Tibet (including the Chinese enclaves in Lhasa) is clearly the Thirdest World place I've ever been. What really brought this home to me was the impulse, after returning to my hotel room at the end of my second day of walking around Lhasa, to take off my shoes, turn them over in the sink, and dump a bottle of Purelle on them and then scrub them under hot water. I also started laying a towel down on the floor before doing my back stretches. I guess this is when I sheepishly confess to those colleagues of mine at school whom I rib for being germophobes that there is a line for me, and I have crossed it, not only in Tibet, but also in certain parts of China. And the fact that I have been suffering for the past several days from Mao's revenge (despite avoiding tap water, ice and fresh vegetables) has only caused me to go through a lot more Purelle.

Speaking of Mao, we've heard a lot of interesting comments about him from our tourguides. Apparently, shortly after his death the official government position was to be critical of 30% of what he did. Now, among other things, it is very common to say that the Cultural Revolution was a big mistake, a fact which has been brought home to me over and over throughout my travels here. Guides never flinch whey they begin a sentence with, "Unfortunately, during the Cultural Revolution . . . . " They clearly don't say everything they think, and several have said that they prefer not to speak about politics. But Joe Yu, our guide in Xian, began talking about Mao's Long March and then went off on a riff that included the corruption of Chiang Kai Shek's government, the reasons why Mao didn't trust the U.S. even though he wanted to be friendly with us, the importance of "face" to Asian nations, and the reason why it was such a big deal when Nixon came to China. Joe told us about the day in 1971, when the news that the American president would come to China was broadcast over the village public address system (they had no radios or TV). Everyone was stunned into silence. He also explained why it was so significant the following year that Nixon, on Kissinger's advice, stepped off the plane with his hand extended to make up for the deep insult that had been perpetrated by John Foster Dulles when he refused to shake Chou En Lai's hand at a conference in 1953. (Fascinating, although Joe made no mention of the Korean War.)

It was because Mao seems to be fading from favor and there are so few Mao statues left in the country that I decided to have my photo taken in front of his statue in Chengdu, my hand waving just the way his was.

But maybe I should have been a bit more careful. Last night on the overnight train from Xian to Beijing, several of my fellow travelers were playing gin rummy in the bar car with a sent of Mao playing cards which can be purchased just about anywhere in China. Suddenly, I was told, a uniformed police officer strode over, picked up the deck of cards, threw them down in disgust and then announced, "This car is now closed."

Whether that was about hatred or reverence for Mao, I can't be sure.

buddha boom town (part 3): wheels

In China and Tibet, wheels speak volumes. I noticed this my first day in Shanghai, when I saw Mercedes Benzes cruise by three-wheel cargo bicycles stacked 8 feet high with bales of goods. Wheels, whether powered by legs or electricity or natural gas or petroleum, tell you everything about the user and the city you're in. For example, it wasn't until my third stop, Chengdu, that I started to see a lot of pedicabs and underpowered cargo vehicles, both symptoms of a weaker economy. In Lhasa, the colorful pedicabs were everywhere, covered with the characteristic scalloped white exterior valances you see fluttering in the mountain breezes over windows on traditional buildings all over Lhasa. Pedicab drivers tend to be Tibetans who can't speak much Chinese while more of the taxi drivers are Chinese who've come to Tibet to make money; both receive 10 yuan (about $1.30) for a trip anywhere in town.*

Traffic in all Chinese cities seems to be a mysterious game whose rules have a lot less to do with lanes and signs and signals than we're used to here, but in Tibet I had even more of a sense that a trip through town was one long series of near misses (or maybe that's just because I was viewing it from the back of a pedicab). People are constantly darting out into traffic at random; bicycles force themselves into the thick of traffic and turn without signaling; taxis and cars cut off everything smaller and weaker than they are: but the weird thing is, no one gets upset. On the wide, well-marked highways of the U.S., we've heard of countless stories of road rage. Who hasn't been cursed off or given the finger for making the wrong move or moving too slowly in American traffic? But in Lhasa, no one seems to mind any of the near misses or acts of poor judgment. Surely, there is a lot of honking, but the honk is a practical tool, not a vent for emotion. (All over China, we've discovered it impossible to sleep on our tourbuses because the driver as a matter of course must honk his horn every thiry seconds to ensure he avoids a collision.)
Maybe what happens in Lhasa traffic is that each driver survives by finding his own Middle Way.
The most important meaning of wheels in Lhasa, of course, is prayer. From what I can see, prayer is a kinetic process to Tibetan Buddhists. In order for it to happen, something has to be moving in a circular motion. It could be the large, brass fixed prayer wheels outside of monasteries and shrines; or the clockwise circumnambulation of a "kora" (or circuit) around a holy site; or the hand-held wooden prayer wheels that pilgrims spin while walking these koras. When these prayer wheels spin, the mantra of the Buddha of compassion -- Om Ma Ni Be Me Om -- which is written on coiled-up paper inside of them and is sometimes engraved on the exterior, begins to spin; the mantra is set in motion (or as the Tibetans say, "released") as it is chanted on the pilgrim's lips. Wheels and circular movement put prayer into being. Maybe it is this spinning that gives the Tibetan Buddhist his private space in the public realm, so that through all the hawking and spitting and giggling and chaos of Lhasa, there is always the spiritual, proceeding undisturbed among the secular.

*This reminds me of the most important change that has overcome Lhasa in recent years: like many cities in outlying areas of China, it has become a boom town for Han Chinese trying to strike it rich. I think the Chinese population of Lhasa may even equal or exceed that of the Tibetans. Huge swaths of the town are already Chinese, many businesses are run by Chinese, and, as I discovered by biking around the outskirts of town on Sunday, there is new construction everywhere. It's a sad fact, but it's also an unavoidable reality, and it's given parts of Lhasa something of the feel of a frontier town. At least that's the impression I got from location of my Chinese-run hotel, the Xin Ding, in the Zhonghe International Trade Zone, on an island in the Lhasa River. Right outside this would-be five star hotel (which, for the record, doesn't change money, doesn't have functioning room refrigerators [which means you have the privilege of paying outrageous prices for hot cokes and beers from the minibar], doesn't have adjustable air-conditioning, is erratic about the daily practice of vacuuming, is capricious in its deployment of pillows and soap, finds it unnecessary to hire English speaking operators, and seems to open the business center only when someone can find the key) was a warren of corrugated tin workshops where scores of workers hammered, sawed, and welded metal gates, doors, and cages (right up until 2 in the morning). Behind these were other metal smiths and tinkers, and other very basic restaurants and shops, all run by Chinese who seem to be just scratching out a living in these broken, trash-strewn, odiferous streets. There are certainly those who are very upset about this invasion of Chinese immigrants, which will only increase as a result of the new pressurized train that began service last year. And few have forgotten the brutal repression of the Tibetan uprising of 1959, the destruction of the monasteries during the cultural revoltion, or the violent suppression of Tibetan protests in 1989, just before the events in Tiananmen Square. The Chinese presence is felt not only in the myriad businesses and new apartments under construction, but also in the many military installations in and around the city, not the least of which being the huge party headquarters situated squarely below the Potala Palace, and guarded by green-uniformed soldiers standing at attention. But at least for now, the reality is that the Chinese are in the city, and the Tibetans are in the countryside. To the latter, geography is sacred; they circumnambulate not only temples and shrines, but also lakes and mountains. And while the Chinese may set up shop and sell prayer flags and jewelry in Lhasa, the holy city still derives its identity from the faithful who come from all over this vast, mountainous land, unperturbed, walking in a clockwise motion around their koras, spinning their prayer wheels, chanting their mantra: Om ma ni be me om.

buddha boom town (part 2): sacred space

Buddhas and Buddhists are everywhere in Lhasa. And Buddhism is a booming business, at least judging by the number of prayer wheels and sandalwood prayer beads and colorful Tibetan prayer flags and "parasols" (multi-colored hanging cloth cylinders that seem to be made of the lower ends of dozens of ties, decorated with tassels) haggled over at the innumerable streetside stalls. In our visits to the many shrines in Lhasa, we saw countless Buddhas in all their manifestations and reincarnations: gilt covered statues draped in shining cloth (some enclosed in glass), adorned with white "khatas," sitting in front of offerings of barley, corn, yak butter, or paper money. I knew going to Tibet would be special but I just wasn't prepared for the reality. I had visions of chasing Brad Pitt around steep flights of stairs while jostling the throngs of the Buddhist faithful. But maybe I should have taken a hint from the glimpses I've seen of the Dalai Lama's easy humor.
When we flew into the modern Gongga airport, a slow hour's ride from the city, our guide, Pemi, draped white khatas around our necks. Two members of our group, who had never been to Tibet, had tears in their eyes. The air, the landscape, the language, the people -- everything was different, even though the Chinese presence was everywhere, in the form of the vast amount of new construction, the Chinese signs, the Chinese food, and the green-uniformed police.
And the holiness is there, is everywhere. But the sacred here seems to coexist with the mundane, the mercenary, and the vulgar, and does so happily, not grudgingly. Certainly temples are sacred spaces: one must wear long pants and take off hats and refrain from snapping photos without permission. But the presence of the secular doesn't seem to impinge on the spiritual, as it often does in the West. As I navigated the streets of the old city of Lhasa, every 10 feet or so would come another pilgrim spinning an ornate brass and turquoise prayer wheel, fingering sandalwood beads, and chanting under his or her breath, while just behind monks might be walking happily draping their arms over one another, straining to hear on their cellphones, or giggling and pulling pranks on one another. Yesterday, my fellow traveller Jane and I sat in the shade at the outdoor teahouse at the beautiful Lhasa nunnery, drinking glass after glass of sweet, milky hot tea out of a large metal, cork-stoppered Tibetan "thermos," the same kind I have seen pilgrims carry through the monasteries in order to pour offerings of liquid butter into the butter lamps. Around us, Tibetans quietly chatted and sipped tea or ate momo, plump yak dumplings with spicy sauce, and occasionally people came up and spun the large, ornate brass prayer wheels fixed to the wall of the courtyard while the alto harmonies of chanting nuns issued from somewhere in the nunnery. Behind us in the hot sun, shaven-headed nuns in scarlet robes scrubbed laundry in a large metal tub under a primitive water faucet while others chopped vegetables in the shade. Within minutes there was a scuffling behind me and I heard giggling from the laundry nuns who were now engaged in a water fight, while from out of the open windows of the building behind them drifted the beautifully haunting tones of chanting nuns, still singing as they coiled up paper prayers for prayer wheels.
The levity doesn't diminish the spirituality. Each quality seems to have an equal right to existence; sacred space seems to be somewhat relative, and perhaps self-contained.
This first struck me on my first full day in Tibet as I walked through the majestic Potala Palace (the traditional political and spiritual seat of the Dalai Lamas until 1959 which overlooks all of Lhasa) and the Jokhang Temple (built in the 7th century by King Songsten Gampo, the founder of Tibetan Buddhism) which houses a solid gold Buddha brought to Tibet by the Chinese bride of the king. This Buddha is the nexus of three concentric "koras" or sacred circuits that pilgrims in Lhasa circumnambulate in a clockwise direction; the middle kora is the Barkhor route I've mentioned before. As large groups of tourists file through the chapels straining to hear their guides (some, having paid the fee, snapping photos), monks and other pilgrims sit chanting or spinning their prayer wheels or lighting their incense sticks undisturbed by the feet of the curious shuffling inches away from theirs.
Maybe this has something to do with the very different sense of public and private space in the East. Not only in Tibet, but in other parts of China, people stake claim to little bits of public space in which to conduct their private affairs. The Chinese are famous for doing Tai Chi and other exercises in public parks--I even saw a group of 8-10 doing their moves on a streetcorner near my hotel in Shanghai. Wherever you go, you see people claiming a piece of the earth simply by squatting and looking about them, perhaps holding a cigarette. In Chengdu, my fellow traveler Dave and I watched a group of men smoke and chat happily as they stood around one man sitting on a low plastic stool in the middle of the sidewalk on a busy main thoroughfare. Minutes later he picked up his stool, stowed it on the back of his motorscooter and rode away. Perhaps this sense of privacy in public goes some of the way to explain the unruffled behavior of Lhasa's faithful. But there's also something they seem to do to make their own spiritual space in their own heads, and it has to do moving, spinning, and wheels. More about wheels in part 3.

buddha (boom) town

One meaning of the name Lhasa, according to our Tibetan guide, Pemi, is "Buddha's city," or at least that's what I think she was saying as our bus careered insanely over the road from the airport to the city, honking incessantly as it overtook trucks, tractors, motorscooters, and three-wheeled cargo bicycles. And I've certainly seen a lot of B-dawg and his many incarnations and manifestations (there's a difference, but don't ask me what it is; Pemi could not explain it in English). There's present Buddha, or Shakyamuni, the historic Gautama after his enlightenment, known by his hair woven into a top knot. And because Shakyamuni has an expiration date of 2500 years, there's future Buddha. And just to show present Buddha didn't come out of nowhere, there's past Buddha or Lantern Buddha. And then there's compassion Buddha, or Chenrezig (a/k/a Avalokitesvara to the Indians), a favorite among our group, with his 11 heads and 1000 arms (he's a manifestation of Shakyamuni). Then there's Longevity Buddha, or Tara, a female Buddha with eyes in the palms of her hands and soles of her feet. Wisdom Buddha holds a sword and a book; medicine Buddha (a favorite of mine) is a Tibetan specialty. He's all blue because he tries all the medicines first before letting people use them. (Buddhists out there, please correct my errors.)
It's fascinating and overwhelming, especially when you're hearing all this in heavily accented English while shuffling along with twenty other camera-snapping, videotaping fellow travelers through dim rooms suffused with the smells of incense and yak-butter lamps, often over the backdrop of the chanting or drumming of the red and yellow clad monks who seem to be in every dark corner of the temple or monastery of the day. Travelers who've been all over Europe will recognize the ABC syndrome (Another Bloody Cathedral) in its Tibetan manifestation of ABM (Another Buddha Manifestation).
All I know is that my Buddha, the one I bargained for in the Barkhor market, is Shakyamuni. He's made of bronze, is hollow, and "is cheaper price." This started at 1200 yuan, but my "last blast" of 500 was accepted and I brought him back to my hotel in my pedicab, very much at peace with myself and the world.

with the pilgrims in shangri-la

For the past 48 hours, I have been following pilgrims in their progress around the holy sites of Lhasa, and I have to say, this has been one of the most incredible experiences of my life. I have walked beside young, middle-aged and old Tibetans in straw hats and traditional dress as they circumnambulate the Barkhor-- the holy circuit or kora around the ancient Jokhang temple in the heart of old Lhasa-- solemnly spinning Tibetan prayer wheels or gossiping to their fellow pilgrims. I have watched a dirt-smeared pilgrim prostrate himself repeatedly as he made his way across the ancient stones of the Barkhor, with the help of smooth wooden blocks bound to his palms that allowed him to slide his hands flat on the pavement when he prostrated himself, while his 3 or 4 year old son, tethered to him by a long woven band, followed along wearing the traditional one-piece child's garment with a vertical slit over the behind (presumably allowing for quick bathroom stops), as his father made his progress past the antique shops and souvenir stands that line the pilgrim route. I have seen dozens of others do the same in stationary positions in front of the temple, with the added comforted of a cloth-wrapped board on which to prostrate themselves. I have seen young monks dressed in brilliant, deep red robes over golden shirts, some with flat shovel-shaped hats on their head, fingering prayer beads and solemnly chanting as they walk. Old Tibetan women smile at me. Some younger Tibetans call out, "Hi!" or "How you doing?" and then giggle when I respond. One monk came up behind my fellow traveler and yanked a hair from the back of his arm, and then ran ahead laughing uproariously. Another young monk asked (through signs) if I wanted to take his photo and then clamored to see the image in my camera. The Barkhor is an amazing place, full of spirituality and mercantilism, suffused with the tinkling of Buddhist bells, the smell of incense, and the incessant cries of "Lookee! Very cheap!" from the hawkers at the souvenir stands that line the route. There's so much more to say about Lhasa. More later.

breathing easy in Lhasa

I am now in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, and am very happy to report that I am successfully breathing on my own. This may not impress those of you who haven't spent the last 72 hours planning how and if you will be able to breathe at an extremely high altitude (14,000 feet, I think), but there has been so much discussion on this trip (and even beforehand at our pre-trip conference in Seattle) that I was beginning to think I'd have to consciously plan and execute each inhalation and exhalation.
I'd been warned about the challenges of the high altitude from the very beginning, and we were advised to ask our doctors about prescribing a special drug to be taken 24 hours in advance of our arrival. We were told we'd have to keep ourselves well-rested and well-hydrated and to avoid alcohol. We were warned not to be too active today, and the only thing on the itinerary is "rest."
Always liking to think of myself as the rugged type, I was one of only three of our group of 22 who did not come with the altitude sickness medicine. (I was a little nervous that the other two had both already proven themselves at high altitudes, while I was a newbie.)
So you can probably imagine how I've been feeling these past few days while everyone around me was discussing how and when they'd take the medicine, how they'd deal with the potential side effects, and whether it made sense to run out and buy some Chinese herbs as a backup.
To make things worse, we were told to get up early and have breakfast at 5:30 this morning in time for our flight to Lhasa. So there I was, lying in my hard hotel bed at 10:00 p.m., trying to get to sleep, thinking of how exactly I'd breathe the next morning or what signal to give my fellow travelers the moment before I collapse into a flu-like stupor.
When I did get off the plane today and miraculously remained upright as I walked through the terminal, I saw, besides the colorful pictures of Tibetan herdsmen on horses, a concession selling altitude sickness medication and oxygen bottles. But when I stepped into the brilliant (and I mean BRILLIANT) Tibetan sunshine, I actually took what might have been my first true breath of fresh air this entire trip. The sky was clear and blue, the air dry and fresh, the sunshine so intense that I felt it through my clothing. This is a big contrast to the humid, polluted air of Chengdu, which lies at the bottom of the Szichuan basin, where people were complaining of having to blow their noses continually, and one woman collapsed of a combination of heat exhaustion and the side effects of the altitude medication.
Tibet is REALLY different from the rest of China. From the airport we drove through bare, rugged brown peaks that remind me a little of the Rockies or the tundra-covered Mont Jacques Cartier in Quebec. It's interesting how in this stark landscape the Tibetans seem to put color everywhere they can: their clothing, the roofs of their trucks and buses, and their houses. As we headed through the Lhasa river valley we saw Tibetan villages in the traditional style, one-storey clay brick houses adorned with intricately painted doors and windows. Behind them stood neatly stacked heaps of sliced yak dung to be used as fuel; from every roof fluttered colorful prayer flags. We saw prayer flags everywhere in the valley: fluttering from sticks in the shallow river, crisscrossing the sides of mountains like whimsical spiderwebs. Lhasa at first seems remarkably clean and modern, but that's probably because we drove through the western part, which is pretty much the center of Han Chinese economic colonialism here. Tomorrow, once we're adjusted, we head into the traditional Tibetan quarter and (I think) ascend the steps of the 7th century Potala Palace, which I can see out of my window . It's a long, steep ascent, but I think I'll be able to handle it. I do feel a little lightheaded and spacy, and my breathing is a little shallow, although that may be a result of getting up at 5:00 a.m. and thinking way too much about breathing. But just in case there's any trouble, there are oxygen canisters in my room.

Not so Hot in Szichuan

Surprisingly, the food in Chengdu, the capital of Szichuan, hasn't been ridiculously hot, although the peppers certainly are. I've had a lot of different dishes here that have come garnished by beautiful, bright red slices of these pungent peppers, which in this populous western Chinese province, are not the only hallmark of the local cuisine: they eat lots of peanuts, lots of tofu (we had four different kinds at dinner last night), and lots of mushrooms of all sorts. Sounds like a vegetarian's heaven except that there's meat in a lot of the tofu dishes. The group meals we have are always banquets served at big round tables with lazy susans. I always tell myself I'll try to write down all the dishesbut never manage to. Let's see if I can remember the lunch we had at a museum restaurant: we started with appetizers of thick, translucent noodles in spicy sauce,crunchy-yellow-vegetable-I've-never seen in orangey sauce, and something else. Then came the main dishes, one by one: a chicken and peanut dish, pork with 3 kinds of mushrooms, spicy tofu, shredded chicken and unidentified vegetable, huge plate of Szichuan noodles with spicy sauce, two plates of Chinese spinach, whole fishsteamed with ginger and soy sauce, squash or pumpkin soup, rice, watermelon, and individually wrapped "Uncle Pop's Roughage Party Cakes." (I know I'm leaving out several dishes.) But because we're American newbies, they really are taking it easy on the peppers, so overall the food has not been so hot.

And actually, the weather in Chengdu hasn't been so hot either. At least not today. From the moment I arrived in China last week, it's pretty much been one nonstop steam bath. In Shanghai and Hangzhou, we were all mopping our brows with sopping wet bandanas as we collapsed into our seats on our airconditioned bus. Yesterday in Hangzhou, the former imperial capital, I got up at 6 a.m. to avoid the heat as I bicycled around the famous West Lake (apparently the main reason that city is the #1 destination for Chinese tourists) but didn't manage to avoid the other 8 million people who apparently had the same idea. I think I saw most of the people of Hangzhou (and all of its retirees) on my nine-mile ride around the lake: riding bikes, stretching, strolling, doing Tai Chi, doing organized ballroom dancing (apparently for exercise), doing pushups off the curb, doing a sort of organized calisthenics involving a lot of slapping of one's thighs, flying kites, walking backwards--even practicing Chinese calligraphy on the park roads using a bucket of water and a calligraphy brush the size of a mop. When I got back to the hotel at 7 am I was drenched with sweat. But today it's been moderate--in the low 80's and so humid that when I was trying tovideotape the giant pandas today (guess what they were eating?) my lens was all misted up. Of course through everything we've seen, both beautiful and hideous, the sky has been a stolid, unmoveable gray. Only on the panda preserve did the sun threaten to poke through the clouds, but then decided it was too hot to bother. Still, Chengdu is a nice relief from the coastal cities.

Another thing that's not as hot here is the economy, although the government is trying to change that. The interior provinces of China have always been behind the coast, economically, and even though things are heating up, they'll never approach the frenzy of places like Shanghai or Shenzhen. Per capita income is 1/3 to 1/4 of what it is on the coast, and although the downtown looks reasonably modern and I saw a Starbucks and a Gucci when I posed to have my photo taken in front of the colossal statue of a serenely waving Chairman Mao, you can really tell the difference just by driving around the streets. The very streets, sidewalks and curbs are not as upscale and well-maintained. Many busy intersections seem dangerously devoid of traffic signals, and at busy times are manned by oranged vested "volunteer" traffic cops who wave red flags. Apparently, they can't arrest people, but if they catch a cyclist or scooter driver committing an infraction, they can make him or her hold their red flag for 20 minutes . Today the bus drove past rows of old-style tiled roofs covering warrens of alleys where people do their washing, hang out their laundry, and fetch their water. And the vehicles tell you everything.

In all three cities I've seen swarms of bicycles and motor scooters of every sort: two-wheeled and three wheeled, carrying goods stacked high and wide and with passengers precariously perched on the back. But here in Chengdu, I've seen fleets of battered green pedicabs of all descriptions, some with just a covered seat, others with a makeshift cardboard compartment suggestive of a 19th century stagecoach without doors. Another hallmark of a slower economy is the motorized vehicles. You see all sorts of underpowered vehicles hauling ridiculously huge loads. You'll come up on what looks like a small flatbed truck piled 7 feet high with bales of goods, and then see in the front an uncovered tractor motor jury-rigged to what is nothing more than a three-wheeled bicycle. As I negotiated the streets swarming with homicidal scooter drivers tearing throughy inadequatetraffic signals, I was amused to think that my guide first introduced us to Chengdu as a much more relaxed city than Shanghai. Supposedly, there's a huge tea house culture here, where people go to a tea house, order a cup of tea, and then just sit there all day. And it is true that you can walk the streets here without being assaulted by touts and hawkers. I suppose that's why, over the past ten years, Chinese from the coastal cities are coming to the interior provinces to set up businesses, and Szichuanese have been migrating to the coast to seek their fortunes.

One thing that may be too hot is this blog. Perhaps this is a delusion, but shortly after I posted the big brother post, I was no longer able to get into my blog. I had to send this one home by email and have them post it.

Well, time to go to bed. We fly to Tibet at 8:20 in the morning. Many in my group are feeling not so hot as a result of taking altitude sickness drugs (Lhasa is at 12,000 feet). I'm going to wait and see.

real tea flavor

I did not buy the emporer's tea. I am in Hangzhou, by all accounts the epicenter of the the production of the ultimate tea, in the one country more associated with the drink than any other. In the hilly lands outside of this former imperial city, well off tea farmers build their sturdy multi-story houses on the steep, winding streets that abut their terraced fields of tea, with the odd peaked-straw-hatted worker bending over the crops. Everywhere in the area you come across shops that sell the local dragonwell green tea, with workers drying the green leaves by rubbing them by hand in lightly oiled woks. But today we were at a plantation that purports to make the real thing in a land where every other product is a knockoff, a "jiade", or a "genuine fake" as our guide likes to call it. (Next to a bottle of Johnny Walker Black in a store last night I saw a nearly identical bottle of "Master Walker Red." Coffee shops like "Moca" shameslessly copy Starbucks' look and logo.) In fact, they have a statue of the Buddhist monk who supposedly discovered that tea helped him concentrate when he was meditating without eating food. Sometime later the Emporer tasted tea and proclaimed that he couldn't go a day without a cup.
But when Grace, our guide to the world of green tea, sat us down in a house on the tea plantation and poured hot water over our green leaves, the flavor was very much unlike the rich flavor of the fermented dark teas I've had in the past. It was a light taste (what she called "fresh" but others might call "grassy"). I know I've tasted tea like this before but never really returned for a second cup. But Grace took us through the various pickings of the tea, starting with the dark summer tea, going earlier in the spring to the grade A tea, and finally ending with the Emporer's tea, picked in mid-March. And after subsequent tastings; some atmospheric instruction in how one drinks such tea; the repetition of claims about the health benefits of green tea for those with a tendency to high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and diabetes; the parading and viewing and sniffing of successively lighter (and earlier picked) samples of tea spread on flat bamboo baskets; after all of this, many of the 20 of us around the table were awed when Grace's assistant brought out the kilo package of the Emporer's tea, beautifully wrapped in shiny red paper and ribbon, and then spread it out onto the flat woven bamboo basket for us to view and smell. We noticed the rich, full aroma of the Emporer's tea. We saw how much finer and lighter it was than the large, coarse leaves of summer tea. We crunched a few of the fine leaves between our teeth and noted that the taste was not bitter, just as Grace had promised.
So when it was time to get on the bus, one after another of my group -- even our tour leaders -- raised their hands and asked for the Emporer's tea, which Grace expertly packed by hand into bright red metal tins, despite its imperial price of 300 yuan per box (about $40). Some looked across the table searching for partners to "go in" with them for a "family" of three tins to save a few yuan.
I, however, coldbloodedly ignored the imploring eyes of my tourmates and settled for a box of the Grade A tea, for only 200 yuan, or about $26. I do have a cholesterol problem, after all.

big brother is watching

But he's doing a pretty sloppy job of it. This morning, my last in Shanghai, I got up to work out in the health club (we're talking 5 star hotels) and turned on BBC News (CNN was all about the car crash in Glasgow, 24/7) while I pedaled. They had a story on the 10th anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong, and at one point the commentary turned to frustration among Hong Kong residents with the Beijing government. Suddenly the screen went black for about 10 seconds. I thought I had jiggled something or hit a switch, but I notice the same thing on the two screens next to me. And then just as suddenly it came back on. At the time I thought it was a coincidence, but then after returning to my room to shower and pack, I had
BBC on again, and it had the exact same blackout. The ironic thing is that the blackout didn't completely eliminate criticism of the government. When the news report returned, it was to a clip of pandas that had been sent from the mainland to Hong Kong, and the voiceover was saying, ". . . but most Hong Kong residents want democratic reform, not pandas." That's a pretty lame job of censorship if you ask me. Later on the bus I asked the professor who is traveling with (and lecturing) us about this and he was certain it was censorship.
This may explain the spotty internet access I've had here. I was able to get onto my email a few times, but I noticed I couldn't open an attachment. And now I can't get on at all. And while I'm able to post to this blog (with great difficulty) I am not able to read my own posts! (So I apologize in advance if I repeat myself.) Today we drove south from Shanghai to the old imperial capital of Hangzhou, a big tourist destination for the Chinese, a city full of greenery and the famous West Lake (Xi Hu), which is right near our hotel. Apparently, this is the place that successful Shanghai businessmen have traditionally built their villas.
More later.