TIBET - Part III: Not Just a National Geographic Article

Walking through the zig zagging narrow back streets of towns and cities, gaining glimpses of a daily life that seem more likely to appear on a one-hour slot on the Discovery Channel than in my personal worldly travels, I floated through the hours, bowled over by the timeless existence of a people and culture so far away, yet so genuinely nearby.

A child, wearing leather pants with a slit down the rear, relieves himself on the street as his mother cleans vegetables at her nearby stand. Butchers take an axe to half a yak, still showing some of its black fur, chopping up pieces to be hung from their cart, while two stories overhead, smaller pieces of yak meat bake in the sun, wired to the metal bars covering someone’s bedroom window. A Muslim man pushes a ten-foot long flatbed cart divided into sections; each with its own brightly colored dry fruit, nut, or sugary candy.

A group of kids play “tibit” (our ‘hackeysack’) with a policeman as a group of teenagers walk by me and shout “hello!” “Hello” back! People seem so kind, so happy, they have their way of life and they endure the hot sun and the cold air and they smile, and they play, and they make the most of out everything they are given. Some might stare as a group of six attractive westerners walk through their neighborhood, past their cart selling beads, prayer wheels, and bananas, but all-in-all I did not feel like an intruder, or at least as an unwelcome one.

We asked our tour guide why, after spending four months in Mainland China where we seemed unwelcome more times than not, we received such an enthusiastic reception from the people here in Tibet. His answer was simply: “they like you because they know you are leaving.” Perhaps, in a contrary parallel manner, I felt the same way.

I couldn’t do it. As exciting and challenging as it sounds, I could not live in a village of 300 with no electricity, no running water, and no flushing toilet. I could not sleep (again) in a bed with no heat, wake up two hours before sunrise and walk around by candlelight as I try to retain whatever heat did not escape my body during the previous hours of icy sleep (yes, we did this once…). No, I could, I just would not want to.

Ignorance is more than bliss in some parts of the world: it is subsistence. A monk walks down the street wearing yak-leather boots and a deep maroon, flowing cloak, talking on his cell phone and donning a ‘puma’ winter cap. He does not know that on Union Square West in Manhattan, a preppy NYU kid is buying a similar puma cap for more money than it takes to run that monk’s monastery for an entire week. The vendor on the street perhaps does not grasp that selling me a copper meditation bowl for less than 40yuan ($5US) is a steal for me, while it is breakfast, lunch, and dinner for him.

I do not look down at a people or a culture ‘unaffected’ by the rest of the world whilst they simultaneously and unknowingly take part in pop culture (playing Western top 40’s CDs in restaurants), Western fashion (selling fake Diesel jeans and Kappa jackets), and international cuisine (serving grilled cheese sandwiches along with Indian paneer panak and Tibetan shebalab bread). I do not marvel at their unawareness, either. I simply wonder how long it will last, this culture and people, before, as our tour guides reiterated time and again, “China and mainstream society take over Tibet, ruining its culture and traditional lifestyle forever.”

I feel genuinely blessed to have visited and experienced Tibet now, as it still holds on to its tradition and history, its culture and its people, while teetering on a match head for change to come sweeping through its land. So much devastation and change has taken place over the course of even the last fifty years in Tibet, and I can only hope that people will be able to, if not visit, then at the very least grasp its existence in our world, not our just our history, and as a people living on our earth, not just appearing in pictures in a National Geographic article.