The taxi ride gave us a chance to see dawn rise over the Tibetan mountains, as we sped through empty roads hugging the hillside as it followed the slow, green-blue and meandering Llasa river along its lonely path. Thick fog banks flowed over the mountain peaks and slid down the valleys. An occasional serene yak munched away on clumps of yellow semi-frozen grass, and for a while, Tibet seemed like a magical place.
That feeling immediately vanished when we left the warm taxi and entered the brand spanking new, and completely unheated, airport building. At the check-in counter we found that our flight had been cancelled, for reasons unknown, and how dare we have the audacity to demand to know why. We were waved away to the other side of the hall. There, a woman with zero English said she was the Bank of China, and waved us back to where we had come from. This happened over and over. Indeed, it is a feature of travel throughout China, and I can only assume the Chinese Tourist board trains its employees to maintain the highest standards in this regard.
The provision of trolleys by the airport authorities would have made things far too convenient, and my aging back rapidly tired of loading and unloading 20 kilograms onto its creaking frame. This coming and going was made all the more difficult by the abject inability of Chinese people to form a queue. Instead of an orderly line of people, you must enter a kind of scrum, or rather a tightly packed semi-circle of barking fiends, each one shouting at anyone behind or near the counter, stuffing documents under their noses, and nudging each other to and fro, jockeying for position like their life depended on it. In this kind of situation, the meek, as Jesus maintained, may very well inherit the earth, but they’ve absolutely no chance of getting a plane ticket.
Different cultures, sociologists tell us, have different acceptable levels of personal space, into which strangers must never tread. The Anglo Saxons, they say, have one of the greatest distances. The Chinese operate with a personal space threshold of zero. I should be able to accept this as a cultural difference and not expect other cultures to play by my rules, but I can’t. The feeling of a stranger’s breath on my neck, or the feeling of his crotch in my backside, or his falling asleep in a crowded bus on my shoulder, these things never fails to aggravate me. However, I have just to grin and bear it, or rather grind my teeth, mutter abusive remarks in Spanish, and bear it.
After a few more yo-yo perambulations of the airport, just to make sure we left Llasa feeling as dizzy as when we arrived, they informed us that the next flight to Xian was in two day’s time, and we should sort out the details with a travel agent back in Llasa. Standing firm, while swaying firm anyway, we insisted on flying the same day and demanded an indorect route, if no direct one was available. They reluctantly offered to exchange the Llasa-Xian flight for a Llasa-Chengdu flight leaving in a couple of hours.We pointed out that this was only half way thee, and wondered if we were expected to walk the rest of the way, or perhaps grab onto a passing swan. The girl behind the counter was getting angry now, and shooed us away like you would a malevolent ghost or a smelly skunk, and told us to buy another ticket in Chengdu. Sandra was getting pretty angry now too, and was beginning to take on the air of a tigress, with her flight to Xian representing cubs she was going to protect with her life. After a lot of snarling and bearing of teeth, they gave us the connecting flight, but made us pay a 50 dollar surcharge. Somebody in the scrum realized what had happened, and before you could say, “let me out of this ****ing place,” everyone was demanding the same thing, much to the attendant’s displeasure. It was not ‘convenient’ for her, as she now had to fill in two pieces of paper for every customer instead of just one.
I had similar experiences in Russia when dealing with officials. I think it’s something to do with communism. The ‘service mentality’ of Western cultures is turned on its head, and officials of every rank believe that they are doing you a favor by serving you. The customer is not always right, as in the west. On the contrary, the customer is nothing more than a petty inconvenience and should be ignored whenever possible, or if they must be dealt with, they should be treated with undisguised contempt.
Eventually, the plane took off and Llasa and Tibet disappeared from view. Forever. It’s customary to say that you’ll return one day, but I know I’ll never go back to Llasa. I’m simply too weak to survive there, but I’ve nothing but admiration for those who can. I do hope the Tibetans and their culture manage to survive up here on ‘the roof of the world.’ There is something unique about them, and the world will be a poorer place for their passing.
However, I can’t help but feel pessimistic about their prospects. History is full of peoples and cultures that have been laid waste by ‘The Mighty Han.’ Even those who appear to have defeated and conquered them, like the Manchus or the Qing, are later assimilated and become indistinguishable from the Han, in language and culture. Originally, they were merely one people among many in central China, but they grew and grew, and reached a ‘critical mass.’ Like the Borg from Star Trek, they conquer, assimilate and grow, growing stronger and stronger with each fresh conquest. However, no Captain Piquard is going to beam down from the Enterprise with an away team to protect the outnumbered and outgunned Tibetans. They must fight alone, and fight passively, without even the threat of violence, in a manner even more subtle than Gandhi’s passive resistance movement in India. Can they succeed? I don’t know. I hope so.
Looking at a group of army cadres on the plane, I softly hummed the tune of an old Morrissey song that had come into my head out of nowhere:
“Shelve you western plans
And understand
That life is hard enough
When you belong here
Life is hard enough
When you belong here”
As acts of defiance go, it was pretty pathetic, and I don’t suppose it will make the Han leave their barracks.
As the plane landed in Chengdu, a group of Tibetans in the central rows of the plane ignored the ‘Fasten your Seat Belt’ sign, and stood up to get a better view out the plane windows. They looked in awe and wonder at the flat, green and lush farmland below them. Perhaps it was the first time they had seen such a landscape. How strange it must have appeared to them.
Xian
I hadn’t expected much from Xian. My students had warned me that it was so polluted that when it rained, the rain was black. One of them had joked that I could return my graying hair to its original colour by merely spending a weekend there. I expected a black, decaying industrial behemoth, like Manchester in the eighties.
In reality, Xian is a much more pleasant metropolis of seven million people. From its central square, the Drum and Bell Tower Square, the cities four main arteries (East, West, North and South Street), spread out into infinity, dividing the city in a logical and coherent way. The square itself, where our hotel was situated, is a pleasant enough grassy place, where kite flying aficionados ride the wind, or rather their kites ‘ride the wind.’ They themselves stay on the ground and try to flog you kites. It contains two typical Ming Dynasty towers; one containing a museum of bells, and another a museum of drums. We went to one of them, but I can’t remember which one, which shows what a great impression it left on me.
The rest of the city centre is all new. This is surprising when you consider that Xian was China’s capital for far longer than any other city, and much longer than the recent upstart, Beijing. Most of the dynasties rose and fell here in Xian, but judging by the downtown area, they left no trace. Once again, war, progress and indifference have destroyed Chinese history. The centre of modern Xian could be any American city; malls, banks, McDonalds and traffic jams.
Xian’s citizens looked prosperous and purposeful. This was a world of business and careers, of mobile phones and factories, and the rough and ready Tibetans of yesterday were world’s away, much to the delight of both parties, I suspect.
Even the weather surprised me. I had expected more of the damp, drizzle and grey mist so characteristic of Southern China, but Xian was dry and dusty. Posters everywhere encouraged people to conserve water-‘each drop means life’-they proclaimed.
Instead of mist, one finds a slight haze. The sky here is cloudless, but not really blue-it’s a kind of grey/blue I haven’t seen before. That’s partly due to pollution, no doubt, but mainly due to the dusty yellow loess soil from North West China being blown east by howling winds from Mongolia. The soil up there is yellow and like powder, and Winter winds lift it from the ground and carry it all the way to Xian and Beijing.
There’s nothing new in this, but the scale and intensity of soil erosion has increased massively in this century. Recent rapid economic progress is bringing things to a crisis point. Drought, over farming and de-forestation, combined with ever increasing demands for water from industry and the cities, are pushing north East China toward the abyss, and some speculate if the whole region, from Xian to Beijing, may soon become a desert.
The Party, not one to let even Mother Nature stand in its way, has a plan. It has begun a massive canal building project to transfer water from the wet south of China (which receives 80-90 per cent of China’s rainfall) to the dry north. Yet again, I am struck by the power of the Party and the Chinese to control, to organize and to build. It contrasts sharply with say, Spain, where the Sahara desert is already moving into the parched Andalusian south. Does Spain, occupying an area smaller than a Chinese province, and in per capita terms massively richer and more economically developed than China, build its own canals from its wet north to irrigate its parched south? No, it does nothing. It merely talks about the possibility of doing something at some indeterminate time in the future.
However, we had not come to Xian to see the grey/blue sky and congradulate the Party on its Public Works’ projects. We had come, like everyone else, I suppose, to see those silly Terra Cotta warrior statues. You know, those life-size replicas built by Emperor Qin to protect him in the afterlife, in place or burying real soldiers alive, standard practice at the time. The soldiers were lucky-his many concubines, servants and all but one of his 22 children did receive the honour of being buried with him, whether they wanted to or not. Emperor Qin was the first emperor to rule a united China, but also a bit of a paranoid megalomaniac tyrant, apparently. It seems to me that paranoid megalomaniacs always do well, historically speaking. Just look at the Bush Dynasty in America.
After uniting China, he set about making sure the whole continent of a country was kept busy glorifying his magnificence, and built the greatest mausoleum the world has ever seen. The terra-cotta warriors were only one small part of the 25 km complex that was to ensure his greatness was never forgotten. The workmen involved in building the most sensitive part of the complex, the emperor’s tomb, were buried alive in it immediately after it was finished. Talk about a bum rap! You spend 25 years-your whole life-slaving away underground on some loony’s tomb, and then as soon as you finish, they bury you alive in it. I guess these guys had pretty weak unions.
The irony is that only a year after his death peasant uprisings destroyed the emperor’s vast monument to himself, looting what they could, demolishing what they couldn’t and burning the rest. Even the Terra Cotta warriors had their metal weapons stolen and were smashed to pieces. The warriors you see today have been put back together again by teams of archaeologist, who are so patient and skilled, they could probably reconstruct Humpty Dumpty.
The Chinese can be a very destructive lot when they set their mind to it. |
