“Qing Zhuang (the direct translation of my name into Chinese). Site three. Data emergency. Up for a trip to the mountains?”
My editing, science-y, paperwork internship took an adventurous twist on a stony gray Beijing morning. I was going to Tibet.
Let me back track for a moment. The genetic conservation project I was interning for focused on farm animals and their wild relatives. Many yaks, sheep, goats, and indigenous pigs and chickens faced extinction because imported breeds had gradually polluted the domestic gene pool until there wasn’t a single purebred yak left except on the Tibetan bod sa mtho. The project was funded by the United Nations Environment Program and executed in Bangladesh, China, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam. Last semester, I received an Alumnae Regional Scholarship, packed up my two years of Chinese classes at Bryn Mawr, and left for the project lab and headquarter in Beijing.
Tibetan sky was wide like nothing Beijing, or Bryn Mawr sky could be. Pennsylvania sky was pale and misty with spring rain, and Beijing seemed to hold that permanent grey of industrial dust. Tibetan blue was cold cut and thin, wedged between snowy peaks and limitless green fields.
I had travelled to Tibet close to July 1st, the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party, heavy with premonition. The precarious relationship between Vietnam and China was recently rattled by confrontations in the South China Sea, ranging anywhere from small rows between fishing vessels to military ships circling each other and the US destroyer USS Chung-Hoon being dispatched to the area. No fire had been shot, but both countries’ newspapers had berated each other; experts had been consulted; historical evidence had been dug up from the wars of decades, centuries, and even millenniums past.
The armed guard at the Tibetan border eyed my travel permit and asked me short questions in Mandarin. He didn’t ask why a foreigner, let alone a tiny Vietnamese girl from an American university, would travel this far so close to July 1st, but the question was on his lips. It was on mine too on that day back in Beijing, until I realized I was the only one on the editing team who even looked remotely Chinese.
Duo Duo, my guide to the project site, met me after the gate and wrapped a Tibetan welcome scarf (khata) around my neck. White khatas were for friends, red khatas for important officials, and golden khatas were given out by families who had welcomed the living Buddha in their homes.
The project site was nestled between the fold of two mountains. Participating families were scattered across vast hills, punctured by large clouds of black yaks: crossbreds, nearly purebreds, and downright wild bulls grazing on soft, green, project-grown pastures. I worked with the team on data input and full body yak photos. When we finished, I was ready never to give a crash course on MS Access ever again, or to go back to Beijing and make a tutorial and FAQs, whichever meant less scrambling for Chinese computer terms.
I didn’t like Lhasa. In Lhasa, I was welcomed as a Han girl, the majority ethnic group that constituted 92% of Chinese population, but only 6% of Tibet residents were Han. The posh part of Lhasa was full of Han people and the occasional groups of foreign tourists or journalists, while the small Tibetan houses rounded the edge of the city, undoubtedly belonging to the labor workers in the shops and factories. Duo Duo talked to me in her small voice and when we were hushed away in a small alley, she asked me for an American joke.
“Don’t you hate it when a sentence doesn’t end the way you octopus?”
I didn’t know if my Mandarin translation was any good, but Duo Duo threw her head back and let out a throaty laugh. For a moment I could see her high, tan Tibetan cheek bones under the sun, her coarse hair drop, and her eyes shine the way only a mountain child’s would.
Duo Duo took me to her family. I accepted a golden khata, washed my hands at the well, and patted my forehead three times before entering the house. Duo Duo invited me to the second floor, which was reserved for children and unmarried youths; I played her random songs on my iPod and showed her photos of Bryn Mawr. She thought Rockefeller looked like a castle and said she had never seen anything like it. I told her it was because she hadn’t seen the Harry Potter movies yet.
We sang for hours on the mountain and bowed our heads before colorful flags around a house. Duo Duo said the house was having a Tibetan funeral and told me all of their glorious posthumous ways, including one in which the body was chopped into pieces on the mountain top for hawks to feast on. Only the most generous and benevolent received the hawk sky burial. The person who chopped the body up inherited all the dead man’s money because “life ends where it is, and [Tibetans] don’t linger and don’t leave things behind.”
I understood then, what I loved—love—so much about this land of harsh midday sun and frosty nights. Tibetans were free, politics be damned. They sang their hearts out and they loved to the fullest. I had admired them for living in such difficult natural condition but only then did I realize they lived because of it. Their gods protected them and gave them their long lives and their unrelenting resistance.
I met a man who had been orphaned since he was ten; he slept on his horse; his eyes blazed because no hard labor, no giant Chinese character signs with tiny Tibetan subtitles like an afterthought in Lhasa could take his hawk song from him.
I left Tibet on a beautiful day. The sky was blue and crisp. I wore four khatas around my neck when I boarded the flight to Chengdu. Defiantly colorful Tibetan prayer paper twirled in the wind. I felt free.
