21 in Tibet, or, a Tale of Three Families, or, Prayers for Cindy

There was a stage. Sort of. Lights. A microphone. I was wearing a hat, given to me by a classmate, of fur of some ambiguous origin. And there was my mouth, open, air pushing out the longest note that I could muster for the first part of an old folk song. There were people who came up from their beers, with silver-white scarfs that the bar had hung around a peg on a pillar beside the stage--they were for the audience to give to good performers, or, in my case, performers who perhaps had a couple too many drinks to be any good, but since it was their birthday, and since it was Tibet, these things didn't matter so much. Scarves came around my neck, felt like snow, if snow were warm.

The song ends, and soon afterwords I run to the bathroom--wondrous moments cannot be spared a sense of purity on a 21st birthday. When I get back, this has occurred: A program friend, Joe, has gotten up onto the stage to recite one of his favorite rap songs, complete with middle fingers and "Motherfuckers!", but before the lovely ode to Compton has finished, a particularly drunk Tibetan roars onto the stage, grabs the microphone, shouts a bit, throws the microphone on the floor, throws a full beer at another Tibetan--a friend of ours. I get back in the thick of this, and then we flee, escaping into the street with whispers "Oh shit, was it Joe's song? Oh damn, it was the finger, he shouldn't of flipped...", but later we figure out that gangsta rap is not to blame for this one--the belligerent beer-throwing man thought it was his turn to sing when Joe got up. Ah. I am reminded by something Lu Laoshi told us when we first reached Zhongdian: "By the way, don't get into any fights. People in Tibet do not settle arguments with words. They settle arguments with knifes."

or beer bottles, I guess.

The next morning wakes up and I follow, breakfast of noodles and eggs, a bus ride, my head blissfully free of thought, feeling nothing more than the thin mountain air, the warming mountain sunshine (god, isn't it Colorado, Tibet?). And as if my body understood that the next couple hours of morning were to be left good, sacred, whole--my hangover had not kicked in yet. Here, we arrived at the monastery, a special niche in Zhongdian, modeled after the palace in Lhasa. On one hand this place is touristy, claimed by an entrance fee, surrounded by little stands for buying overpriced prayer beads, and people overly-traditonally-dressed, holding baby yaks and demanding that you take a picture of them and give them 10 kuai for it. On the other hand, this is a monestary, gold leaf pressed upon the escarpment statures, robed monks murmuring prayers, a flock of blackbirds spiraling above, an inescapable sense of peace. We walk up stairs, to a small room and here he is, sitting in his robes colored like yellow sandstone and red mesa (again, Colorado, you keep whispering here), a living Buddha, a reincarnate Lama. Questions are traded for answers, and more questions. Some questions, such as things I probably shouldn't mention on a site that can be looked at by certain governments, went unanswered. Some things are still too dangerous. He ends the session by tying a red string around each of our necks, speaking a small prayer with each knot. For three days, we are not to take them off.

The day rambles on, I get a lunch hour in a cafe to computer-talk to my would-be-(nay, will be!)future-shark wonder of a sister, and then to the orphanage.

But that's one family, and there are two other important families which I have neglected to mention: Gao and Duan.

I stayed with the Gao family for two weeks in Kunming. There's mom, dad, grandma and Chen Chen, the girl who during my stay turned six years old--and is more or less a sure example of the Chinese phenomenon labeled as the "Little Emperors".

Don't get me wrong, Chen is a sweet kid--but, she also has more or less free reign to throw fits, shout, and demand whatever she wants. It's a common attitude for kids to assume in urban China these days; due to the infamous One Child Policy, China is fostering a generation of single kids, who are meeting the world with a rapidly developing world that their parents only had dreamt of. Chen Chen's mother, Jiang Yaoxi, for example, received a single egg for her sixth birthday. Chen Chen received an expensive western-style meal (complete with ice cream and cheese-and-fruit pizza), barbie dolls, movies, chocolates, and a toy moose (brought from the US from yours truly). But just like big emperors, little emperors don't get a life of luxuries for nothing--each of these kids faces an immense pressure to succeed: to be number one, to get the best score, to be the best pianist, to uphold the family by themselves. No wonder parents in urban China rear back a little on repremands--how else could they command their children to schooling, sports, tutoring, more tutoring, lessons in piano and english and on and on and on... without crushing them?

Aside from commands from Chen Chen to "HUA HUA!" (paint) with her (meaning, use the paint program on my computer to draw butterflies and dinosaurs) disrupting me from studying, the Gao family showed me more warmth an acceptance than I could've ever expected. Gao Jian, the dad, a wonderfully dorky and kind computer technician, took me swimming with him at a nearby pool, where we would race and laugh about how tired we got. Jiang Yaoxi talked to me in the evenings as she hula-hooped in front of the television about her childhood at a farm near Dali, and I showed her pictures of my family's thanksgiving. Chen Chen and I, needless to say, got along great. The first night I arrived I played Gillian Welch songs in the livingroom while Chen Chen hopped around in a pink unitard.



Fastforeward, past the techno ghost of John Denver and the ganja mistresses of Dali (see last post if you're confused), shot out across Northwest Yunnan in a bus, in an out and Dali, up and down a holy mountain adorned with a pagoda and enwreathed in a sunset too pomegranate tangerine gorgeous to ever be caught and pinned down by a picture, let alone with words, and after that we come to Shaxi (for those mapping events, we arrived in Shaxi a little over a week ago, and stayed 5 nights).

Shaxi, a small town, surrounded by hills full of pine trees and spiders and Buddhist temples, where the inhabitants cross their fingers for an influx of tourism (tourism = money) while they farm wheat and rice in the fields and pick mushrooms in the hills. Here I stay in a house in cobwebs, a square of rooms surrounding a small courtyard where an old pomegranate tree reigns. My room there is next to the pig and goat pens. This is the Duan household, headed by a laughing man with half his teeth left, a wrinkled face and a skill at playing traditional Chinese musical instruments, chiefly the erhu and flutes.

How many people actually are part of the household I never was too sure--rural Chinese families stick together a lot more than urban families, and also don't have the usually One Child Policy to tie them down, so numbers can be large. But because it rained the entire 5 days I was there, I got to sit with the family a lot, trading songs with the Duan Baishan (the patriarch laughing man) and watching bad Chinese soap operas with one of his two sons, a man in his late twenties who suffers from a heavy mental disability. Again, even though in quite a different scenario, I was treated with so much kindness. Happy bowls of noodles were shared over episodes of the Chinese version of the Ugly Betty TV show.


The stay in Shaxi culminated in an exchange of performances: the men of the village played traditional Bai music on Erhus and other traditional instruments, and I played American folk songs: "Paradise" and "Man of Constant Sorrow" (Dylan style, not Soggy Bottom Boys) with my guitar and harmonica. Then the women of the village did traditional dance, and some of the girls from our group went up and sang "Build Me Up Buttercup" a capella, and to top it all off, the aformentioned Joe played my guitar for a shouting-tastic rendition of "Queen Bitch" ("They can't understand the lyrics," he told me after the performance, "so when I screech, they know what it feels like for me when I have to sit through Beijing Opera." If you don't know what Beijing Opera is, think heavily make-upped women singing like the sound when you let air out of a full balloon when you pinch the opening). It was a good farewell, and the next morning we were off to Zhongdian, a tourist hub of Tibetan culture that holds the other name of "Shangri-la", where there were 21st birthdays, living Buddhas, orphanages, and beyond the city, prayers for Cindy.

The orphanage was happy faces, Tibetan children of all ages running around. In the fashion of the Shaxi performances, they sang and danced Tibetan-style, while we, caught off-guard, managed to slop together a rendition of "in the jungle". After that we played soccer and basketball and duck duck goose. Wonderful kids. And even if I only spent a small time with them, I have to put them here as family #3--not a family for me like the last two, but irrefutably a family, another kind, just like the Gaos, just like the Duans.

Later that evening, a night for good food, a performance by dread-locked drum-circled Japanese, and a final switching of my ISP topic (will elaborate later). But the next day, back in the bus, out onto dirt roads that bump and heave us, up to a trailhead where a goat (to whom I bestow the regal name of "Andrew the Majestic (the goat)") accompanies us up to a small temple, halfway up a hill where thousands of prayer flags flap between the pine trees. Prayer flags are a common sight, but here at this out-of-the-way community, the people have a special preparation: before tying up the strings of flags, they take a moment to write the names of loved ones, now gone, upon the sacred colored scraps of cloths. The prayers are for them, and they go out into the wind with each flapping of cloth in the breeze. I bought a strand, and in the morning mountain air, the morning mountain sunlight, I walked up the hill, ducking under and over strands of flags. Nearer to the temple the flags are newer, brighter and taut between the trees. But the further I went, the more faded they got, the more tattered, the more age. And in a spot where the flags must've been older than me at least, where the morning sun got through and through the trees I could see the rolling green of the valley below, I tied up a string of white, blue, yellow, red, green, with Cindy's name on each one. I stood awhile to watch them rustle: their first motions of many. And then, stuffing my hands into my coat, I walked back through a sea of prayers, back to the bus to Shangri-La.



-s