The Open Road (5 page)

—
THE BEIJING JOURNALIST XINRAN XUE,
describing Tibet in her book
Sky Burial

THE FAIRY TALE

W
hen I was a little boy, barely old enough to know what the “news” meant (small children live in a different sense of time), my father began telling me a story every night before I went to sleep. The stories he told me were often of angels and demons and many-headed gods, drawn from the ancient myths of the India where he grew up, or spiked with the Shakespeare and Dickens of the England where we were living. Down the road, a five-minute walk away, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were gathering regularly at the Eagle and Child pub, and stories of magical wardrobes and hidden hollows, of minglings both evil and good, were developing. The story that my father told that especially transfixed me, though, was of a little boy born in a simple rural cowshed far from anywhere, and very high up, who was seen by some passing monks one day and declared to be a king.

The little boy, not much older than the wide-eyed kid listening to his father in Oxford, was taken to a faraway capital, after a long passage on horseback, and installed in a palace with a thousand rooms. He was instructed in all the philosophies and sciences of his ancient culture, by two strict tutors in red robes, while his family was sent to live in a summer palace, bright with flowers and animals and lakes. Only one elder brother kept him company in the cold, dark palace overlooking the city.

One day, the story went on, the boy, while still a teenager, was asked to be the full-fledged leader of many millions of people, as well as its ruling monk, and traveled in a caravan again and a yak-skin coracle to a far-off city of the Emperor, who intimated that he would overrun the little boy’s country—“liberate it,” in his terms—unless the boy could persuade him otherwise. He refused to do what the Emperor said, so the Emperor attacked. One night, with his mother, his younger brother, and a few trusted friends, just after he had finished his final exams, the boy stole out of his palace, dressed as a soldier, and undertook a long, hazardous journey across the highest mountains on earth.

At this point the story picked up. Our little transistor radio would crackle in the evenings, and when it was turned off, my father would turn to me, in the last days before television, and fill me in on the day’s events. The young king was fleeing, across cold, high mountains, and his pursuers were very close behind him. Sometimes the watch fires of the enemy could be seen at night, the tents of the soldiers only a few hundred yards away. The small group had disappeared into the mountains. A mysterious plane—friend or foe?—was circling overhead. Tonight the fugitive party was said to be a little closer to freedom at the border.

It was a story not so different from the ones I heard in class, at St. Philip and St. James school. It spoke of other flights, other precious jewels hustled across the border to safety before the enemy could get to them. What little boy could resist?

Would the boy and his little brother make it to safety? Would right win a terrific victory? The two-year-old in Oxford, in the simplicities of his excitement, spoke of “good Tibetans, bad Chinese.” At last one day—the Tibetans had risen up against the Chinese the very day the little boy’s father had turned twenty-nine—the news came through that the team had arrived, half-broken, and sick, in freedom. The site of that freedom, happily for the little boy, was his own hardly seen homeland, India (which meant the boy-king, as in a fairy tale, was returning to his master’s home). Right had not exactly won, but it had at least managed to keep one step ahead of wrong.

The only trouble was, it wasn’t a fairy tale, except in the eyes of a two-year-old. It was a story, painfully real, that soon got complicated, with eighty thousand other Tibetans leaving the country in the following months, and hundreds of thousands more staying behind and fighting and losing their lives, and the CIA coming to whisk off some of the freedom fighters to an isolated area where they could learn guerrilla warfare (from those who were losing a guerrilla war at the time), while young Chinese boys were being sent by the battalion to their death or at least discomfort on the high plateau. The problem for Tibet, as for so many of its people throughout its history, has been that it has seemed to wear the contours of fairy tale. It feels—or we need to make it feel—more like Shangri-La than a place that could have a seat at the United Nations. We have plenty of exile leaders and men with exotic causes; we don’t need another. It’s transparent wise men with ready smiles and a boyish sense of humor that our myth calls for.

The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, in fact—this perhaps the most fairy-tale-like element of all—had come into the world at almost the very moment, in 1935, when the notion of Shangri-La was filtering into the Western imagination, James Hilton’s novel
Lost Horizon
and then the Frank Capra movie of the book, telling us not just that there was a place where lamas lived for centuries and people could enter a magical world of gardens and Platonic learning but that there had to be such a place inside us whether there existed one on earth or not. The natural setting to locate it was the place we would never see (as of 1950, Tibet had been visited by fewer than two thousand Westerners, one thousand of whom had come in a single British military expedition in 1904).

My father, who had grown up on stories of Tibet told by H. P. Blavatsky, Nicholas Roerich, and other wandering mystics, went back to meet the Dalai Lama, months after our nightly broadcasts, because he was aware, as not so many people were then, that a great treasure had come out into the world for the first time, really, in history. (The Thirteenth Dalai Lama had been forced to flee Lhasa twice, as outside forces moved in, but he was never truly available to the world the way his successor would become in 1959, when, in a disquieting augury of what was to come, he appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine beside the legend “The Escape That Rocked the Reds.”) Full of a young man’s indignation, my father complained to the Dalai Lama that the Indian press concentrated only on the material treasure that was said to have come out with the Tibetans into exile; the young Dalai Lama, as he would now, counseled my father to be patient and said that understanding would come in time.

His only child, my father went on—a three-year-old boy in England—had followed the story of the Tibetans’ flight with unusual intensity. The Dalai Lama, in response, sent a picture of himself, as a small boy on the Lion Throne in Lhasa, to me in faraway Oxford, and wherever I went in the years that followed, I kept it on my desk, like a talisman from fairy tale. It accompanied me to California when we moved there, and if ever I felt out of place or burdened, I could look at this photo of a four-year-old, taken from his home and family and set upon the throne of his country, and put things into perspective. Then a forest fire swept down from the hills nearby, and the photo, like everything I owned, was gone.

One spring in Dharamsala I got in the habit of waking early, just before the sun showed over the mountains, and going to the central compound, from which gongs sounded every morning. It was always a magical walk. Street people hadn’t appeared yet on the slope outside my guesthouse garden, and the cars hadn’t begun to congregate at the intersection. There would be the smell of early cooking fires from some of the houses nearby, a monk walking alone up one of the steep roads, or a woman gathering a pail of water on the rooftop of her house. Dogs barked constantly—packs of them ran wild along the gulleys and dusty mountain paths of Dharamsala—and the lights had not yet been put out in the houses across the valley below.

At the central temple, even at this early hour, were scores of Tibetans, walking and walking, telling their beads, pushing large bronze prayer wheels to make them spin, muttering chants or praying for the long life of their leader. Many were very, very old—women with healthy skin and pigtails and traditional
chuba
aprons around their waists, old men in cowboy hats, men with bowed legs or faces that suggested their minds were not quite right. Young local kids, too, who had never seen Tibet but upheld their Tibetan traditions even in sunglasses and lipstick, above San Francisco 49ers T-shirts. A great parade of them, while a monk or two swept the area clean, and in a little chamber next to the temple, lights were set in a sea of butter lamps to make a field of tiny candles.

Every day, as the sun came up over the far-off ridge, turning the snowcaps pink, then gold, both of the temple’s prayer halls were filled with rows of monks reciting their chants. One in particular caught my eye. He had a flamboyant mustache, unusual in Tibet, and it gave him some of the special charisma of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. He was the leader of the second prayer hall, offering two weeks of special prayers for world peace (Washington had attacked Iraq two weeks before), and when a dog came in one day and sat on one of the meditation cushions, the head monk broke into a big smile. The dog threw back his head and bayed as the monks chanted, and when two of them tried to carry him out, he scrambled right back and sat on the cushion again, baying in time with their chants. In Tibet it is said that dogs stay around temples not just because of the food and the kindly (it is hoped) company but because they were weak monks in their past lives and now are hoping to win their way back into their rightful homes.

The Tibetans crowded past, walking and walking around the temple. Below us, unseen through the trees, many dozens more were making a larger circumambulation, around the whole hill on which the temple, an adjoining monastery, and the Dalai Lama’s house across from them stand. In the midst of their chants, their collected hopes, I kept my eye on the praying monks, and especially this one charismatic character.

On this particular day, after two weeks or so of prayer, when I went to the temple at dawn I happened to see the monk I had been taken by, his weeks of chanting finished, standing outside the hall among the visitors. He was surprisingly ready to talk; his eyes lit up when he saw me and he gave me his business card, featuring his address in an affluent part of California, and made an urgent appeal for me to visit him and become his student. When he saw my glamorous Japanese companion, his eyes lit up even more. He gave her a business card, too, and then another, in case she lost one. He caught her eye and held it and told her how happy he would be if she visited him.

“We watched you every day,” I said, to try to take the conversation back to the temple around us, the prayers.

“I’ve been to New York many times,” he said.

He had some power, no doubt of it—a real magnetism, compounded by mystery and the glamour of his robes, his origins. Another young Japanese girl showed up, and he came close to her and pressed a business card (or two) on her. He’d been so much more appealing when I knew nothing at all about him and was free to project all my hopes, my accumulated fairy tales upon him.

A trivial incident, but less and less an untypical one. Here is the Tibetan conundrum in miniature, as Ngari Rinpoche always stressed. In the cafés of Dharamsala, young Tibetan boys with hair down to their waists and strong cheekbones—their smiles a glow of white, their eyes mysterious and soulful, able to tell palpitating stories of crossing the Himalayas to be near their leader, breaking into old nomad songs from Amdo when not making conversation in broken English—roam around like the packs of wild dogs, and few visitors are able to resist them. Many of the foreigners one sees in Dharamsala are, for whatever reason, female, and young, and unattached (drawn to the calm and graciousness of Tibetan culture after the grabby swarm of India, perhaps); these boys look like the exotic movie stars of their dreams, and have tragic stories to boot. The Indian shopkeepers stand amid their pyramids of biscuits and look on with envy, ill-disguised frustration, as Lhamo or Sangye takes a girl’s arm and draws a Tibetan mandala on her palm, or pulls out from his inside pocket a picture of the village he left behind him, in the Dalai Lama’s province.

This is one of the problems that weighs on the Dalai Lama and those around him, though it will fit no part of the Western story about him; in some ways, it is the second most urgent story in his life, after the story of the Tibetans in Tibet itself. These boys and thousands more who, like people in poor countries everywhere, long to come to the West, and will call upon all their wits and charm in order to make it happen, will use Tibet whenever it suits them, even if they are not Tibetan in knowledge (how could they be? The very use of the Tibetan language in schools is fading in Tibet). They have little motivation to hold on to the culture and history that made them, though every motivation to turn it to global advantage. They know how to play the fairy tale, over and over.