CHAPTER FIVE

The Forbidden City

Riding back to Lhasa, I saw young lovers sitting in a field of purple nycothiums. They reminded me of Carolyn. So did the Tibetan women spreading barley out to dry. I wondered if Carolyn was still in Lhasa, and if she had missed me during our month-long excursion into the mountains. The driver kicked us out at the edge of a desolate valley. We shouted obscenities at him when he drove off. We did not realize our mistake until we walked around a small hill that had concealed the Xegar checkpoint from view; if the driver had been caught with passengers, he could have been fined and lost his license.

Two unarmed guards stood at the checkpoint. Confident that we were unrecognizably dirty, we walked past the guards toward the adjacent truck stop. The guards shouted after us, but then retired to their hut. We wanted food and our first showers in a month, but we soon learned that the truck stop had not had food for a week and that it could spare us no more than a thermosful of hot water. John opened a map and a can of Chinese Spam. He held up a chunk of smoked pink flesh and made a toast: “In the spirit of epic adventure, may Everest pale compared to our next and even greater expedition.”

Two German men in their thirties were waiting on the Lhasa side of the checkpoint. Hans had a crew cut and wisps of blond beard. He looked like a young Anagarika Govinda, the German monk whose decades-long pilgrimage through Tibet, as recounted in his book The Way of the White Clouds, explored Tibetan Buddhism’s spiritual horizons. His friend Otto had stringy, shoulder-length hair and a penetrating gaze. “We come from Kathmandu,” Otto said. “The border is shit. Three days we hike across landslides. More than a hundred people die this monsoon season.” Otto spoke in German to Hans and they laughed. “It is unfortunate only twelve tourists die, and no Americans,” he translated for John and me. John liked Otto’s defiant attitude, but I was leery of him. He had the demeanor of a Khampa, which made me wary of my valuables.

A rising plume of dust on the horizon streaked toward us. Watching the approaching dust devil, I imagined a monk bounding across the 12,000-foot plateau in effortless, exaggerated strides. In Tibet some monks are known to cover large distances at superhuman speeds. While I believed that such things were possible, I was not surprised to see a bus materialize at the head of the dust plume. It took two hours for the guards to check everyone’s passports and let the bus through. When the bus finally pulled up in front of us, I assumed it was to pick us up. I did not see its flat tire. Otto pushed past an ashen man fighting to get out of the bus in order to vomit. A horrible smell accompanied the gauntlet of harsh stares from other passengers as John and I headed toward the two remaining seats in the back.

“Whuh,” I gagged at chunks of dried vomit in a topographical relief on the seat. John’s suggestion that we clean it up brought more harsh stares from the passengers who had sat next to the mess. Outside in the fresh air I realized there was no way I could get back on the bus. Even if we didn’t get sick trying to clean the seat, we would have to endure that smell for the days it would take us to get from Xegar to Lhasa.

Just then an army jeep skidded to a halt at the checkpoint. The driver was Tibetan. A PLA soldier sat in the passenger side. I said hello in Tibetan and Chinese: “Tashi delek” and “Ni hao,” and asked, “Lhasa?” The driver nodded. I ran back into the bus, and found John’s face hostage to the same contortion as the other passengers. “Fuck America,” Otto yelled out the bus window after us as we climbed into the jeep.

John handed a pack of Marlboro cigarettes to the front of the jeep for Tenzin, the driver, who never smiled, and Zheng, the soldier, whose uniform was two sizes too big. Tenzin threw the wrapper out the window and accelerated onto the dirt road. Just as I was beginning to fantasize about reaching Lhasa and having a hot bath, the jeep hit a pothole that shot us against the roof. The joy of having a 360-degree view of the mountains faded as Tenzin barreled over and into more potholes.

The jeep broke down regularly. Fortunately, Tenzin was a mechanical wizard. He replaced an old alternator belt with a larger one from a tractor in a nearby village. Dust in the fuel line was sucked by mouth out of the tube. Radiator leaks were plugged with a rag. The jeep broke down so many times that I stopped counting after twenty.

I think Zheng tried to tell us his life story, but neither John nor I spoke enough Chinese to understand him. Like Mr. Tang, the Everest expedition’s liaison officer, Zheng was in his early twenties and hated mountains. He had been stationed in Tibet for several years and longed to return to the mainland. He also disliked Tibetans, which explained why Tenzin never smiled.

Rain the second day made the jeep stick fast in the muck in addition to breaking down. We became covered in mud after wedging stones under the wheels and pushing it out of ruts. Then Tenzin drove forty miles an hour off the road. Miraculously, no one was hurt. With oil, water, and gas leaks, we broke down every fifteen minutes. I stopped counting after fifty.

Ironically, we ran out of gas twenty-five miles from Lhasa. Many army trucks passed us, but none would stop for the Tibetan driver, for the Chinese soldier, or for the American who yelled “Fuck you!” at receding taillights. At first I was angry that we would have to spend one more night outside. I noticed that the electricity lines that paralleled the road did not branch up to a nearby Tibetan village. Tibetan homes were lit by butter lamps, as they had been for centuries; they had neither electricity nor showers. At dawn Zheng flagged a driver who let us siphon enough gas to get to Lhasa.

The well-dressed tourists at the Lhasa Hotel’s main desk eyed us suspiciously. I explained to the manager that we had just come from Everest. He smiled uneasily, but he took my American Express card. We took two baths each and still could not wash the blue dye from our cheap pants off our legs. John looked thin; he had lost ten pounds. I was emaciated, having lost twenty-five. We ate five meals in a row without leaving the premises: copious amounts of stainless-steel eggs and cold toast, overcooked yak burgers and greasy fries, beef stroganoff and sugary desserts. The food didn’t taste very good but we wanted to satisfy our cravings for Western cooking before we resettled in a Tibetan hotel.

“Are you staying here?” Otto shouted when he discovered us in the lobby. Otto and Hans sported a motley assemblage of dirt that offended the sensibilities of the hotel’s refined clientele—the same dirt that had covered us less than twenty-four hours before. “The Lhasa Hotel is fucked,” Otto bellowed, loud enough to attract the manager’s attention. John said we were leaving. Otto berated us “soft Americans” for taking a luxurious jeep while he stayed on the bus.

“Change money for me,” Otto demanded. “I lose my passport.” Otto retrieved a 500-mark note from a sack hung around his neck. I took the bill to the main desk and the manager said that German marks had to be changed at the bank. Otto glared at me and shouted, “They would change American dollars. Chinese treat Tibetans like shit. FEC’s (foreign exchange currency) are fucked. The Lhasa Hotel is fucked.”

Lhasa had changed since we had left a month before. Squads of police goose-stepped in the streets while roving loudspeakers denounced the Dalai Lama as an enemy of the Motherland. It took two days for me to find a letter from Carolyn on the Tibetan hotel bulletin board. She had stayed for another two weeks after her brother returned from Kham, then went on to Nepal. She would be at the Tibet Hotel in Kathmandu.

Otto was soon arrested for stealing a government stamp. After a policeman refused to authorize a special visa to Bhutan, Otto stole the government stamp. No one witnessed the theft, but when Otto returned from his trip and heard that the police had searched his room, he gave himself up. For five days no one knew what had happened to him. Even I began to miss him. Then Otto reappeared one evening at a Chinese restaurant.

“I was in Drapchi prison,” Otto announced.

“Did they beat you?” John asked seriously.

“It was like a hotel!” Otto said. “I had my own room. In the morning, the guard asked me what I wanted to eat, then sent someone to the market. The guards were O.K. until the last day. The bastards charged me forty FEC.” John asked if Otto had seen any other prisoners. Otto said that he had not.

“Was it worth it?” John asked.

“I gave government back their stamp,” Otto said, “but first I make two visas.”

“We have to see the Potala,” John said once we had settled into the third floor of the Banak Shol Hotel. “That is, if you can handle being a tourist for a few hours.” John put a colorful, postcard-sized sticker of the Tibetan national flag on his black shoulder bag. I admired the colorful sticker of two facing snow lions with red and blue rays streaming from a rising sun. John gave me one. He had gotten two at the Office of Tibet in New York, and had forgotten about them until now. I put the sticker on the cover of my journal. We rented bicycles from the hotel and raced them through the streets to the Potala Palace.

I had imagined that the Potala’s thousand small rooms would be adorned with tankas that portrayed alternately enlightened or horrific manifestations of the human subconscious against a backdrop of colorful silk brocade, with the walls blackened by eons of accumulated soot and floors slippery from centuries of spilled yak butter. John veered his bicycle around a dog with a mutilated haunch that stared at two men unloading yak quarters from the back of a truck onto the dirt alley.

At the palace we locked our bicycles and walked up the long switchback of stairs; dwarfed by the palace’s white walls rising into a cobalt sky I thought of standing at the base of Half Dome in Yosemite with John three years ago. We had climbed the Northwest Buttress in one day instead of the usual two. In order to lighten our loads we did not bring extra equipment or clothing. We carried one quart of water each during the eleven-hour ascent, and each lost fifteen pounds. A lightning storm approached the cliff as we summited, and we ran down the back of the dome without touching the metal handrail.

Six Chinese soldiers with AK-47s slung over their shoulders smoked cigarettes at the entrance. I wondered if the police were there to arrest the monks for subversive activity. Surely they were not sightseeing. “Tashi delek,” I greeted the soldiers in Tibetan. They did not respond. We paid our entrance fees and passed through a large wooden gate into a courtyard with red and green trim on the wooden balcony.

A Chinese woman standing on the steps leading into the Potala’s East Wing spoke to a tour in English. “Before Tibet’s peaceful liberation from its feudal past,” the woman said, “serfs had no rights. Brutal warlord monks tortured their serfs in human sacrifices. Now, thanks to the People’s Government, the monks at the Potala Palace enjoy total religious freedom, I have arranged for you to meet a Tibetan monk who will tell you how happy the Tibetans are in the Motherland.”

“These Tibetans are barbaric,” an overweight man said. He was breathing hard and had the crimson face and distended neck veins that precede a massive coronary. John and I looked at each other in stunned disbelief; no one had questioned the tour guide’s version of Tibetan history.

I noticed a beckoning side door next to the stairs that was slightly ajar. The soldiers had entered the courtyard but were not paying attention to the tour. John saw me moving toward the door and grinned enthusiastically. Without saying anything, we walked through the side door. Shouts followed us down a corridor that opened into rooms piled with carpenters’ tools and stacks of slate shingles. The voices almost caught up to us as an unlocked wooden door led us into a red courtyard. There were no visible handholds on the steep maroon walls. A half-wall on one side looked out over the valley floor 500 feet below. We were trapped. The voices were upon us.

Terrified of being caught, I climbed over the half-wall, lowered myself gently onto a two-foot-wide slate roof, and crawled as fast as I could beneath the locked wooden shutters that lined the wall. John followed. No soldiers ventured onto the roof after us, but I continued to crawl farther away from the yelling. The houses on the valley floor looked diminutive next to the winding banks of the Kyichu River. “Slow down, you crazy bastard,” John called after we rounded a bend. I did not stop until I found a shutter that opened. When our eyes eventually adjusted to the darkness, we explored the Potala not open to the tourists.

We lost track of time, how many floors we hiked up or down, and where we were in the palace labyrinth. Lit matches cast eerie shadows on padlocked doors and clay hearths blanketed by dust. We tried to climb to the highest roof, but locked doors and dead ends forced us down into the Potala’s depths. We negotiated stairwells clogged with broken timber, trash, and excrement, which left us silent for long periods. I thought of how easily the tourists had believed the tour guide and became angry at myself for not challenging her.

John wedged a copy of a U.S. Congressional resolution on human rights violations in Tibet, which he had gotten in New York prior to our departure, into a padlocked door. The resolution, dated June 7, 1987, stated succinctly that 1.2 million Tibetans had died from execution, imprisonment, and starvation in Tibet’s thirty years of military occupation; that 6,254 monasteries had been destroyed, and only thirteen rebuilt; and that Tibet was being colonized by Han immigrants. “I had forgotten what a hard-hitting document this is,” John said. He stopped to admire the piece of paper, which stood out like a flag from the door frame.

I asked John what he expected to accomplish by leaving the resolution, and how he thought the Chinese police would respond. John said that he had not thought about it. He disliked the fact that Tibetans got no information other than the Chinese party line from the People’s Daily. I became angry at John in a way that I never had been before. As long as I had known him he had loved to indulge in these sorts of quixotic adventures; but leaving this resolution behind could get Tibetans in trouble. I started to yell at John for being reckless, but as usual his easy grin and humor disarmed me. We both realized that no one was likely to see the piece of paper for years, and we laughed at the idea of such an effete gesture.

Sunbeams straying into a corner of the dark hallway drew us to a room with a crack in its shutters that opened easily. I was surprised to see the late afternoon sun on Chokpori Hill, where Lhasa’s most prestigious college of medicine once stood. The Fifth Dalai Lama had Chokpori Medical College built in the seventh century. Physicians from all over Mongolia and Tibet were educated there, until Chinese soldiers bombed it to the ground with artillery. Now all that remained was a television tower on a barren slope.

John leaned out the window and looked down two stories to a sloping ramp of trees. The cracks in the ancient mortar looked as though they could provide finger-width holds to the ramp. “We can downclimb this!” John exclaimed. As we made our way down the wall he talked about sharing the resolution with fellow travelers. He suggested that we leave the shutters unlocked; we could come back another night with other travelers and have a Potala party.

“We have to do something,” John said.

I agreed with John that something had to be done about Tibet’s plight. But I still needed to recuperate from Everest. I coveted my breakfasts of yogurt and fried eggs wrapped in pancakes with chocolate sauce at a Chinese restaurant. My afternoons were devoted to drinking cold beer in the hot sun and writing exaggerated postcards home at the Lhasa Cafe, a new restaurant in the Barkhor, where an Austrian chef made apple strudel, bratwurst, and potato salad. In the evenings I wanted to enjoy six-hour dinners with other travelers.

“How’s the intrepid traveler?” John inquired as I sprinted out of bed and down the hall to the hotel’s communal toilet. This particular toilet was a noisome reminder of other hygienic atrocities I’d experienced around the world. I held my breath.

Dysentery was not new to my travels. I had my first bout in 1979, mountaineering in Peru with John. After eating salad on our descent into the lowlands, I became stricken with diarrhea. Then, in 1983, after a month of not getting sick on rancid butter tea in Ladakh, in northern India, I considered myself immune; in the capital, Leh, I thought I could drink the water with impunity. One should never think one can drink or eat anything in Leh with impunity.

Squatting and holding my breath like this at 12,000 feet made me lightheaded. I envied John’s intestinal fortitude. He ate ravenously and rarely had to run for a toilet, as I often did. John made fun of how I hoarded bits of newspaper, the small Tibetan currency notes worth two cents, even bus tickets. No scrap was too small, no parchment too rough that it could not be used in an emergency. I had eaten nonstop for two weeks and was still unable to gain weight, which made me wonder what sort of parasites I was hosting.

We met another American woman in the market. Julie had saved enough money working as a nursery-school teacher in Colorado to travel for six months in Asia. She traveled with a “male friend” from India to Pakistan, crossed the Karakoram Highway to Kashgar, and continued along the old silk road to Urumchi and Turfan before they split up. He went to Beijing. She came to Tibet. Both John and I told her we were glad she came to Tibet. Julie smiled. She planned to stay in Lhasa for a few weeks, then hitchhike to Everest. She also asked if we wanted to play hackysack in the Barkhor Square. We became an attraction among the chanting monks and Khampa dancers. John and I tried to outdo each other, intent on impressing Julie,

A Tibetan woman lunged for the Tibetan national flag sticker on John’s camera bag. “Watch it!” John warned. The woman lunged again for the sticker and berated John in Tibetan. I could not understand everything the woman said, but I recognized her hand in the shape of a pistol pointing to the sticker and back to John.

That night we ate dinner at Julie’s favorite restaurant, the Sunflower Cafe, which was run by a cantankerous Chinese man who thought Tibet should be free. Lu served warm beer and charged too much for his mediocre food, which had to be eaten while sitting on miniature stools around miniature tables. But the atmosphere was appealing, and we became regulars.

One night Lu closed the restaurant after the other customers had left. We were drinking warm beer and blasting Dylan on Lu’s tape deck, and John was talking about politics. We thought Lu was getting ready to push the six small tables together and get his bedding out from the kitchen, but instead he handed everyone at our table another can of beer, and said gruffly, “On the house for my American friends.”

“You won’t make any money if you give away beer,” John said.

“Americans are good business!” Lu said. He smiled his rotten-teeth smile, then scrunched up his face. “There was a public execution in Lhasa today. Two Tibetans killed at the People’s Stadium.”

“Did you see it?” John asked.

“Had to. A representative from every business is required to go, then report back to others. China has executions every year before the People’s Congress. This year, 15,000 people come.” Everyone at the table strained to discern Lu’s thick Chinese accent over the blaring tape deck. “The police tie prisoner’s wrists behind back. After prisoner’s crimes are announced, police pull up on wrists to break elbows. Then each prisoner is shot with one bullet in back of head. They charge family five dollars for bullet.”

“That’s on par with the Khmer Rouge,” Julie said. John and I agreed.

“Used to be worse,” Lu said. “Before, they cut prisoner’s tongue out. Otherwise Tibetans screamed ‘Free Tibet,’ before they shot.” Lu learned forward to ask, “Why do my American friends think execution at this time?” Lu looked inquisitively at us, sitting in stunned silence. “Dalai Lama in United States now,” Lu said. “He make political speech to U.S. Congress. China wants to show the world they will not be push around by U.S. government.”

“How do you know this?” John asked.

“The Chinese broadcast it on the street,” Lu said.

Two nights later Lu said there was a rainbow over the Potala; that same night, all of us felt three subtle seismic tremors. “I am not religious,” Lu said. “But I believe everyone should be free to practice religion. Rainbows and earthquakes are auspicious signs for Tibetans.”

At 9:00 the next morning, September 27,1987, one dozen monks from the Sera Monastery carrying homemade Tibetan flags began a circuit of the Jokhang Temple. The monks chanted, “Free Tibet,” and “China out of Tibet.” All business activity ceased as Tibetans left their shops and homes to march with the monks. By the third circuit there were 300 people marching and chanting. A dozen police arrived in jeeps and beat the monks with rifle butts, but they were vastly outnumbered, and the demonstrators continued toward the Cultural Palace.

A hundred yards ahead I saw a flash of maroon and yellow robes surrounded by men in green uniforms with raised truncheons. John, Julie, and I ran with Chinese, Tibetans, and tourists alike down the wide boulevard. On the sidewalk to our left, two policemen beat a Tibetan woman to the ground with their truncheon. Hundreds of people had stopped to watch but did nothing. I could not believe what I was seeing. I was also unable to intervene, and in the mayhem I briefly lost sight of John. Julie and I ran toward the police jeeps that blocked the main intersection in front of the Cultural Palace.

Five young cadets stood at attention while a group of older police beat a Tibetan couple. The audible CRACK of a truncheon slicing a hunk of flesh from the man’s head registered as terror on two of the young cadets’ faces. Another cadet winced as the man fell to the ground. The cadets laughed nervously as their elders beat the woman on the head, back, and legs. A pair of policemen grabbed the man’s wrists and ankles and swung his limp body onto the back of an open truck. The police continued to beat the woman as she climbed onto the truck to stay with the man.

Hundreds of people saw the Chinese police beat the Tibetans. No one tried to stop them. I counted eight monks thrown into the truck before it drove off. With the monks gone, the police raised their truncheons and dispersed the crowd still converging in front of the Cultural Palace. Suddenly, the three of us were holding hands and running down the wide boulevard away from the police.