Riding the Iron Rooster (63 page)

I went to the Meditation Hall and was almost overcome from the smell of yak butter. I went to the kitchen. It had the look of a tannery—full of deep vats, each one about seven feet across.

"This kitchen was last used in 1958," Mr. Xun said. "Those cauldrons could cook thirteen yaks at a time. The whole monastery could be fed in this kitchen."

The remains of the 3rd Dalai Lama are at this monastery, in a temple called The Nine-Roomed Hall. This man, Bsod-nams-rgya-mtsho, was the first to be called "Dalai." The Mongol chief Altan Khan conferred this title on him when he visited the Khan's court in the sixteenth century.
Dalai
means ocean in Mongol and it implies boundless wisdom. But the special features of The Nine-Roomed Hall are not the bones of this holy man. Interest in the place is usually centered on two tall demons.

"Notice the curtains?" Mr. Xun said.

Dusty drapes covered the bases of the statues.

"They have put them there so that you cannot see the figures beneath them."

"Why would they cover those figures?" I asked.

"One is an ox having sexual intercourse with a lady," Mr. Xun said.

"What sort of lady would have intercourse with an ox?"

"I don't know," Mr. Xun said, "because it is covered up."

The buildings were not beautiful, nor even pretty, but they had a rough mountain charm, and some of the carved pillars looked both godly and weird. The attractiveness of the place was in its life, its pilgrims and monks, the novice monks fetching water and eating Popsicles, and penitents draping the white and yellow gauze on the statues, and burning butter, and whirling prayer wheels, and prostrating themselves in a sort of religious athleticism that was very impressive—they are required to flatten themselves against the ground 100,000 times a year. It is not a fastidious kowtowing but a calisthenic so vigorous they wear mitts and knee pads to prevent bruising.

Mr. Xun and I walked down the road, past the souvenir stalls and the little shops, and had lunch in a restaurant that was otherwise empty. We had grilled yak meat, melon, squash, pig fat, buns, seaweed soup and french fries. The yak meat stuffed into the buns was my Dish of the Day, and I entered it into my notebook under dumplings and smoked duck and all the rest of the dishes I had favored.

We were sitting near a Franklin stove with a ten foot tin chimney. Mr. Xun said that he had visited the United States the previous year. He had been an interpreter for a trade delegation. In order to secure this job he had had to pass a competitive exam in English. He said he had traveled all over.

"I went to San Francisco," he said, and smiling, he told me how much he had hated Chinatown. He regarded the very word as insulting, but also he had found it all hackneyed, ridiculous and embarrassing. "And the food was bad," he said.

"What did you think the first time you saw New York?"

"Not as nice as Vancouver."

I then asked him what he had bought in the United States to take back to China.

"A pen. A book of stories. A photograph album."

He had no money. But what things he would have bought if he had had the cash! A refrigerator, a motorcycle, a television, an electric noodle maker!

We talked about Tibetans.

"They have black and red faces," Mr. Xun said. "The Hans are white and red. You can tell the Hans by their red cheeks. And the Tibetans are very dirty."

"There isn't much water around here," I said.

"On the grasslands in the west of Qinghai there is no water at all. The people wash their hands in yak's milk. And they never take a bath in their whole life."

"How about the Hans?"

"We wash once a week."

Mr. Xun said he usually went to a public bathhouse in Xining for a bath—on Fridays. He lived in a three-room apartment on the outskirts of the town, with his family.

Without warning, Mr. Xun said, "'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife...' "

"You read Jane Austen, Mr. Xun?"

"My favorite book is
Pride and Prejudice.
"

A very Chinese title, when you come to think of it. He also liked Dickens and Thackeray. There was apparently plenty of time out here on the high plains of central Asia for the plump and populous English novel. He said that he also read religious texts. After middle school he had decided to become a Buddhist. "I wanted good fortune in my life," he said. He was now a firm believer.

"Want one of these?"

"Oh, yes," he said, gratefully accepting a portrait of the exiled Dalai Lama.

I had brought fifty pictures of the Dalai Lama with me. I had been told that they were impossible to obtain in China and that I was likely to win friends among people in this region if I handed them over. It was a simple expedient. I had no personal objection to presenting pictures of this solemn bespectacled incarnation of Buddha; and it seemed to work.

On the way back to the monastery we ran into a pilgrim who said he was a yak herd—he had about thirty of them. They sold for about $100 each (but Chris Bonington was paying $8 a day just to rent them), and he had had to sell two of his yaks to pay for this pilgrimage to Taer'si with his wife and two small children. The Chinese word for yak meant "hairy cow"
(mao niu).
It is a lovely long-haired animal, like a cow on its way to the opera.

Taer Monastery is known for its butter sculptures, and as yak butter is the medium they are pungent works of art. A hall about forty yards long held statues and friezes of multicolored flowers, cherubs, trees, temples, little animals, and gods and goddesses. One of the largest statues was of Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy. But the Yellow Sect interprets this deity as having thirty-six forms, and in this yak-butter statue she was a mustached man.

The monk watching over the butter sculpture took the portrait of the Dalai Lama I offered him and folded it into his robes. Then he gave me a surreptitious blessing.

"You have made him happy," Mr. Xun said.

This present Dalai Lama, number fourteen, was born not far away from here at Hong Nei Village in Pingan County, in 1935. He came to Taer Monastery at the age of two, borne on a sacred white yak and guided by three lamas from Lhasa who had gone in search of him.

It happened in this way. After the death of the 13th Dalai Lama, the corpse was found to be facing east. The head was repositioned, but soon after, it moved again, to face northeast. The state oracle put on his mask and went into a trance and he too faced northeast. The three lamas set out for the northeast to find the new Dalai Lama. They interviewed the parents of three or four children. One was Lhamo Dhondrub. His family was very poor. But there had been portents at his birth, in particular the strange visitations of crows in a place where there had never been any crows. Still, the lamas were not convinced. It takes a while for a Dalai Lama to be proven. But this child passed all the crucial tests, chose the correct beads when they were offered, answered all the questions, and was physically the Holy One: had oversize ears, sorrowful eyes, "tiger stripes" on his legs, and the rest of the eight bodily marks. He was brought to Taer'si and then to Lhasa. He was named: Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshi Tenzin Gyatso—Holy Lord, Gentle Glory, Eloquent, Compassionate, Learned Defender of the Faith, Ocean of Wisdom.

"When he was here in Taer'si he stayed over there, in a house."

The monk was pointing at nothing.

"I don't see anything."

"His house was wrecked by the Red Guards."

This monk was one of the few people I met in China who refused to talk to me about the Cultural Revolution. He was not afraid; he was simply furious and disgusted. He lived in the stables of Taer'si, in a small cell, with another monk. On the walls of his cell were pictures of Buddha. He had a teapot, a little brazier, a pallet and a faded quilt. It was not austere, but it was very simple. Over his tiny bed was a poster of a tiger. This monk too had a large can of yak butter.

In the market outside Taer'si business was slow. There were no foreign tourists because it was winter, and there were very few Chinese tourists. The shops sold beads, brassware, wolf pelts, Tibetan cloaks and hats and horns, walking sticks, Buddhas, and trinkets. Also this—in one shop, cans of cooking fat for sale. The label on the can said,

Norwegian EDIBLE FAT Sandarit Brand—5 lbs.
Supplied by the World Food Programme
Gift of Norway
Produced by Jahres Fabrikker A/S Sandefjord Norway

"How much?" I asked.

"Fifteen yuan a can."

"How many cans do you have?"

"Plenty."

The cases were stacked in his shop. How had the stuff arrived here? Perhaps through India or Afghanistan. In any event, this free gift, courtesy of the Norwegian people, was generating income for a prosperous little shop in remote Qinghai.

In that same market, Tibeten men were haggling over gray otter pelts, and buying beads, and swapping silver for chunks of amber. There was a brisk trade in pretty ornaments, and some were trying on the Chinese-made cowboy hats that are so popular among Tibetans.

Remembering the cassette player in Mr. Fu's little car, and our impending trip to Lhasa by road, I went into a music shop and bought some tapes. When I went back to Xining I did the same, but the music shops and department stores were so well stocked, I emboldened myself and asked for tapes with political songs on them.

"What kind of songs?" the salesgirl asked. "Do you know the names."

"The East Is Red,"' I said. "And one that starts, 'I love Peking's Tiananmen Square.' The Liu River Song.' The White-haired Girl.'"

They were the Maoist revolutionary songs that had been sung for the past two or three decades.

"We don't have those."

Mr. Xun said, "We are sick of those songs."

But they had pop songs, they had Hong Kong rock, and they had tapes of
Oklahoma!
They also had Strauss, Mendelssohn, Bach, and the complete Beethoven symphonies, which I bought for the trip to Tibet.

A few days later, as I was walking through Xining in the middle of the day, the sky darkened. It began to snow, at first softly, and then blizzarding down. No one seemed to mind. There was hardly any traffic, anyway. And the place looked better under a few inches of snow. A blind boy was caught in it, and tapping his stick he squawked when there was no sound or echo—in just a few minutes he had lost his way because he could not hear his stick in the snow. But he turned his face up and as the snow hit it he licked the flakes from his lips. Then a troop of black-cloaked Muslims came by and rescued the blind boy. The Muslims were either old bearded patriarchs with severe eyes, or else bratty boys fooling with each other. I followed them to their mosque, which was the biggest one I had seen in China, but like every other religious building I had seen, it had a vandalized-and-renovated look.

I stayed in Xining longer than I had planned because I liked its stuffed pancakes and snowy skies, its red-cheeked Hans and the ragged Tibetans in their greasy cloaks, who went smiling down the street. I climbed all the nearby hills—to the Tao Monastery, with its cave-dwelling monks and its temples balanced on cliffs (the whole thing looks like a wooden fire escape)—and from the tops of these hills I could see that Xining was larger than I had imagined. But the rest of the town was merely brown shoe-box-shaped buildings that had no visible function. After the snow melted, the harsh wind from the mountains whirled dust into the air. It was a terrible-looking place, but it was friendly; and I liked being the only barbarous foreign devil
(yang guedze)
in town.

In the more remote regions of China, where people are not trusted to be orderly, the authorities devise specific drills for boarding the trains. Xining had one of the cruelest I had seen. The Hard Class passengers were lined up in front of the station—perhaps a thousand cold, impatient people in a long, shuffling line. But it was a directionless line. It led nowhere. It was formed in the windy plaza in front of the station, behind an ugly statue depicting a dozen contending minorities. That was appropriate, because the line for the train was composed of the same minorities, contending for seats.

Ten minutes before the train left, a railway guard blew a whistle, and these people snatched up their bales and bundles, and ran. They went flapping two hundred yards across the plaza, panted another hundred around the station, and wheezed down the platform to where the train sat steaming. That race sorted them out, and so there was a gasping free-for-all for the seats, women and children last.

It was a horrible train. But that was not a bad thing. It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places. I had a strong feeling—and I was proved right—that I would be traveling through one of the most beautiful landscapes in China. This train was dirty, scruffy and extremely crowded. Before it set off there was a fight among the passengers, as five heavily laden Tibetans tried to get into the wrong coach. No punches were thrown. It was all push and pull, and some snarling. The Tibetans smilingly resisted. The most explicit sign that it was a bad train was that it ran out of water an hour after it started. No water—for tea more than for washing—is a catastrophe rather than a simple hardship in China. But no one got angry. No one even complained. They inquired in froggy voices, and then took it without further muttering. I was impressed but annoyed. Without hot water this long trip—thirty hours or so—would be unbearable. We were headed for Golmud, in the Qinghai desert, and there the train stopped. I planned to make my own way to Lhasa, with Mr. Fu.

There was no food either. I made noodles in a cup with the last few inches of hot water. People congregated in the dining car, but nothing was served. There was a certain amount of shouting and lots of abuse, but these sounds were drowned by the rattling and clanking steam engine. There were no lights on the train either. I was exasperated, then uncomfortable, and finally bored stiff. I couldn't eat, I couldn't read. I hated the friendly honks of passengers, the yells, the squawking kids. I dug out some of my food and ate it, and wished I had more. The floor was covered with spat-out sunflower seeds.