When people have no sense of self, relationships are just temporary distractions from the inner emptiness and fall apart at the first obstacle. My brother’s friends used every means possible to secure return permits to Qingdao. Some slept in tight bandages for six months and were sent home with crippled limbs. Some chopped their fingers off. Our neighbour Zhang Li took pills on the sly and was discharged with liver disease. They were proud of their injuries. But proudest of all were the girls who gained their return permits by sleeping with village heads and political instructors. Li Chengyuan never wanted to leave though. He was afraid of the cities. He was afraid of himself. He said life was safe in Yunnan because if the government decided to launch another campaign he could escape across the border.
My last scarf is sold. I have made twenty yuan, but feel uncomfortable seeing all the women walk by with my pink chiffon scarves on their heads. A man walks up to me and asks whether I want to buy one of the water bottles dangling from his neck. I tell him I have an army bottle. He says plastic bottles are much lighter, and he’ll sell me one for just two yuan. I tell him to bugger off.
My patience has run out. I fetch my bag from the bus and start walking. I reach a hostel before dark. Dali is just a day’s trek away now. Next week, I will continue to Lijiang and explore the matriarchal Naxi villages around Lake Lugu, then I will cross the Yulong mountains and head into Tibet. I hope that there at last I will find a place where man can live close to his gods.
9. A Land with No Home
Buddha and the City
He strides ahead, waving me on occasionally with his army cap. We are nearly four thousand metres above sea level and climbing a hill, there is no way I can keep up with this local boy. On my first day in Lhasa I played basketball with Mo Yuan and Liu Ren and collapsed after just ten minutes. The boy has followed me all day, watching me take photographs. He loves to look through my camera at the crowds on the street.
We sit down for a rest. At our feet lie broken prayer stones and yak horns carved with the six sacred syllables. The view is perfect. Not a road or telegraph pole in sight. Just the red and white Potala Palace rising from the cliff, swallowing the sun’s rays and the hearts of the pilgrims. I have been here a month, but have still not visited the palace. Every day a man crouches below its walls carving mantras, boddhisattvas and auspicious symbols into the rock. He strikes his chisel with complete concentration as the dust flies into his face. When he pauses to rest or meditate his body seems to merge into the cliff. The images of Avalokiteshvara, Boddhisattva of Compassion, daubed with rainbow aureoles stare at him with piercing eyes. He has carved the cliff for five years, apparently. The pilgrims who pass on their way to the prayer wheels drop coins or food by his feet. Once I spent a whole day seated behind him, trying to discover the source of his faith.
I look in wonder. The boy seems pleased with my expression. He is a good guide. He led me here through a maze of side alleys and backyards. I would never have found it by myself. I position my camera on a heap of stones, adjust the focus and aperture, place the boy’s finger on the button and ask him to take my picture. But before I get to my feet, he presses the button with the force of a shepherd restraining a wild sheep. I sweep the broken stones away, reposition the camera and take a picture with the self-timer instead.
The boy gestures it is time to leave. I follow him through more narrow streets to a small hillside temple. He walks in and wriggles up a tunnel at the back. I climb up behind him to a cave filled with the acrid smoke of yak butter lamps. I move forward and see a lama seated beneath a gold buddha. The lama lifts a black stone in the air and slams it onto the back of a woman crouched at his feet. The woman looks up, bows appreciatively and disappears down a hole behind. The stone then crashes on the boy’s back, and he wobbles and creeps to the side. Without thinking, I crawl up and close my eyes and wait for the stone to strike. But the lama sees me and shouts in Chinese, ‘Han man! Han man!’
I glance at the stone hovering above and say, ‘No, no, I’m from Hong Kong!’ This is not the first time in Lhasa I have used this lie to get me out of trouble.
After a moment’s hesitation, the lama bangs the stone on my spine then shouts, ‘Hong Kong man, go!’ and I crawl out behind the boy’s bottom.
As we wander along the Barkhor — the pilgrim path that circles the Jokhang Temple — the boy sticks his hand into cracks in the wall and pulls out clay tablets delicately moulded with images of Manjushri, Boddhisattva of Wisdom and Vajrapani, Eliminator of Obstacles. From a gap in a large incense burner he takes a warm tablet of eleven-faced Avalokiteshvara and gives it to me as a present. After that I become his obedient pupil. He teaches me the correct way to rub a buddha’s feet and spin the prayer wheels. When he sees a hole in a rock he tells me to insert my hands. I cannot understand his explanation, so I content myself with feeling the cool. He makes me copy his every move. At the banks of a stream, he leans down to drink then waits for me to do the same. I put my mouth to the water but only pretend to swallow because a few metres upstream a pack of crows is devouring a dead dog. He performs a full prostration, then I too fall on my stomach and scrape my forehead on the ground. At last he looks satisfied. I sit down to catch my breath, my back still aching from the lama’s stone. Then a voice calls from a window and the boy runs away. I never even got to buy him an ice cream.
In the evening I return to Mo Yuan’s room in the grounds of the Tibet Autonomous Region Radio Station. Mo Yuan is a friend of Lingling’s. He left for Guangzhou last week to attend a writers’ conference and see his girlfriend Dali who has just graduated from Shenzhen University. He said I could stay in his room while he was away, as long as I look after Beimu, his Alsatian puppy. He is very attached to her. He bred her himself. When I walk into the yard, Beimu jumps towards me and wags her tail. I feed her half a steamed roll and some leftover noodles, then go next door to have supper with Liu Ren.
A beef stew is simmering in his pressure cooker. We have had supper together most nights, taking turns to cook. Last week I made a hundred yuan from painting two large advertisements on the hoardings outside the radio station, and then the local government contracted me to design an exhibition on the geology of Tibet. To celebrate my good fortune, I bought two bottles of rice wine and some tinned meat yesterday and invited some friends round. It is impossible to cook at this altitude without a pressure cooker, though. My stir-fries were raw and tasteless.
Liu Ren hands me another book on Tibetan Buddhism while I tell him which temples I visited today. ‘I seem to have lost some of the excitement I felt when I first arrived. Especially after talking to the lamas. Many of them are probably just peasants who were too lazy to work on the land. When the Dalai Lama fled to India, he must have taken the best lamas with him. The communists did not just drive the spiritual leader from Tibet, they removed the soul from its religion. The temples feel like museum pieces. When my designs are finished, I might travel into the countryside. Get a change of air.’