And then I remembered the old Northampton Hospital, where I had worked as a student, and thought, Of course! The Xining Guest Hotel was exactly like a madhouse. The tiny rooms, the smells of food and disinfectant and sewage, the sudden squawks from locked rooms, the TV no one watched, the scarred walls suggesting violence, the bars on the windows, the eternal figure down the shadowy corridor slowly toiling with a mop, the silent inmate squatting on a chairseat, roosting like a chicken. It was all a reenactment of life inside the old-fashioned hospital I had known. Even the room girls were more like fearless, untalkative madhouse orderlies than they were compliant Chinese fuwuyuan. And in this loony-bin-like hotel, I could not decide whether I was a patient or a visitor; but I sometimes suspected that I would be like one of those poor creatures who is taken in for observation and somehow forgotten, and twenty years later discovered behind a bolted door, driven totally insane by the place.
These anxieties impelled me to make plans for Tibet. I told Mr. Fu I wished to discuss this matter.
"My father went to Tibet," Mr. Li said.
But I asked him more questions and realized that the man had gone there twenty years ago, on horseback, as a volunteer teacher.
"There was no road then," Mr. Li said.
"There's a good road now," Mr. Fu said. "I've driven to Lhasa a few times."
But my questions elicited only vague answers from Mr. Fu, and I could not tell whether he really had driven there or not.
"And it's a lovely drive from here to Golmud," Mr. Fu said.
"I can take the train to Golmud."
I had wanted to do that. The train to Golmud was the ultimate Chinese train. The line had been constructed as far as this town, and then because of the impossibility of penetrating the Tibetan plateau, it had been abandoned, in the middle of nowhere. I would not have missed that ride for anything.
"It's a horrible train," Mr. Fu said. "It's a steam locomotive. It goes through the desert. It is very slow."
That was music to my ears.
"You drive to Golmud," I said. "I'll meet you there and we'll both go to Tibet. We'll stop on the way. I'll bring some food. We'll listen to Beethoven."
Mr. Fu did some figuring and presented me with a bill for the Chinese equivalent of $600. That included his little Japanese car and his labor as driver and all the gas. I would pay for meals.
"It's a deal," I said, and we shook on it.
The car seemed rather fragile for such a difficult trip—1200 miles across the bleakest part of Tibet. It was a Galant. I hated the name. It was a car you saw on scrap heaps. When the wind blew through Xining, Mr. Fu's Galant swayed. It was not a vehicle for Tibet. Mitsubishi said another plate. It looked like a Dodgem car.
"You think it'll make it?"
"This is a good car," Mr. Fu said.
"Remember to bring two spare tires," I said.
He swore that he would. There was something in the heartiness of his assurance that made me think he was lying to me.
After that I decided to spend my time in Xining making preparations for the journey. I bought dry noodles and canned goods and fruit and soup. I bought storage containers and canteens and thermos jugs. I bought another hat. I found a place that sold jars of quails' eggs and bought a case. The food was so cheap I did not bother keeping track of the cost—it was a few dollars, no more. In my wandering around town I discovered that a special sort of dumpling was made in Xining. It was a stuffed pancake, fried in a wok—a dough bun crammed with scallions, and they served them fresh out of the pan, hot and dripping, just the thing for a snowy day in Qinghai.
Xining was the sort of simple ramshackle place I had come to like in China. It was not pretty, but that didn't matter. The food was delicious in an unremarkable way: not fancy but good to eat. The weather was full of surprises. The people said hello to me and were pleasant to each other. I liked Xining as I had liked Langxiang in Heilongjiang—and for the same reason: it was a country town. By degrees I realized that I was the only barbarian in the place. It was off-season, the middle of March in the back of beyond. That was also the reason people talked to me. It was a novelty to see a barbarian so far from his home.
Xining had department stores—of a kind. It had movie theaters—at least two. It had an enormous mosque. But Mr. Fu's was one of only about twenty cars in the place, and as the main streets were four lanes wide, one had the impression of almost no traffic at all. The buses were the broken, rusted kind found in all parts of rural China.
It was alarming to be told by people in Xining that Golmud was horrible and primitive. Bring warm clothes, they said. Bring food. Bring water. Tea, too. Bring everything you need. Nothing is stranger than being in a fairly bad place and being told that another place—your destination—is a great deal worse. But such warnings also made me deeply curious.
They grew potatoes here. They ate french fries. The fries were thin, crunchy, greasy and unappetizing, like the ones sold at McDonald's—exactly like those.
I met a young recent convert to Buddhism, Mr. Xun, who was studying English. I told him how much I liked the stuffed pancakes. He somewhat dismissed this, as Chinese do when you mention your liking for peasant food like dumplings, or lotus roots, or fried noodles, or steamed buns. Meat was the thing.
Mr. Xun said, "Sheep vein. Yak vein. Mongolian hot pot. Caterpillar fungus. And stir-fried camel's foot. That's what I like."
There was also a variety of black moss from the mountains called "hair grass" that was tasty. They made it into soup. It was indistinguishable from seaweed. But the fact was that west of Xining, and through the whole of Qinghai and the whole of Tibet, there is only one vegetable (barley) and only one kind of meat (yak). As might be supposed, faced with only two ingredients the people of these regions have learned to cook them a number of different ways. But that is no more than a gesture. The taste is unvarying. It is the taste of yak.
Mr. Xun the Buddhist convert went with me to the Taer'si, a monastery about fifteen miles southwest of Xining. The founder of the Virtuous Order (Gelukpa), a pure form of Buddhism, was born here over 500 years ago. This man, Zong Kapa, went to Lhasa and preached at the Ganden Monastery there. He was the founder of the Yellow Sect. After he had been away for some years, his mother wrote, imploring him to return. He said no, but added: If you want to do something useful, build a temple in my honor. Before the old woman could act, a pipal tree sprang up on the spot where Zong Kapa was born—the same sort of bodhi tree under which the Buddha received enlightenment. The mother built a pagoda over the tree, and then built a temple. Later, in 1560, the monastery was built. Dalai Lamas and Panchen Lamas have visited here. The present Dalai Lama was born nearby, in the hills. The white horse of the 9th Panchen Lama dropped dead soon after bearing his master here in 1903. This animal was stuffed and is venerated in one of the temples. So Mr. Xun said.
What Mr. Xun did not say was that this monastery, recently reopened by the Chinese, had the stuffings kicked out of it, and not only in the predictable battering of the Cultural Revolution. In 1958, Mao issued the edict of Religious Reform. It began as a political program; it became religious persecution. But now, thirty years later, the Kumbum Jampa Ling—the Tibetan name of the Taer'si—is growing again. There had been 3600 monks. This was reduced to none at all. In the past few years 500 monks have established themselves, and there are Rapjung—novice monks: grinning little red-cheeked boys who trot around combining high spirits and mischief with their chores.