Ray Kreisel - A Different Kind of Freedom

It seems that in the USA we live few “real” experiences in normal everyday life. At home the television is the main source of all new experience, or rather pseudo-experience. As this trip unfolded I had a rare chance to experience things that I had never witnessed before on TV, since most of the area where I traveled has had few Western visitors. As I thought about it more and more, it seemed that most new experiences came from things that I had first seen on TV. Only much later would I ever get a chance to actually physically participate in the event. I remember seeing dozens and dozens of TV images of Machu Picchu in Peru before ever visiting there. Even though I had yet to travel to Peru my mind held all kinds of images and ideas of what it would be like. When I did finally get a chance to travel to Machu Picchu it held so much more than could ever be captured in a video image. Every day of this trip was infinitely richer than I could ever have imagined. Every day of it unfolded before me with a newness that is difficult for me to find in the USA.

I had met Sonam in a small shop at the foot of the Potala Palace. He overheard me talking to the shopkeeper in Chinese, and he started talking to me in English. I had been searching for a Tibetan tutor, and he was looking for someone to help him with his English. For Tibetans, English language skills provide a guaranteed way to get a good job and make a higher than average wage. Anyone who can speak English has a chance to become a tour guide for foreign tourists. We arranged to meet at Tashi’s Restaurant two days later.

When I saw Sonam with his friend Lopsang out in front of Tashi’s, I asked them if they wanted to go inside for a cup of tea. They both replied with a nervous but polite “Yes.” Much later, I learned that neither of them had ever ventured inside the most popular backpacker hangout in Lhasa. When they accompanied me it was a new experience for them, they had never been around so many odd foreigners before. All of the wild-looking and colorful foreigners frightened both of them a bit. We all looked over the Tibetan language books that I brought and talked about what aspects of English they wanted to learn. They had spent some time learning English from other Westerners in the last year, but they both wanted to get a better command of the language.

We no longer met in Tashi’s, because neither of them felt comfortable surrounded by strange foreigners. Over the next two weeks we met about every other day at different little tea shops or monasteries around town. I learned that both Sonam and Lopsang worked on a restoration project underway in a local monastery. They were both monks but they were forbidden to wear their robes because the Chinese government controls the number of monks at each monastery. At their height the three main monasteries in the Lhasa area each held from 3,000 to 10,000 monks. Today the Chinese government limits the numbers of monks at each institution to just a couple hundred. Years before, Sonam had been living in a large monastery just outside of Lhasa. After a police raid, the government officials held him for questioning for two weeks. They asked him about his faithfulness to the Communist government and whether he was involved in any kind of Tibetan resistance movement. At the time of his release it was clear that they would watch his every move. He knew that if the police picked him up again there was no way that they would let him out. Sonam decided to illegally cross the border to Nepal and traveled on to India. For a few years he lived in Tibetan refugee camps in south India, but recently he had come back to Tibet. In the last two years Chinese control of Tibet loosened up quite a bit. The Communists allowed individual Westerners back into Lhasa during the fall of 1992. Tibet had remained closed since the fall of 1987 because of the massive Tibetan uprising against the Chinese. During the riots of ‘87, Chinese security forces had killed hundreds of people in front of the Jokhang Temple.

Sonam and Lopsang were great guys. Sonam was the more serious one, and Lopsang the jester. He loved to sing a song that was taught to him by another Westerner -“We didn’t start the Fire” by Billy Joel, a song full of references to John Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and nuclear war that he did not understand at all. We talked about the USA, Buddhism, and the situation in Tibet. They introduced me to their English teacher. She had taught English in Lhasa for quite some time. She invited me to help her out, because I was a native speaker. She knew English grammar far better than I did, but I could help with teaching pronunciation. During the time I spent with this small class and my two new friends, I felt that I was doing something useful both for other people and myself. I enjoyed it enough that I started to think about returning to Lhasa in the fall just to teach English. Then I would be able to live in Lhasa for a couple months, improve my Tibetan and help others learn English.

When I told my idea of staying in Lhasa during the fall to a friend who had spent many years living there, my hopes of becoming an English teacher in Lhasa were crushed. He presented a dilemma that I did not know how to solve. He had seen it all happen before. He told me the story would go like this. First I would establish a group of people that I would teach. We would set up a regular schedule of meetings maybe three times a week. Everything would proceed well for the first month. After about six weeks, the police would get word of the class. They would then recruit someone from the class, someone who had a relative in jail so that they could put more pressure on him or her. This person would then bring a concealed tape recorder to class and record every session from then on. After maybe three months, I would leave Lhasa. As soon as I left town, the entire class would be arrested. If any of the students had talked about anything political in the class the police would have it recorded on tape. Those people would then be tortured and sent to jail. The others would be held for a few weeks in jail for questioning. There was no way that I could teach more than two Tibetans on a regular basis and not be found out by the police. No matter how much good I thought I was doing by teaching English, I would always be putting the students at risk. If for nothing else, then for just associating with them. A week before, I had met Sonam at his work one afternoon. After that, he asked me not to show up there anymore because a foreigner walking around speaking Tibetan at his work place created trouble for him.

Although I would have liked to stay in Lhasa for another four weeks, other factors outside of my control prevented me. The PRC government makes it a bit difficult for foreigners to stay in China for more than three months at a time. I had to do a few extra tricks to be able to stay in China long enough to make it to the Pakistan border, so I could not afford to stay in Lhasa any longer. I wanted to travel a substantial part of the route to Mt. Kailash on the “south” road. This road is only passable after early May when the rivers start to thaw out, until the end of June, when the rivers run too high to walk across. Because of this, just about all truck traffic to Western Tibet travels on the north road. The south road is plagued with a mix of deep sand and deep river crossings, two things that do not go well with any kind of vehicle. When I announced my departure from Lhasa to a friend who spends summers there, he told me that I had to stay just a couple more days for the full moon of Saga Dawa. After a bit of coaxing, I finally agreed to stay in Lhasa for two more days. He promised that I would not regret it.

The most important part of the month of Saga Dawa happens during the full moon. In the predawn hours of the night of the full moon, just about every Tibetan in Lhasa will get up in the darkness to walk a seven-mile loop around what used to encircle the entire city. Today the circuit that makes up the Lingkor is just a small circle inside the sprawl of Communist Chinese concrete buildings and army camps that compose the greater Lhasa area.