Ma Jian - Red Dust

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.’

‘You’re in luck, then. A group from my office is going to Yangbachen next week. I’ll ask them to give you a lift.’ He pulls on a woollen tank top. The nights are cold here even in the middle of summer. Liu Ren’s face is identical to mine. Same beard, same ponderous eyes, same involuntary scowl. We look so alike that I can cycle through the compound gates on my bicycle without having to register. Once on my way out, a man stopped me and said, ‘Why didn’t you come up yesterday?’ I had no idea what he meant so I mumbled, ‘I’ve just come down,’ and peddled away at full speed. When I told Liu Ren he said, ‘That was the deputy chairman, you fool. There was a Party members’ meeting on the third floor yesterday. I should have attended, but I skived off.’

‘You seem troubled tonight. What’s up?’ I ask.

His nose twitches like mine. ‘Nothing. Pass me a fag.’

He doesn’t usually smoke, and his face goes red after just two sips of beer. When he has finished presenting his radio programmes, he returns to his room, sits in front of a picture of his wife and a photograph of the blind Borges torn from a literary magazine, and works on his short stories.

‘Seen anything interesting today?’ he asks. ‘Oh by the way, I found these letters for you on Mo Yuan’s desk.’

‘Got hit on my back with a black stone,’ I reply.

There are two letters. One from Li Tao and one from Fan Cheng. Yesterday I received a bundle of post that had accumulated for me in Chengdu. In the covering letter, Yang Ming said she has divorced Wu Jian and plans to study English and go abroad. Wang Ping has not replied to the postcard I sent her from Lijiang. I have not heard from her for four months.

‘Ha! The sacred stone! Tibetans only visit that cave when they are sick. They believe the stone can strike disease from the body. You must be careful where you take your camera, Ma Jian. You can’t go snooping around like that. Relations between Han and Tibetans are very tense. If you cause any upset the rest of us will have to pay the price. When I first came to Lhasa, the Tibetans held a water-splashing festival — completely bogus of course. No one has a water splashing festival in the middle of winter! It was just an excuse to vent their anger. If a Han walked past, they splashed him with water. It was very frightening. None of us dared go out. They dragged a colleague of mine off her bicycle and poured freezing water down her shirt.’

‘I have been travelling for three years, but this is the first time I have sensed there are places on this earth where my feet should not tread. Perhaps that’s how it feels for those people who go abroad. The Tibetans have been pushed to the limit, they have a right to be angry. Imagine if you invited some friends for supper and they decided to move in and take over your house. It is not the loss of power that hurts, it’s the loss of dignity and respect. A man tried to steal my camera in the Barkhor today. The strap was tied to my hand, but he tugged and tugged. His friend tossed a yak hide over our hands so the police wouldn’t see. The thing was still dripping with blood. In the end he gave up. I threw the hide off and held my camera in the air, daring him to have another go. But he just spat at me and walked away.’

I pour some hot water into a basin and wash last night’s bowls and chopsticks. Then I sit down and take the clay tablets from my pocket. ‘So how did the water-splashing festival end?’ My ballpoint pen has leaked and Avalokiteshvara’s faces are stained with blue ink.

‘Same as usual. "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" as Old Mao said. The soldiers stood on the streets waving their guns and everyone went home. We bear the brunt of the anger though. Tibetans can spit in our faces but we’re not allowed to fight back. They have huge daggers dangling from their belts but we can’t carry so much as a fruit knife.’

The wooden chest I am sitting on is draped with a soft Tibetan rug. Liu Ren meets many Tibetan artists through his job and his room is crammed with their gifts of religious scroll paintings, opera masks, thigh bone horns and ritual conch shells. Liu Ren fetches the egg and tomato soup from the stove and pours it into wooden bowls.

‘What have you gained from these four years in Tibet?’ I ask him. He was assigned to the radio station after graduating from Shaanxi Nationalities Institute. At the time boys who applied for posts in Xinjiang or Tibet were the heroes of their universities, and were worshipped by girls for their bravery and self-sacrifice. But times are changing, and now the best students dream of moving south to make their fortunes in Guangzhou and Shenzhen. In the market yesterday I bumped into one of the Hebei boys I met in Golmud. He told me he likes his job at Tibet Press, but his friend found life too hard here and returned to China after the first week.