A Boy of China

by Richard Loseby

  He nodded and absent-mindedly played with a chunk of tofu on his plate, pushing it around with a chopstick. There was a pregnant pause. I noticed on the wall behind his head a photo of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, with the owner of the restaurant standing in the foreground, his arm pointing towards the portrait of Chairman Mao above the gate to the Imperial Palace. Unfortunately, the angle the photo was taken at made it look as if the man’s finger was stuck up Mao’s nose.

  ‘You are right, we have big problems in China,’ Liu said finally. ‘For the youth there is little hope of a good job. Everyone works so hard to get into a university, but maybe they end up in a factory all the same. We are so many.’

  Liu was grimacing down at the table as an elderly woman brought fresh tea in a chipped pot. I asked if he had a solution to the problem and he leant forward, bending his neck down to my level.

  ‘We get rid of this party of old men in Beijing,’ he whispered.

  I imagined the youth of China, all 297 million of them, marching on the capital city to take over. If they ever got together and acted as one, the change would be immediate. No army could hold back such a force. It would be over in a week. The only problem was, could they tear themselves away from their computer screens long enough to be bothered?

  Liu sighed and poured the tea, first into my glass then his, as is the custom. Then he sat back and laughed.

  ‘But it won’t happen,’ he said with the air of a confirmed fatalist. ‘There is more chance of me playing for the Los Angeles Lakers.’

  Just then the power came on and we sat blinking in the harsh blaze of electric light. People in the street gasped with relief as the oppression of the darkness was all at once lifted. Xining was working again like a well-oiled machine. Suddenly, Liu’s cellphone started ringing.

  ‘Careful,’ I warned.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Could be the Lakers calling.’

  SEVEN

  KUMBUM MONASTERY, AN ANCIENT RELIGIOUS CENTRE ALSO KNOWN as Ta’er Si, was at the head of a valley dotted with tall trees and purple flowering grasses. A cool wind had sprung up from the south, bringing with it the fresh high-altitude air of Qinghai’s vast and lonely hinterland. In the summer the valley would bake under a relentless sun, turning into a dust bowl from which there was little escape. But for now the weather was perfect: warm sun and a gentle breeze, the lifelong friends of the long-distance traveller.

  The bus that had brought me out here had been full when it arrived at the pick-up point on the eastern side of Xining. The passengers were peasants mostly, looking for blessings that would ensure a good harvest, and monks on pilgrimage seeking higher spiritual awareness. I was searching for a bit of both, particularly in the blessing department, although at first it didn’t look too promising. The only seat available was a wooden box in the aisle. I looked through the gaps to see what was inside and the beady eyes of some chickens gazed back at me. They clucked nervously together, possibly wondering, as I was, whether the box would stand me sitting on it for a few hours. Fortunately, though it creaked loudly at times, it held for the duration of our journey.

  On arrival I followed the monks through the ticket office and up some stone steps towards one of the larger buildings. Kumbum is one of the six great Geluk ‘Yellow Hat sect’ monasteries of the Tibetan plateau and in its pre–Cultural Revolution prime would have been home to 3,000 monks. Now there were no more than 500 in residence, though from the noise they were making you’d have thought their number was still as strong. I could hear chanting and the banging of deep bass drums; every so often this would be intermingled with the clashing of cymbals so that the overall effect was both chaotic and ordered at the same time. There was routine in the sound: ancient repetition that gave the music an altogether otherworldly feeling.

  I’ve been lucky enough to hear traditional instruments being played in many countries, from the two-stringed tar in Afghanistan to the ney flute of Arabia, but the solemnity and peacefulness of this music was wonderful. I sat down to listen in the sun, by an old wooden doorway carved with intricate geometric designs. It might have been the altitude or lack of sleep from the night before, or a mixture of both, but my eyelids soon grew heavy and I was powerless to stop them from closing . . .

  In the dream I am walking again. It is always the same path each time, in every dream like this that I can recall, always through a field of harvested wheat in a dusty brown landscape of parched, rolling hills. I feel the crunch of stalks under my boots and find it pleasing, reassuring perhaps, because it is now so familiar. I have no idea where I am going, but I know for certain this is the way. One thing I also know is that I am rarely alone in this place. I am always here to meet someone, so it is not unexpected when the figure of an old man appears out of the heat haze on the path up ahead. I quickly make my way to where he is seated on a rock, waiting. He doesn’t speak, but I can hear his words nonetheless as he looks to the sky.

  ‘You see them?’

  Way overhead, a flock of birds is flying in a perfect V-formation, heading south for the winter — the same direction as me. Their flight is effortless, in slow motion, as if gravity had no part to play in the equation. I know what it is instinctively: the allegory that reminds us we are better as a group than as a single unit. Flying in formation, each bird flaps its wings and creates uplift for the one immediately behind it, and so the whole flock increases its flying range by far more than if each bird flew alone.

  ‘Is this message for me?’ I think.

  ‘No, not you,’ comes the voice. ‘Another.’

  One of the birds breaks away and begins to head further west, but his flight appears slow in comparison to the rest. It’s a struggle, as if the lone bird is now subject to unfavourable headwinds that don’t affect the others. Yet still it carries on regardless.

  ‘That is you,’ comes the voice again, but this time it is full of sorrow and I am hearing once more the voice of my dead father. I turn to go and find the wheat stalks have suddenly grown into thick brush, thorny and impenetrable, and the path has vanished.

  I yell out loud, ‘What is happening?’

  The old man stands up and gestures south, as a whirlwind dances at his bare feet, his long arm bent in the direction of the flock.

  ‘Tell him,’ he commands.

  I yell against the wind. ‘Tell him what?’

  The response is immediate, but this time the voice is female, soft and unfathomably kind. There are only two words that I hear and they come to me just as I am waking.

  ‘To forgive.’

  There was no one around to talk to when I opened my eyes, no one to offer an explanation as to the meaning of the dream. I wondered whether it might have something to do with Liu for a moment, but the idea seemed unlikely. There was no connection between us other than the fact we had happened across each other’s paths.

  I rose to my feet and was surprised at how good I felt. Not tired, but more alive than before. My possessions were few, but I carried the burden of the task I had set myself, and now it seemed lighter. Self-doubt is a terrible travelling companion and, sometimes, though I had kept it to myself, I had despaired at the seeming impossibility of this journey and what I aimed to achieve. A voyage from A to B, the subject of nearly all successful travel books, including some of mine, is simple by comparison. Even if the distance between the two points is vast and the journey is beset with hardship and difficulty, it is still just an endurance test: put one foot in front of the other and the end will be reached. But what I was doing was partly investigative and required a new set of skills, one of which was patience — not my forte. Nevertheless, now, for the first time in a long while, I felt more at ease with what I was doing.

  The smile on my face must have been obvious as I stepped over the wooden threshold and into a sort of anteroom with a ceiling that was open to the sky. To the left was a high wall of mud brick that had been plastered and whitewashed so that it shone brightly. To the right, a brick archway led into a courtyard
of paved stone with a wooden staircase at one end that provided access to a second floor. The place seemed empty until there came the loud slapping of sandals on stone and a young monk appeared, running at full speed, red robes flying. He slowed down when he saw me, as if I might have chastised him for breaking some monastic rule about running in the corridors, so I asked him where he was going. He replied that it was time to eat, and dashed past me, out the way I had come in. I felt like an intruder at this point, a visitor who had outstayed his welcome. This part of the monastery was clearly the monks’ living quarters and, as such, a private domain. I started to go, but then I saw a figure waving at me to come over.

  He was an elderly monk, wrapped in a cloak of gold that showed a glimpse of the crimson cloth he wore underneath. In his hand was a simple bowl of rice and bread, which had no doubt been brought to him by the boy I had just met. He was sitting on a low, wooden bench on a landing halfway up the stairs and he patted the space beside him with fingers bent by age and arthritis.

  ‘Tashi delek,’ I said, using the common Tibetan greeting that means ‘May all good and auspicious signs come to this location.’

  His reply, however, was in polished German.

  ‘Sprechen Sie Deutsch?’ he said, asking if I could speak the language.

  I laughed at the irony of it all. My German was better than my Tibetan or Mandarin, and so it was that I could communicate with a monk, in a Tibetan monastery, in China, in a completely different language from the ones we were both used to.

  His name was Gonbo. When I asked him how old he was, he simply smiled and told me it didn’t matter how many years he had lived, but how many times.

  ‘And how many is that?’ I asked.

  ‘Not enough,’ was his reply. ‘Otherwise I would not still be here on this earth.’

  He chortled at this and gathered the robes around his body to ward off the cold. There was not much of him to cover, though, and his bare arms were thin and wrapped in skin that seemed a size too big for his frame. It hung loosely from his face as well, and his eyes were deep in their sockets. Yet, despite these obvious signs of old age, his mind was razor sharp.

  ‘Do you know Koblenz?’ he asked.

  ‘On the Rhine, yes,’ I replied. ‘I’ve been there a few times.’

  He smacked his lips together in delight: ‘Is that so? Then you’ll know the castle on the hill overlooking the river — Ehrenbreitstein. I stayed there in 1960 for two years.’

  The castle was one that I had stayed in too. It was a hostel in my time, though, run by an Austrian man who loved archery, Roman history and beer, in that order. He practised his archery by aiming his arrows skywards over the Rhine, pulling the drawstring tight across his ample belly in an attempt to hit the other side, where Roman enemies had once gathered. Sometimes a passing tourist barge would make a better target, however, and one day, after several litres of Pilsner, he’d struck a pilothouse, only narrowly missing the captain.

  Gonbo explained how, after the Chinese invaded and occupied Tibet in the early 1950s and the Dalai Lama fled into exile in 1959, life for a monk was incredibly hard. He could not freely practise his religion without risking a beating from Mao’s Red Guards, who favoured torture over imprisonment, and so he had followed his leader into exile, first trekking to Nepal then India, followed by Persia and Turkey before finally hiding himself aboard a train to Germany. There, he became a refugee and in time, courtesy of a wealthy German couple who lived near Koblenz in a tiny Westerwald village, found himself a new home.

  But, he asked suddenly, what about me? Where did I come from? So I drew out my notebook and handed it to him, opening it to the first page, where Liu had written the explanation of my purpose in China. He fussed over it for some time, reading and re-reading certain lines before closing the book and handing it back.

  ‘Now I understand,’ he said. ‘When I saw you sleeping there on the steps of our temple, I wondered about you. So you are not a Buddhist in search of enlightenment?’

  I shook my head, feeling slightly guilty as I did so.

  ‘That is good for you,’ he carried on, unperturbed. ‘Where you are going, they do not like Buddhists. In Qinghai and Sichuan province there will be no problem, people will be kind to you, but the further east you go, the further from safety you will travel. If you go to Hunan and Jiangxi, which of course you must,’ he said, tapping the notebook, ‘this is where you will find the red heart of China, and there they have no religion but Mao.’

  Slowly the old monk got to his feet and stretched, then pulled a wooden staff from under his robes and began to descend the steps, one at a time. I followed dutifully, taking care not to tread on the crimson trailing edge of his clothing. When he reached the bottom, he turned around to face me.

  ‘When do you go?’ he asked.

  I told him tomorrow.

  ‘You know, you must ready your mind for this journey,’ he said, running a crooked hand over the stubble of his shaven head. ‘The roads are long and hard. In places the mountain passes might be closed, sometimes for days. The snows will come early this year too. I have seen the geese flying in great numbers already. They know. They always know.’

  He then produced a small leather pouch, and from it retrieved a colourful slip of paper printed with Tibetan script.

  ‘Om mani padme hum,’ he said, putting the paper into my hand. ‘The first three syllables stand for generosity (Om), belief (ma) and patience (ni). You will need them.’

  ‘What about the meaning of the other three syllables?’ I asked, slipping the folded paper into my shirt pocket.

  Gonbo sighed. ‘Patience,’ he said, turning to go. ‘The baby crawls before it walks.’

  I sat on the bottom step and watched as he shuffled across the courtyard and out through the gate. The click-clack of his walking stick on the stone steps echoed loudly, before fading away.

  EIGHT

  DURING A PREVIOUS JOURNEY IN CHINA, I HAD ONCE SURVIVED three days and two nights in hard-seat class sharing a cramped wooden train seat with two other passengers, one a flea-ridden peasant and the other an off-duty policeman. (Hard-seat class was different from hard-sleeper. In the latter you had the luxury of a bunk, whereas in the former you slept sitting up, leaning against your immediate neighbour for support.) On the first night my old desert-coloured Iranian army bag, which I had carelessly left on the floor, had started to slide, seemingly of its own accord, under our seat. Seeing this, the policeman dived down after it with much shouting, emerging minutes later, covered in dust, clutching an even dustier thief. Not waiting for the train to stop, he simply thrust open the door and threw the culprit out into the darkness. The peasant’s pleas for mercy were lost to the night.

  From that day on, I’ve been aware that a Western traveller can cause problems simply by being in a world that is not their own. The thief, if that was indeed his profession, might not have been so sorely tempted had I been less imprudent. But therein lies the rub, of course: we dive into foreign cultures in search of new experiences but, in so doing, may create waves that have unintended consequences. Far better, therefore, to try and slip into those waters unnoticed, in disguise even. But that is sometimes easier said than done, especially when you walk with giants.

  At the bus station the next morning, the first stage of the 800-kilometre journey to Yushu began. My intended route wasn’t along the exact path of the Long March just yet, but instead ran parallel to it. For now, I was more interested in spending time with the Tibetans in this area of Qinghai province, in order to learn more about what they thought of Mao and how they viewed their role in his historic walk. As a people and a culture, they had not benefited greatly from the advent of Communism in China — far from it in fact. But, back in the time of the march, had they been friend or foe to the desperate rabble of Mao’s followers as they sought to escape Chiang Kai-shek?

  Liu had come to see me off and as usual he attracted a crowd of people. Those who were practising their tai chi, the elderly stretch
ing their limbs and the young playing badminton: all came to gawp at the colossus. The other passengers on the bus climbed out of their seats to get a better look, some even went to touch Liu’s clothing, just to make sure he was real. When we shook hands to say goodbye, my hand disappeared into his like a baby’s hand enfolded by an adult’s. He gave me his cellphone number and I wished him luck with the business. ‘No problem,’ he said. It would be ‘fine and dandy’.

  ‘Bob’s your uncle,’ I replied and, with that, I left him to his congregation of admirers.

  The bus travelled west for the first part of the day, along a road lined with tall poplar trees and the occasional willow with its leaves starting to turn from green to gold. They were planting more trees in Qinghai. Even the multinationals were getting in on the act as a way of currying favour with the provincial government. Unilever, one of the largest of them all, had stuck thousands of dragon spruce and birch trees in the soil up near Qinghai Lake, to try and hold back the encroaching desert. Millions of dollars were being spent on this important project and expert analysis of local conditions meant the chosen species of trees were well suited to the high altitude. But no one told the local villagers, who promptly chopped them down for firewood.

  Along the way we picked up more and more passengers, whose belongings were added to the growing pile in the space between the seats: bundles of blankets tied up with twine destined for a nomad’s tent before winter set in; a new chainsaw, still in its packaging; and boxes containing live animals, in which the creatures defecated out of fear, so that the bus windows had to be opened to get rid of the stench. Sometimes, only the cargo came aboard and our journey was delayed as the Hui owners haggled tenaciously with the Han Chinese driver over the price of delivery.

  ‘How much do you want? That is crazy! It is just to the next village! Half that amount would still be a crime.’