The Nianjie Cuo may or may not have had much to do with the formation of one of the world’s greatest rivers, but it can henceforth lay claim to having been the venue for the greatest stone-skipping competition ever. Wei saw his chance to put the young upstart in her place and, unfortunately for Hua, her stone selection left something to be desired. She’d pick the most unlikely nuggets of rock and watch as they sank almost on impact with the water. Wei’s choice of stone was infinitely better and he could get his to skip quite a few times. One particular piece of smooth granite he sent bouncing across the water into the middle of the lake, whereupon it finally ran out of puff and came to a halt, seemingly floating for a split second on the surface. Still wearing his white driving gloves, Wei high-fived everyone in delight. Hua forgot her superiority complex and kissed him on the cheek. The other two men dropped their stones in mock surrender.
In Yushu that night, we celebrated with a few bottles of Qinghai’s finest beer and laughed out loud at the idea that stone skipping might soon become an Olympic sport, and Wei its first gold medallist. It was a good way to end a long day.
After a week had gone by in Yushu, my journal bore a few scribbles in Mandarin and Tibetan, but those merely welcomed me to their country and wished me luck. Mao Tse-tung was not a welcome name either, not amongst the Tibetans anyway. Their ancestors had killed the Communists with impunity, harangued them at every opportunity and driven the Long Marchers back into the mountains where many froze to death. Small wonder then that Mao had returned a decade or so later, to viciously invade the Tibetan homeland and claim it for his own. Mao was never what you might call a forgiving person.
From Yushu there was a road that headed east over the mountains to a place called Garze in Sichuan province, a small town known for its association with the march. It was not a good road, by all accounts, but it was passable, at least until the first winter storms came and closed it for months on end. If I didn’t go soon, I’d be trapped, and left with few options except attempting the pass on foot or using some other non-mechanised form of transport. The main difficulty with that idea would be the weeks it would take just getting anywhere. The bus represented an arduous journey in itself, 16 hours at least, depending on landslips along the way. But it was still the fastest route.
The next day I sat in a bus next to a carsick monk who vomited out the window at regular intervals as the countryside rolled by. We were still on a relatively straight road, so it was only going to get worse, I feared. In fact, when we did eventually reach the foothills and the start of the long, slow, winding climb to the first of many passes, he tucked his head down by his ankles and stayed there for four or five hours, seemingly in a state of hibernation. It was like having the whole seat to myself. He was bent so flat and so still, I could have used his back as a table.
In Sershu we stopped to fix a blown tyre. The driver, Gan, rolled the bus onto a kerb, so that the right rear wheel was suspended in the air. Gan was a Muslim, whose religious obligations forced us to stop often so that he could pray. He wore the face of a man devoted to God, and to keeping his bus in one piece. It was a constant battle to maintain it in working order, particularly over such punishing roads as these, but maintain it he did. There was probably not a part of that vehicle he had not, in some way, performed major surgery upon, so much so that I suspected he knew it better than its maker.
In the meantime my carsick monk had unravelled himself and, with a few others, wandered over to a ramshackle building where a middle-aged woman with a stern expression was serving tea from a giant-sized teapot. She was dressed in a long black skirt that dragged on the floor and a red long-sleeved top. Her black hair was plaited down her back and on her head was a white brimmed hat that wouldn’t have looked out of place at an English wedding or the Melbourne Cup. Her name was Lolha and she was the self-appointed matriarch of Sershu. Nothing came or went here without Lolha knowing — or passing comment, I assumed — so, not surprisingly, I soon came under her close scrutiny. She tsk-tsked at my unshiny boots and remarked in a Tibetan that needed no translation that I could probably do with a wash. I followed her gaze to my jacket, which still had a few remnants of my travelling companion’s first explosive puke on its sleeve. Within minutes it was off my back and being attacked by Lolha with a scrubbing brush in a nearby bucket of water, then hung out to dry in the heat of the Tibetan sun. This was much to the amusement of the others, who joked that Lolha and I were now as good as married. Gan, the driver, who was under the bus but still within earshot, thought it especially funny. He laughed so hard he hit his head on the axle and, when he re-emerged, offered to get my bag down from the luggage rack because clearly I was staying on a bit longer than expected. Meanwhile, Lolha beamed from under the frilly white lace of her wide-brimmed hat.
A well-timed distraction was provided by two young Tibetan men in cowboy hats, who rode up on a Chinese motorbike. They wore matching red coats in the traditional style and manner, with one arm free of its sleeve, which was tied around the waist. They came over and sat themselves down on the stone steps of Lolha’s teahouse and chatted noisily with each other. They were in the middle of an argument and seemed to have come to Lolha to settle it. As judge and jury on most things in Sershu, she listened intently to both sides and then gravely delivered her verdict, speaking first to the younger of the two.
‘Teshi, you stole your brother’s yak?’
‘It’s not his yak.’
‘He is the eldest, so it is his yak and you have to respect that.’
‘But he stole my motorbike!’
‘Norbu, don’t take his motorbike and he won’t steal your yak.’
Norbu nodded sombrely in agreement.
‘There, that’s settled then. Now, you two, I want you to meet my new lover.’
At least that’s what I thought she said, because Lolha then gave me the biggest hug. I was slightly relieved when it didn’t last too long. Lolha had a wicked sense of humour and enjoyed making people squirm.
It turned out the two young men were her sons and that Lolha had divorced their father many years before. She now had a new partner, I was relieved to hear — although apparently in Tibetan culture it is permissible for a woman to have more than one. Polyandry isn’t by any means common; however, it’s interesting to note that women in Tibetan culture are not as oppressed as one might imagine, but are quite free, both economically and sexually. They often manage household finances and can own land, which in turn makes divorce easier. Moreover, the Buddhist belief that all of our experiences are constantly changing, and that nothing is permanent, meant that moving on from a relationship was sometimes seen as a healthy thing to do.
Once he got the wheel off, it took Gan a few hours to have it fixed at a garage just down the road, so we had quite a bit of time to relax and hear more of Lolha. The husband she had separated from still lived in the village, but his job took him far away, to where he traded in horses with the Turkic people — sometimes as far west as Xinjiang — so she didn’t see him much. Her new partner was his brother, which conveniently made the division of possessions after the divorce simple, given that they all stayed in the same family. I asked her if this happened often and Lolha nodded.
‘Why be unhappy?’ she shrugged.
I couldn’t help but feel this Tibetan view of life made a lot of sense. When separations occurred, those involved did their best to work out a deal whereby houses, land and animals were not split between the parties but were kept together so that the extended family group remained strong. There was no call for expensive lawyers or prolonged legal battles, nor the accompanying hurt that all too often prevailed in Western courtrooms. Here, it was life, and they just got on with it.
Lolha’s two sons were big, handsome lads with a keen interest in what lay beyond their town’s borders. Whenever they had the chance they’d get up to Yushu or down to Garze, though the latter journey was a lot further and in Garze they had had problems with soldiers in the past.
‘What sort of problems
?’ I asked.
‘Teshi got into a fight,’ said Norbu, giving his little brother a less-than-friendly clip round the head.
Some soldiers on patrol had stopped Teshi for questioning and pushed him around a little. Teshi’s answer had been to go at them with his fists. He was sturdily built but not big enough to take on a whole patrol. They’d given him a broken rib and a night in jail for his trouble.
‘Are there soldiers where you come from?’ piped up Teshi.
I told him yes, but that our navy was bigger than our army.
‘What’s a navy?’ he asked, and received another clip from his older brother.
‘Stupid. A navy is an army on the water.’
‘In boats,’ I added, just to clarify.
‘You live near the sea?’ Teshi gasped, looking out at his own horizon.
I told them a story of how, just days before coming to their country, I had been out sailing with my son, Tom. Our ketch, Tiki, was an old Peterson 46, an ocean-going vessel built for circumnavigating the world, but this time we were hugging the coastline, heading southeast towards one of the outer islands in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf. The wind was blowing at 15 knots, gusting at 20, a perfect sailing wind creating just a light chop on the water. I’d been telling Tom about Little Mao and the trip, while he grasped the helm and rode out each puff of wind with a skill I hadn’t known he possessed.
Suddenly I realised everyone had stopped to listen. They may not have understood all the details, but Lolha, the boys, the other passengers — they were all tuning into this other world that was so unlike their own. But what I also suddenly realised was that this revelation had put up a wall between us. I was an alien, with an alien life, far removed from these concrete steps outside a teahouse on the edge of the Tibetan plateau. The silent pause that lingered afterwards said everything.
After a while, Teshi spoke to his brother.
‘I’d like to see the ocean one day,’ he said hopefully.
Norbu thought about this for a moment and then playfully grabbed his brother in a headlock.
‘Not until you give me back my yak,’ he said.
Young monks at Thrangu Monastery
The vast grasslands of the Tibetan plateau, near Sershu
By the time my jacket had dried in the sun it was time to move on. With a new tyre safely in place, Gan rolled the bus forward off the kerb and motioned for us to climb back on board. Across the road a vast expanse of grassland spread out before us, rolling without a break towards Lhasa, more than 1,000 kilometres distant. Here and there it was dotted with yaks and the ever-present telegraph poles that marched along the roadsides. Buddhism may suggest that life is change and nothing is permanent, but I hoped this pastoral scene would stay just the way it was forever.
On we went to heights that were unmarked by post or sign but were rejoiced in nonetheless by the monks, who crowded around the windows and threw coloured papers out into the cool air, each one printed with a special sutra. Every peak was a celebration. Holy sutras floated on the breeze and littered the ground on the mountain passes in every direction. In a matter of just a few weeks, perhaps, they would be buried in metres of snow. But for now, though an isolated shower or two could be seen in the valleys, it was a clear day. Distant snow-capped peaks glistened majestically. According to my map, some were up to 7,500 metres tall, though they didn’t appear so high to the naked eye. It dawned on me that this was because we were viewing them from an already lofty elevation, possibly 4,700 metres, so we were only seeing part of their great bulk. Despite this, they were still impressive, even from a distance. Closer to hand, jagged shards of rock protruded from verdant hillsides, like teeth jutting from a jawbone.
At one stage a young Tibetan started singing in a full and lusty tone, and soon others joined in. Monks put aside their religious chants and began to sing a very different tune, one in which the singer apparently pined for a long-lost sweetheart. We also had one other form of entertainment, which seemed very out of place given the age of the bus: a TV set. Connected to a DVD player under the driver’s seat, it played music videos — featuring more males pining for long-lost sweethearts, as the singers walked through fields of wild grasses in full national costume — and a comedy film that had everyone in fits of laughter. It was Chinese and featured a woeful bunch of new army recruits on a madcap adventure that included every slapstick joke in the book. The recruits ran around like idiots, which is probably what the Tibetans loved most about the film — it made the Chinese look stupid.
Sixteen hours and 700 kilometres or so after leaving Yushu, when every bone in my body had been rattled thoroughly and I was on the point of crying ‘Enough!’, the small town of Garze came into view. Nearby, in 1935, an advance party of soldiers of the Fourth Red Army had quietly passed in the night, speedily making their way towards the neighbouring town of Luding, in order to capture its one and only bridge, so that the rest of the marchers following them could safely cross. As it would have been then, it was dark now, and just a few scattered electric lights shone brightly, no doubt powered by the usual diesel generators. The streets had emptied but, as in most Chinese towns, there was a little place with rooms for rent in the bus station. I took the only room that had a bath and soon sank deep into its tepid embrace. We had been going since 5 a.m. and I smelt of monk puke. A wash was the first thing I needed, followed by a long sleep.
I was looking at a human thighbone near the water’s edge when an explosion came from upstream, a distant booming that reverberated against the mountain walls and made a flock of birds jettison themselves from a nearby tree. A dead fish floated down the river some time later, followed soon after by several more, and then a lot more. All of them upside down in the water.
I was just a few kilometres outside Garze on the Yalong River, which started its journey on the Qinghai plateau and ended over 1,300 kilometres later when it poured into the Yangtze in the very southernmost corner of Sichuan. Most of the houses in Garze were wooden and of a particular two-storey design, and were bunched together in tight little alleyways. Their gates were high and wide, and made from timber with wrought-iron filigree painted red and gold, and they enclosed dusty courtyards filled with chrysanthemums and dahlias of the same two colours.
I had wandered through the village that morning until I found a long swing bridge across the river. At the halfway point, an old woman on a motorbike sped past me in the opposite direction, carrying a load of fresh vegetables in a bamboo backpack. On the far side of the bridge were fields of the same produce in row upon neat row, and a small forest of silver birch ablaze with autumn colours.
The thighbone had caught my attention because of its size. Undoubtedly human, it was evidence of a typical Tibetan Sky burial, where the body is opened up, cut into pieces and fed to vultures, usually high up on a mountain ledge. Gruesome as it may seem, this is simply an effective way of disposing of a body whose spirit, according to Buddhism, has flown; it’s also practical, given that wood for cremations is scarce and the ground too hard and stony for digging a grave. But how the thighbone had come to be by the river was a puzzle that I had been pondering when I heard the explosion.
A few kilometres further on, round a bend in the river, I located the source of the destruction. A group of Chinese soldiers were camped amongst a clump of trees and were practising throwing live grenades. As I approached they tossed two more into the river in quick succession and the quiet water erupted. Their beaming smiles softened slightly when they saw me, probably more out of curiosity than fear, although I probably did have a pissed-off look on my face. My Afghan mujahedeen friends of many years ago would have felt the same. They would also have seen the senselessness of detonating live ammunition in the water and not bothering to put a net out. After all, that’s how we’d caught fish sometimes, maybe the odd tasty eel if we were lucky. But these guys were just doing it stupidly, for fun. Nevertheless, I greeted them with the kind of respect you reserve for people toting machine guns and they duly responded,
inviting me to have a glass of green tea.
They were keeping an eye on the monasteries in the precinct and were part of a much larger company from Changsha, a long way away in Hunan province, Mao’s homeland. Apparently there had been some trouble with the monks and I gathered they’d had to knock a few heads together to keep the peace. It was all pretty normal stuff: regulation, military-standard monk busting. I showed them the passage in my journal, which outlined what I was doing in China, and this received a warm response. The ones who had initially hung back now stepped forward to hear what was written, spoken slowly by one young soldier who stumbled over the longer words. As for an answer to some of the questions concerning the son of Mao, they were less forthcoming. Their average age was probably 19 and none of them had even heard of the young Mao An Hong. It was consistent with most of the reactions I’d had so far. The younger generation was not taught that part of their history, simply because the child was of no consequence. He did not feature in the great and glorious birth of Communism.
However, there was one small ray of sunshine, in the form of the man to my immediate right. He may have been an officer, or at least of a slightly higher rank than the others. He spoke shyly, in broken English, with long gaps between the words as he searched for the correct sentence structure.
‘You will go to Changsha?’ he asked.
I nodded and said I hoped so, to which he replied, ‘Then I must give to you the name of my university history professor. He is very wise.’
The other soldiers were smiling, clearly impressed with our conversation, which made the young man even bolder. He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a pen and paper. As he wrote the name in English, there were oohs and ahhs of wonder at this alien alphabet. It wasn’t much in the way of a lead, but it was something, a target to aim for. Perhaps in Changsha I would have better luck.
Later that night I celebrated this modest progress at a local restaurant. The small kitchen opened out onto the footpath, casting a spell, with its heavenly aromas, on anyone who walked by. The place was crowded, and I perched on a stool next to a cherubic young Tibetan businessman in a brown leather jacket and his thin young male assistant, who wore a light blue ski jacket. They had finished their meal but, before going, the businessman poured me a glass of tea and insisted on paying for my meal. I asked the woman who ran the kitchen what was on the menu.
A Boy of China Page 10
