Sky Train
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Sky Train

Tibetan Women on the Edge of History

Canyon Sam

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Sky Train

Tibetan Women on the Edge of History

Canyon Sam

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About This Book

Through a lyrical narrative of her journey to Tibet in 2007, activist Canyon Sam contemplates modern history from the perspective of Tibetan women. Traveling on China's new " Sky Train, " she celebrates Tibetan New Year with the Lhasa family whom she'd befriended decades earlier and concludes an oral-history project with women elders. As she uncovers stories of Tibetan women's courage, resourcefulness, and spiritual strength in the face of loss and hardship since the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1950, and observes the changes wrought by the controversial new rail line in the futuristic "new Lhasa, " Sam comes to embrace her own capacity for letting go, for faith, and for acceptance. Her glimpse of Tibet's past through the lens of the women - a visionary educator, a freedom fighter, a gulag survivor, and a child bride - affords her a unique perspective on the state of Tibetan culture today - in Tibet, in exile, and in the widening Tibetan diaspora. Gracefully connecting the women's poignant histories to larger cultural, political, and spiritual themes, the author comes full circle, finding wisdom and wholeness even as she acknowledges Tibet's irreversible changes.

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Year
2011
ISBN
9780295800066

1

SKY TRAIN
I WALKED ACROSS the huge, dimly lit concrete platform. There wasn't a soul around except a conductor in cap and uniform standing at attention, stone-faced, by one door of the sleek train. The loneliness of the scene, the hiss of the engine, the eerie lighting, and the echoing, hangarlike space in the dark night gave me chills. A scene from World War II Europe flashed to mind. At night it happened, I thought. A scene like this. The clandestine evacuation, the disappearance of a whole people. I pushed the thought from my mind and steeled myself to move forward.
A long distance away, to my left at the other end of the platform, I saw probably a hundred people thronged at a single door, trying to board, like a swarm of buzzing insects. Oh, I get it, I thought, they were elbowing to get in at the boarding gate to try for a “hard seat”—the alternative to sitting on the floor. I was the wealthy foreigner now. Not everyone could afford a soft sleeper like the one I had. From my previous trip, I remembered that not everyone got a seat; people slept all over the filthy floors, under bench seats, in aisles.
I looked for my car, number 6. The side of the train, marked with the destination points, read “Beijing,” then the train logo, and then “Lasa.” They had misspelled Lhasa. Rather than spelling it the Tibetan way, with an aspirated sound, the Chinese had spelled it as if it were a Chinese word. The meaning in Tibetan combines lha (gods) and sa (abode, home). Refuge of the gods. Heavenly home.
Inside the train, new brick-red carpeting ran down the aisles, and a clean modern bathroom with a trio of sinks stood at the end of each car. Signs displayed three languages: Tibetan, Chinese, and English. The reek of cigarette smoke in the cabins made my stomach turn, which the sight of fresh bed linens in my berth could hardly assuage. Oh yes, I thought, my body remembering: Here we are in China again.
Years ago I had vowed never to return to China. Never to return to Tibet. Never to return to Dharamsala. Now I was going to all of them.
“I can't take the train,” I had said to my neighbor, a children's book author, on a winter night two months before, when she suggested I take the controversial Beijing-to-Lhasa train. I needed to revive my book project on oral histories of Tibetan women—shake it up, begin again, give it new life. “Go back and revisit the women in the book,” she had urged. “Take that new train.”
The train was China's Final Solution, I thought. It signaled the death knell for Tibet. An NGO (nongovernmental organization) staffer I'd talked to in Asia two years before, who'd seen it under construction, had said that once the train was built, there'd be no hope of ever getting the Chinese out of Tibet. I couldn't even bring myself to read the splashy travel articles that appeared when the train began operating a few months earlier in the summer.
I had said in the 1980s that I'd never visit China again. I didn't want to extend the country credibility or tourist dollars. I'd even been invited to the UN's huge Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, all expenses paid, but declined. You couldn't pay me to go to China.
I can't take the train, I had thought. The train would forever bind Tibet to China, just as the completion of the transcontinental railroad to California had bound the American West to the Eastern Establishment in the 1880s. The Western press of empire. The technological expression of Manifest Destiny. The rail line had forever changed the lives of all who'd lived in the West. Native American cultures became extinct. Trains imported goods and people but also ideas, culture, and value systems. On top of that, more than 80 percent of the workforce, who had been cruelly exploited, were Cantonese from southern China, my ancestral home.
I was soon joined by my cabinmates—a couple in their late twenties, a tall, strapping young man and his sweet-faced woman companion wearing Western-style outdoor clothing. He spoke some English. They began pulling things out of their spanking-new tricolored backpacks, setting up their thermos cups and foodstuffs on the window table, changing out of hiking boots into slippers, communicating in short cooing phrases.
After ranting and rejecting my neighbor's idea in that late-night phone call in San Francisco, I had toyed with the idea: I could just take the train with Tashi, I thought. That'd be easy. Tashi, my Tibetan friend, whom I'd met twenty-one years ago in Lhasa, whose family I'd lived with that summer in Tibet, now lived in Canada. She had spent the better part of the previous year lining up oncologists to treat her father's stomach cancer and waiting for approval of his visa application. He finally told her he'd rather not come, declined Western medical treatment, and asked that she just return home for Losar, New Year, the most joyous occasion in the Tibetan year. She had told me a month ago that she would be taking the new train line home.
In 1986, I had gone to China for a year, thinking I would travel for a time, then settle and teach English somewhere. Quite momentously, China had opened to the world a few years earlier, after thirty years behind the Bamboo Curtain. My first day in Lhasa, in early May, when I wandered away from the alley beside the Potala Palace where the bus from the airstrip had dropped me off—Lhasa had no airport then—I met the only English-speaking woman in town, twenty-three-year-old Tashi. On my second day in town, I was invited to live with her family in their cozy, three-room warren in a ninth-century monastery converted to family housing, with its three-foot-thick mud and straw walls.
If I took the trip back to Tibet for Losar with Tashi, I could complete my book and see my Tibetan family, I had thought—the father perhaps for the last time. The opportunity had loomed so large that my iron-clad resolve about never visiting China had started to melt.
“Tashi,” I said one night by phone shortly thereafter, “what do you think of the idea of me joining you on the train to see your folks for Losar?”
“I think it's a great idea, Canyon,” she said directly. “They would love to see you.”
What compelled my first trip to China in the mid-’80s I can't exactly say. Unease, restlessness, curiosity? My life wasn't working for me. I can't say that I consciously embarked looking for answers to the meaning of life, but I knew that I'd reached the edge of a forest, the edge of the known world for me, and that now I had to enter into the unknown. In order to go forward, I had to go beyond anything I knew.
I had never set foot in Asia in my twenty-nine years. When I was growing up in the 1960s, I never heard a word about China; China then had cut ties to the outside world—diplomatic, trade, cultural. I thought China was some ancient place that no longer existed, like a land in the Bible. No one mentioned it—not my parents, my grandparents, the newspapers, the schoolbooks. True, sometimes a few dry goods sneaked through, imported from the Mainland and carrying a pungent smell of mothballs, a sour smell like something they put over your nose to revive you after you've fainted. When I was nine, my father and mother tried to tutor us in Chinese language after dinner, and the little primer books they brought home reeked of that unmistakable odor. The children on the covers and between the pages looked like red-cheeked, smiling cherubs from a bygone era, not like the Chinese American kids in our neighborhood and at my school in San Francisco, along the clean, straight streets of stucco houses edging Golden Gate Park. Did people even really exist there anymore? Was the whole place steeped in that foreign scent?
As an adolescent in the early ‘70s, I had a distant uncle who kept a pile of China Reconstructs magazines by his recliner. During one of our visits, he leaned back, flipped open the pages of an issue—all glossy color photographs of thick golden crops, spotless factories, and happy workers in lab coats—and told me with pride that China was becoming a great land, a powerful modern country, advancing on every front.
As I prepared for my trip, I read books about modern Chinese history, accounts of the devastating damage to society and to people during the Cultural Revolution. It was so overwhelming in scale and degree, so thoroughly and pointedly destructive, that I became suspicious: This was written by a Red baiter. This was biased because the writer was a white man in a capitalist country looking at Chinese in a Communist country. But to be truthful, I didn't want it to be right, didn't want to believe it had been that bad. I would just have to see for myself, I decided.
I found reassurance in the thought that the Chinese, in a major campaign at the time, were ardently inviting those they called Overseas Chinese to return home to the “warm embrace of the motherland.” I saw the poster on the cork bulletin board at the tiny U.S.-China Friendship Association office on Oak Street in San Francisco. I wasn't an Overseas Chinese; I was an American, I thought. But clearly the government meant people like me. And the part about the warm embrace seemed friendly, if a bit sentimental.
The only thing I knew was that my grandparents had come from China; I might come to understand them better by living there, I thought.
By the time I left, I still hadn't secured a position teaching English, and my Mandarin comprehension was rudimentary, though my speaking was passable. What was I going to do for a year, I thought. No one spoke English. How would I survive?
After five weeks of traveling in China, starting in Hong Kong and crossing southern China to Yunnan Province, I felt bitterly disillusioned. I had thought the accounts of the Cultural Revolution must be exaggerated but being there quickly changed my mind. I saw no caring government in the gaggles of begging blind people shuffling up the street gripping one another's shirttails. I observed no free, quality health care in the sick people I saw, like the miserable man with a purple ulcer the size of an ice pack on his cheek. I saw no egalitarianism in the army trucks with sirens screaming, parading men through city streets, handcuffed, heads bowed, denounced in sidewalk photo displays as “criminals.” I saw coal-burning smokestacks belching in the middle of cities, fouling the air so badly that I one time couldn't see the lamppost on the other side of the boulevard I was crossing. Instead of a model socialist society, I found Orwell mixed with Dickens in the largest nation on earth.
Far from being warmly embracing, I found the Chinese rude and unhelpful. They treated me as though I were invisible; some seemed contemptuous and envious.
At the beginning of my fifth week, I flew from Chengdu in western China to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, a three-hour flight over the ice-blue Himalayas, into what seemed like one of the most inaccessible corners of the earth. Before the Chinese takeover, Tibetans had long shut themselves off from the outside world. In the twentieth century, only a couple thousand foreigners had ever set eyes on the holy city of Lhasa: seven hundred of them British troops who invaded in 1904, a few intrepid explorers, a handful of officials, and a dribble of Westerners in the early 1980s who came in expensive, organized tour groups.
Then, six months before my visit, in the fall of 1985, Tibet opened to anyone holding a Chinese tourist visa. Extreme weather conditions effectively closed it for the winter, but with the spring thaw, travelers trickled in—mostly independent travelers, backpackers like me, of whom I was the sole representative on the small sixty-six-passenger plane, among the silver-haired Chinese bureaucrats in drab, post-Mao fashions.
From the moment I arrived in Lhasa, I could sense something different. Even the air was different, pure and dry. The small plane landed on a vast barren plateau—I had never seen such long, clean horizon lines and such intense, indigo-blue skies. There wasn't anything around—no buildings, no airport personnel, no electric lines, no signs, no indications of civilization. After a two-hour bus ride, we arrived in Lhasa, where a few bicyclists leisurely pedaled along the wide, sunny main street; this was nothing like the jammed freeways of riders I'd seen in other cities in China. Snowcapped mountains ringed the valley, towering behind soft-sloped, brown moraine hills. Old ladies sitting on the sun-blanched street curb fingering their prayer beads tracked me as I walked down the main street and grinned as I passed, sticking out their tongues in the traditional greeting. I was struck by the bright white quality of the sunlight, the deep saturated blue of the massive sky, the air so clean and crisp it almost singed my lungs going down. I liked the relaxed atmosphere, the sense of space. Unlike everywhere else in China, Tibet was uncrowded, and one rarely saw a motor vehicle.
Over the next two months, particularly while trekking in the countryside, I had extraordinary experiences in the pristine mountains, rivers, and plains of Tibet's high desert plateau—which, I learned later, is the highest and largest landmass on earth. I was welcomed warmly wherever I went—so completely different from my experience in China. I developed an affectionate relationship with Tashi's mother, Amala. I found the people devoted to their faith, with a rare quality of equanimity and acceptance. I loved their easy humor and openness, their warmth and generosity.
Images
Images
Later that summer, I was floating up the Yangzi River. I'd reluctantly left Tibet to resume my travels: I am Chinese, I should like China, I told myself. I had gotten the last bunk available in a twelve-passenger cabin, the upper bunk by the door. The first morning I discovered why.
From a speaker mounted in the hall, one foot from my head, a voice screamed garrulous government directives and martial music blasted at eardrum-splitting volumes at six o'clock. This was the same broadcast that railed at people everywhere in China; speakers hung from buildings and telephone poles, in cities, in the countryside. They were even wired into train compartments. Plugging my ears or covering my head with a pillow couldn't block out the shrill directives and political slogans, which blared for a solid twenty minutes.
From the traveler's co-op in Lhasa I had borrowed John Avedon's award-winning book, In Exile from the Land of Snows, about the modern political history of Tibet since the Chinese takeover in the 1950s. For the first time I learned in depth of the brutal destruction of the culture and people. More than 95 percent of Tibet's monasteries—equivalent to a Western church, university, and library combined—had been demolished, thousands of them. Tibetans claimed that more than a million people were killed. Religious art and literature was looted or burned. Over the next twenty-five years, the Chinese attempted to brainwash these devout people, to break them and strike Buddhism out of their hearts and replace it with fervent Maoism.
At six o'clock every morning on the ship, and several times throughout the day, the public address system blasted the state harangue. I took refuge in the dog-eared text, in the vivid handful of profiles of Tibetans—fascinating, each one of them. But by the end of nearly four hundred pages, I realized that not one of the profiles had been of a woman. Were we to assume that women's experiences were the same as men's? I doubted that was possible. It was as if women didn't exist. Or, if their experiences were different, they didn't matter. Yet my richest experiences of Tibet had often been with women.
What were women's lives like during this tumultuous period? Why weren't they portrayed?
In late summer, in eastern China, I finally gave up my long-held dream of living in China for a year and left for India—to the Himalayas where Tibetans had settled, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile and home of the Dalai Lama. There I became intrigued by Buddhism through reading about political history, and I got to know Tibetan nuns as I helped with an international conference on Buddhist nuns. When I got back to the States a year later, I became aware that for the first time in many years, probably the first time in my adult life, I had stopped searching. I didn't look right, I didn't look left; I was only interested in continuing to cleave close to this culture, this land, this philosophy. A woman I met at the Himalayan Fair in Berkeley asked me what my interest was in Tibet, and I thought a long moment. Was it Buddhism? Politics? The land? The people? Finally, I simply answered: “Total.”
I worked as an activist for Tibetan independence. Most of the U.S. public didn't know where Tibet even was, let alone what had happened to it. The State Department under George H. W. Bush and Henry Kissinger took the hardline position that Tibet was part of China. I published articles, helped organize demonstrations, raised money for what eventually became the Tibetan Nuns Project, and gave educational slide lectures using the best photographs from my yearlong trip. A group of us started a cable television show on Tibet, for which I was on-air host and sometimes coproducer. Not a negative word about China appeared in the press, if anything appeared at all. We found out later that China had threatened to expel from Beijing any Western news bureau that printed anything critical of the country, a precursor of the censorship they would impose on the Internet twenty years later.
We worked hard, but we prayed for a miracle. We had a glimmer of a chance, we thought, to galvanize public and political support to save Tibet from China's so-called development plans. In the summer of 1989, our prayers were answered when Tiananmen Square ignited in protest. The international media picked up the story. I wrote an opinion piece that was widely published and even translated for a Chinese-language publication. As a result, I was invited to testify before a congressional subcommittee on the Chinese government's violent suppression of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, to link human rights in Tibet with human rights in China. That autumn, though he'd been short-listed for years, the Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize. We were ecstatic, flush with new hope.
A few months later, I traveled to Dharamsala to work with the exile government. Living in the government compound, I quickly observed that virtually no women worked in the eight or nine government offices housing the various departments. I lived a stone's throw from the central Tibetan library; in the English-language section—an entire room, probably the most substantial collection of Tibet-related titles anywhere in the world—I searched for books about women, or by women, or with significant reference to women. There was next to nothing: 2 percent. Religious literature made up 60 percent of the total, and of the rest, most were autobiographies, all, except for Daughter of Tibet, by Rinchen Dolma Taring, penned by men. I found no...

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