New Yorkers in Tibet

by Rupert Wolfe Murray | 3 May, 2019 | Journeys

This is Chapter 29 from my memoir about hustling for work in Tibet in which I describe my American friends, some of whom you might not approve of…

The next morning I hung around the Cheese Factory and kept a sharp eye on proceedings. I put a reservation in with the management and when someone left I was on their bed like a shot, and I stayed on the bed for most of that day to make sure I didn’t lose it. A sense of exhaustion came over me and I realised that all the hustling, optimism and hope that I had put into finding a job was more tiring than my exertions up on the plateau. I decided some down time was needed and for the next two weeks I hung out with a crowd of New Yorkers who had taken up residence in the Cheese Factory. I became good friends with a skinny couple called Frenchy and Diane, the best conversationalists I had come across in Asia. There was also Larry who said he spoke better Spanish than English and looked like a character from New York in the 1920s. Larry’s travelling companion was Adrian, with whom he had shared a flat in the Bronx. Adrian was loud and annoying, but entertaining in a twisted kind of way.

Diane and her boyfriend Frenchy were the first travellers with whom I formed a real friendship. We spent lots of time talking, walking and eating together. They both enjoyed hanging out with Tibetans in the daytime and drinking with the Chinese at night, and neither of them were judgemental about the politics, poverty and other heavy issues that travellers tended to know so much about. They entered into the spirit of things, joined in, rather than observing from the sidelines.

I related to Frenchy and Diane so well because they were living on their wits – rather than executing a carefully worked out travel plan. They appreciated spontaneity. They only had five hundred dollars each and they knew that if they didn’t find a job soon they would be stuck. They were more realistic about working in Tibet than me; they knew it was impossible and had set their sights on teaching English in Hong Kong or Taiwan, where people like us could get hired relatively easily. I told them that my destination had been Shanghai but now I’d seen Lhasa I wanted to stay, and I was doing all I could to find a job. If not, it was Shanghai and if that didn’t work out I would probably head for Hong Kong or Taiwan. Maybe we’d meet up there? For the next few weeks I felt like taking it easy, hanging out with Diane and Frenchy and seeing the town from a different perspective. It was a period of indulgence, topped off by a joint birthday party that Isabella, the woman at the Traveller’s Co-op had organised for Roger, her boyfriend, and me. Our birthdays were only two days apart.

I was surprised that Isabella had arranged this party as she saw so many people in her Co-op that I wondered how she even remembered me, but there was something else going on: she was using this party as a means of introducing me to her students and the boss of their English language school. She really did want me to get a job with them! With a bunch of people from the Cheese Factory, I entered a big whitewashed room with carved pillars that had been painted red. It was the classroom, located in a curious old building that surrounded a yard.

– Oh, it’s Rupert, shouted Isabella when we came into the room,

– Say hello everyone.

I felt a rush of embarrassment and almost turned tail and fled, but a group of smiling young monks were approaching and it would have been disrespectful to run out on them. The monks were each carrying a white cotton scarf and they laid these over my neck, saying some kind words that I didn’t understand. There were other Tibetans in the room, some Chinese as well as some of the more intellectual looking travellers. Isabella took my arm and led me round the group, introducing me to them individually. Some of the Tibetan students couldn’t stop themselves from giggling:

– This is Rupert. Injee teacher. Very good teacher.

We approached an older man with sallow cheeks, sunglasses and pockmarked skin. He had probably been handsome once but now he had a haunted look.

– He was in prison for 20 years, Isabella whispered into my ear, and it was him who set up this language school for 40 people. He’s with the Tibetan Peoples’ Consultative Conference. It’s important you meet him in case a job comes up here. We approached him and shook hands sincerely. He smiled and said in old fashioned English:

– Thank you for coming here, my very good fellow. Here is a present for you.

He handed me a small package that was wrapped in newspaper. I thanked him profusely, unwrapped it and found a modern Chinese tea strainer. A bit later the monks all trooped out and went back to their monastery, some alcohol was produced and Roger put on some funk. By midnight I was dancing with a crowd of young students, all of whom were scrutinising my every move, sharing jokes and squealing with laughter. They were good dancers and I got into the spirit of it. The only bores were the foreigners, especially the bearded guidebook author. They sat around the edges of the room, observing, smoking and making wise comments to each other.

Over the next few weeks I developed a routine with Diane and Frenchy. We would get up late, savouring the warm beds and waiting for the sunlight to heat up the frozen room. Diane would take ages to get ready while I would hustle them impatiently so we could get breakfast, usually consisting of cold rolls and yoghurt from the market, with Chinese jam, all eaten sitting on a wall or doorstep with plastic spoons and penknives. The main attraction of the afternoon was sunshine and once settled in comfortably on the balcony at the Cheese Factory it was hard to go anywhere else.

We had a stunning view of the Eastern mountains from this spot and as evening approached the sun would throw strange shapes onto the mountains. By this time the cold was back and so were our appetites and it was time to go and find dinner. We would go to the shacks that functioned as little restaurants, sit around miniature tables or on dirt floors, within a lively buzz of multi-lingual chatter. The food was greasy, delicious and always took ages to arrive. I would get impatient and harass the cooks to speed things up a bit. I preferred to eat in the Chinese places, with their finely sliced meat and veg, plus a bowl of rice – ten yuan in total – while they preferred the Muslim noodle house where we’d pay just two or three yuan for a plate of boiled noodles mixed in with fresh garlic, and sit with a local crowd on tightly packed benches. After dinner, when the cold had descended, we would search out somewhere warm to drink Chinese beer, which the Tibetans call Pee Jew, and chat late into the night.

One of the things that kept reminding me how great it was to travel alone was that almost every couple I saw travelling together through Asia seemed to get on badly with each other. Diane and Frenchy were different; they didn’t get on with each other better than other couples I had met, if anything they got on worse, but they let me in to their disputes. I found myself becoming their mediator, a role I enjoyed, and worked out ways of defusing the insults and barbed comments they would hurl at each other. They hardly spoke to each other but both of them talked profusely with me. Frenchy shared his frustration about sleeping with her:

– Whenever I show any affection she calls me a pervert.

Frenchy was running low on cash and Diane would continually mock him for not saving more when he was earning good money in Boston. He was always on the lookout for ways to earn a few bucks and he would haggle with the Khampa tribesmen in the marketplace, buy their hand-made trinkets and sell them to gullible American travellers as antiques. There were plenty of other Americans haggling in the marketplace, buying up old silver antiques, for prices well out of Frenchy’s league, and I disapproved of the trade as I knew these valuable objects would end up being sold in the USA for twenty times the price.

One day Frenchy took me to the sky burial site on the outside of town. I could see the bloodstains on the big rock that was used to smash up the bodies, and hundreds of vultures flapping around expectantly, but there was no activity that day. The body-cutters were having a day off. The best antiques that Frenchy had found were in the huge mound of clothes that lay by the sky burial site; I didn’t want to join in his business but I did think that anyone bold enough to rob the dead deserves whatever they get.

It was October and Frenchy’s birthday was approaching. With Diane and some disco-crazed Tibetans from India we organised a big party for him in the restaurant at the Snowlands Hotel. There was no charge as long as we promised to bring a crowd and consume lots of beer, an easy problem to solve with my new-found friends. The problem with organising parties is the anxiety one feels at the beginning – will anyone come? – and it took about a gallon of beer for me to feel sufficiently relaxed to join in the frenzied dancing. I got so drunk that night that I ended up taking a blonde German woman to bed in her room at the Snowlands. The next morning I had a vague memory of frantic undressing but no recollection of the actual act, but one look at her the following morning – tight-lipped, cold, disappointed – made me squirm in shame and get out as quickly as possible. I scurried back to the Cheese Factory and guiltily confessed all to Diane and Frenchy. They mocked me about it for weeks.

I became friendly with some of the Tibetan exiles; young, well-dressed and handsome men from India who had returned to the land that their fathers had escaped from. They didn’t share our appreciation of Lhasa’s backwardness; they saw it as provincial, boring and desperately in need of some good nightlife. I doubted their trading activities were legal but the Chinese authorities seemed to tolerate them. The exiles were despised by the local Tibetan men as lechers who were corrupting their women, and neither the local Chinese nor the foreign travellers trusted them. I was keen to learn Tibetan from them and enjoyed their company.

Their priority was having a good time and their passion was organising big discos, in large modern halls, where they could show off their superb disco dancing skills – making the locals and the travellers look like ridiculous puppets in comparison. My best friend among the exiles was called Pemba and he could break-dance so well that he would bring the whole dance floor to a halt as we watched on in amazement. Diane and Frenchy would smuggle in beer and watch from the sidelines, never dancing. Some of Isabella’s English students would come to the disco and one of them, the sexiest mover in the place, was known as the Disco Queen. One night she asked me to dance and although I failed miserably to perform to her high standards, I was honoured to have been asked. I got lots of jealous looks that night.

Elliot was another New Yorker who lived by his wits and slipped into our scene. He hunted deals by day, was a boozing socialite by night and spoke with a drawl. There was something fascinating about his contemptuous manner and I appreciated the honesty of his behaviour: he made no attempt to be pleasant. His main scam was to buy cheap bus tickets from Lhasa to the Nepalese border and sell them to fresh travellers at twice the price. He had a stash of slide film which he would also sell at a huge profit. I would berate him for his rapaciousness but he would dismiss my observations as if to say who gives a shit? Elliot was the only one of us who could afford a decent hotel room; he stayed in the newly-built Plateau Hotel where a single room cost ten yuan (₤1) – four times what we paid.

One night some Tibetans had accosted Elliot and Diane and begged them to teach English. Apparently the last English teaching volunteer had disappeared without trace and these young folk were desperate for someone, anyone, to teach them basic English. The group had organised itself spontaneously and everyone chipped in for the teacher’s fee – but there was no contract. In fact the whole thing was illegal. I thought it ridiculous that untrained half-wits like Elliot could be invited to teach English when he could hardly string a sentence together. Some days later Elliot announced that he had a headache and asked me to teach for him that evening. I wasn’t quite sure and he took advantage of my hesitation and said:

– Nine thirty. Friday. Disco Hall. Be there! And then he was gone.

At nine thirty on the Friday night I approached the disco hall and realised that all my struggles with conquering fear had been in vain. I was terrified. The memory of the terror I had felt when I first taught English came flooding back: Norwich 1986, the final test in the most intensive educational experience I had ever endured, a one-month course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL); a group of adults looking at me expectantly and the tutor lurking at the back marking me down for being a nervous wreck.

As I made my way through the dark, deserted hall I could see light coming from under a door and heard voices. I wanted to run, hard, in the opposite direction. I can’t teach English I told myself, I’m a phoney. All I’ve ever done is help one girl in Vienna correct her essays. I’ve forgotten everything I learned on that TEFL course and I never understood grammar anyway. I looked through the door into the room and saw row upon row of bored faces staring at Elliot. Before I had time to flee they spotted me and I knew there was no escape. Elliot was already heading for the door and before he disappeared into the night he handed me a children’s book and said commandingly:

– Make ’em repeat.

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This is an extract from 9 Months in Tibet — the eBook — which will be published soon. If you’d like to reserve a copy just email me at wolfemurray@gmail.com (or post a short comment under this article). To see feedback to the paperback edition, click here.

Trying to make a phone call in Tibet

by Rupert Wolfe Murray | 29 Apr, 2019 | Journeys

At the Kirey Hotel, the most expensive place to stay in the old town, I met a charming Tibetan who had been educated at an English-style private school in the Indian city of Chandigargh. Hundreds of thousands of Tibetans had fled their homeland since the 1950s and they were well established in India. Now that Tibet was opening up a few of them were coming back as traders. They all spoke Tibetan, and English with an Indian accent but not a word of Mandarin, which is China’s official language. My new friend was called Lobsang and I managed to remember his name by thinking of the word lopsided. Not only was he charming and interesting – he told me about India’s English-style education system with their elite private schools – but he seemed well connected in Lhasa too. I asked him to find the phone number of Samye Monastery and to call them to see if they needed some extra labour.

Lobsang was happy to help but where would we find a telephone? The only places that had phones were the units – the Chinese Communist term for companies, schools, factories and any other organisations – but it was highly unlikely that any one of them would let two suspicious foreigners in the door, let alone use their phone. There were no telephones at the Post Office, or hotels, as far as I was aware, and I had got quite used to doing without them.

Lobsang turned his charm on the pretty young Tibetan receptionist at the Kirey. He leaned seductively on the counter, stared deeply into her eyes and got chatting. She tried to be hostile and frosty but failed miserably and within minutes had told him the crucial information:

– There is a telephone in the hotel, in the accountants’ office…cross the yard and up the wooden ladder.

Seized with excitement, we abandoned the receptionist, climbed the ladder and found the accountants drinking beer and playing cards. There was a large abacus on the desk and a messy pile of paperwork. Lobsang asked if we could use their phone and they waved lazily in its direction. He made some calls, found the number for Samye and entered into a shouting match that seemed to last for half an hour. The accountants had paid no attention to our intrusion up to that point but eventually they were listening to every word. At the end of the conversation Lobsang said:

– They have an office in Lhasa and say you should go and see them tomorrow. I will come and translate for you.

The next morning I discovered the downside of Tibetans: chronic unreliability. From that day onwards Lobsang could not be found anywhere. He had disappeared and I couldn’t understand it: he had been so warm in his encouragement and I was sure that his offer of help was genuine. I was desperate and I ran around town looking for him. He had arranged an interview with the representatives of a monastery that may be willing to hire a foreign mural painter. I had to meet them but my Tibetan wasn’t good enough to stand up to an interview. I returned to the Kirey Hotel and turned my attention to the pretty young Tibetan receptionist who seemed, I was glad to note, rather bored. This time it was I who turned on the charm, doing all I could to make her feel special, before popping the question: Will you come with me to the Samye office?

She was shy and small and laughed at my suggestion but, when she saw that I was serious, said she couldn’t possibly leave her work and that her English wasn’t good – which was true. She was my last hope of getting a translator (or a job) and I hung around for hours, begging and persuading and imploring. Eventually she agreed to accompany me, but not for another two days.

It felt strange walking through the maze of backstreets next to a pretty Tibetan girl. She looked at the ground all the way and her face was red with embarrassment. The passers-by stared at us in surprise, some made comments and the young men whistled and laughed – giving me the thumbs up as if to congratulate me on my conquest. We reached a newly-built arched entrance with Chinese characters written on the right hand pillar and Tibetan words written on the left. We went through the arch and found ourselves in a deserted builders’ yard – sacks, bricks, metal pipes scattered everywhere – and moved towards an impressively restored Tibetan building. A huge dog looked at us lazily through one eye, pondered for a moment and then charged at us in a fury of barking and snapping teeth. The receptionist screamed hysterically, unable to run, frozen in terror. A millisecond later the dog’s charge was violently stopped by the thick rope that was firmly anchored into the ground. Recovering quickly from its temporary strangulation the dog kept on barking. The girl recovered from her paralysis and tried to run back, but I had a firm grip on her wrist and pulled her towards the main building.

Two bored youths were lounging in the hallway – neither of whom had reacted to the dog’s outburst – and they grinned widely when they saw me with the girl. They pointed upstairs and said third door on the left. Dark stone steps and dragons painted in fluorescent colours. A thick blanket hung over the third door on the left, presumably to keep the draughts out. We entered a large room with two huge wooden desks and some plastic chairs. At the sight of Tibetan officials staring at us, the girl had another panic attack and tried to retreat but I was still gripping her wrist and I whispered fiercely to not abandon me at this stage of my quest.

The two Tibetan men watching us were a harmless looking old man and a young cynical-looking one in a Mao cap. They waved us to be seated in the only armchair, which I gallantly offered to the receptionist, while I sat on one of the plastic chairs. There was an embarrassing silence as I fumbled for the dog-eared reference letter that I had preserved carefully since my mural painting job in Vienna. I passed the shabby bit of paper to the receptionist, trying to get some enthusiasm into the girl and stop her sinking deeper into the armchair. The paper ended up in the hands of the man in the Mao hat who looked at it blankly and was obviously confused about what the hell we were doing there. When the girl reluctantly explained that I was looking for a restoration job at Samye Monastery they said I would have to speak to the boss, who was directing operations down at the monastery and is far too busy to interview foreigners. The girl perked up as she realised this wasn’t working and we would have to leave, but I pressed on, trying vainly to get a name, a phone number, some sort of commitment – but in vain. Soon we were hurrying down the stairs and heading back to her hotel where I thanked her profusely, hoping I hadn’t compromised her reputation and put her through a traumatic experience.

Back at the Pemba all the foreigners were packing their stuff. I spoke to one of the Americans:

– What’s up? I asked, are you being kicked out?

– No, they’ve just opened up the Cheese Factory. Why don’t you join us? Get outta this dive!

– What’s the Cheese Factory?

I helped them move their gear about ten minutes up the road – turn right at the Kirey Hotel and go past the smelliest toilet in Tibet – and saw the Cheese Factory, a Tibetan style construction made of square blocks of stone and leaning inwards to save itself from earthquakes. The building was austere and you got to the rooms by climbing up steep, fixed ladders which led onto wide wooden balconies. There was a rich smell of bread coming out of a noisy unit on the ground floor. We passed some unfriendly looking Tibetan traders on the first floor and eventually reached the third floor where eight rooms had been taken over by foreigners.

I dumped the couples’ gear on a surprisingly clean concrete floor and took in the fact that in this room there were eight beds, each one of which was taken, and two windows. The travellers seemed to take themselves quite seriously and some were dressed in Tibetan clothes, which looked ridiculous. There was a lot of demand for beds and they had developed a dog-eat-dog system to cope with it. As soon as the word got out that a free bed was available, travellers in the more expensive hotels would hurriedly pack their rucksacks, rush over and throw themselves onto the free bed.

I was told there was a free bed in Ron and Cherry’s room and so I ran back to the Pemba, packed my rucksack, hitched a lift on the back of a bicycle, got back to the Cheese Factory only to find that the bed had already been taken by some other swine. There was nothing I could do except go back to the Pemba and get my room back, but they didn’t want to know; a horde of pilgrims were disembarking from a truck. The fat manager shouted at me, pointed up the street and made it clear that I was no longer welcome. By now I knew the layout of the Pemba and when the manager’s back was turned I raced up the ladder, pushed through the crowd of smelly pilgrims, found an empty bed in the big dorm, dumped my stuff on it and asked those nearby to hold it for me. They grinned and seemed amused to have a foreigner in their midst.

Confident that my bed was booked and my stuff would be safe with the friendly nomads I went back to the Cheese Factory where some Americans from Arizona had asked me to eat with them. We drank and joked late into the night and at midnight, like some debauched Cinderella, I remembered the Pemba and my bed. Through dark and empty streets, silent apart from the howling dogs, I raced back to the Pemba: too late, the three metre high metal gate was closed. I silently climbed it and saw the night guard was asleep – his feet were sticking out from under a truck. I also knew he was a light sleeper and sure enough he woke up when I landed, cat-like, on the inside of the yard. He roared at me in rage, reached for his metal bar and started to get up. I put my fingers to my lips to urge him to shut up and hissed some words at him: Nga Injee (I am the Englishman). This was fine by him, he recognised me, and settled down again for the rest of the night.

I crept upstairs as silently as I could, anxious to not wake the volatile management, heard muffled noises of people drinking and talking from a first floor room, reached the big dormitory at the top and found, to my horror, that my bed had been occupied by two pilgrims. I began protesting and people started to wake up and look on with interest. The two men on my bed looked at me blankly but had no intention of moving. They shrugged their shoulders as if to say bad luck. Then the manager’s women appeared and the lights were on. Get out they screamed and moved in on my gear. I shouted back at them and a struggle began for my rucksack. I knew the game was up; I had already been told to leave and was unable to stop the forced move towards the big metal gate – which I had to climb back over as they cackled and laughed.

It was after two in the morning and the town was totally dead: not a soul to be seen, not a light on anywhere, even the dogs seemed to be asleep. I wasn’t sure what to do. I wandered in the direction of the Kirey, which was all barred up and dark. At the Cheese Factory there were some lights on the top floor and I climbed the wall and looked in at the yard for a few minutes, scanning the area for guards or dogs. There was no sign of either but just to be on the safe side I didn’t jump down into the yard, but climbed up the wooden frame that held up the balconies. All was quiet on the first floor, which was fortunate as the Tibetans who stayed there looked like they could be dangerous and who knows how they would react to finding a foreign intruder on their doorstep at this time of night. I crept over to the ladder up the next landing and found a room full of drinking, smoking foreigners, none of whom seemed surprised to see me. I told them my story, which raised a few laughs, and a redheaded girl from New Zealand asked if I would like to share her bunk. Thanks a lot I replied and then spent the night carefully keeping my hands to myself, not wanting to touch, hug or get involved with a woman. In the morning she had her arms round me but when she saw that I wasn’t reacting said:

– The Scots aren’t very affectionate, are they?

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This is an extract from 9 Months in Tibet — the eBook — which will be published soon. If you’d like to reserve a copy just email me at wolfemurray@gmail.com (or post a short comment under this article). To see feedback to the paperback edition, click here.