by Rupert Wolfe Murray | 13 May, 2019 | Journeys
This is chapter 34 of my Tibet memoir in which I was laid low (I thought I was dying) by hepatitis, for which western medicine has no cure.
A few days later I got hit by a shockwave of illness and it was so bad that I was convinced I was about to die. All I could do was lie in bed and drink water. Fortunately Joga’s place was empty that day and I tried desperately to convince myself that I was fine, but the signs of hepatitis were hard to ignore: brown urine and yellow eyes. For two days I lay there, trying to get used to the feeling of being so ill, trying to accept it, trying to convince myself there was nothing wrong with me. This was the worst possible time to get sick: Roger and Isabella were both going off on a trek together and they had asked me to be Roger’s replacement teacher; it was the best job opportunity that had come up yet so I couldn’t stay in bed. But I was too weak to get up.
A day before the appointment at the class I staggered up to the Chinese Hospital – a Herculean feat – and sat by the window of my student’s room. I was too exhausted to teach and could barely talk. She assumed I was hungry and offered a plate of thick curry and pickles, but the smell turned my stomach even though I hadn’t eaten for days:
– You no eat?
– I can’t eat. Today I can’t teach! I feel very sick. I must see a doctor.
– Okay, we go see best doctor man in hospital.
With a sense of purpose that I found exhausting, she led me out of her block, up the road and into the Chinese Hospital – which I hadn’t actually visited thus far. It looked modern enough from the outside but inside it looked terrible: dirty, chaotic and with a cold, unwelcoming atmosphere. The doctor took my pulse, told me I had a common cold and gave me some aspirins. I returned to Joga’s, feeling like it had been a wasted journey and was so burned out by the exertion that I spent the rest of the day asleep. Joga’s place was full of her middle-aged lady friends who made sympathetic noises, but Joga was both sharp and sensitive and she knew what was needed: she shooed her friends out and banned others from coming for the next few days, giving me some welcome relief. I still couldn’t accept the fact that I had the dreaded hep. I was in denial: This can’t be happening to me!
The next morning was the job test and I dragged myself over to the Shata building, an ancient courtyard where Isabella and Roger lived and where the classes were held. I slowly made my way up the stairs, knocked on their door and was invited in to join them for breakfast. The smell of frying food was too much; I went straight to the toilet, located at the end of the landing and puked violently into the slit in the floor, inhaling a terrible smell from the cesspit that filled up the room below. Nothing came out. My body went through the heaving gesture of vomiting but there was nothing to puke except some watery gobs of sticky phlegm.
– You look rough, said Isabella back in the apartment. You don’t have to do this you know?
I didn’t know her well enough to know that she meant it. I had spent days working up the energy and determination to go through with this test, which was crucial – I was convinced that my very survival depended on it.
Downstairs in the big classroom the students were lively and pleased to see me. They were laughing and expecting me to join in but I just slumped into a chair, croaked out some words to explain my state and asked them to be quiet and read their books. They understood immediately and settled down to read. I felt they were on my side and that maybe I could actually pass this test. Towards the end of the class the head teacher came in and I stood up and started teaching some parts of the book. This seemed to satisfy him and he left. I slumped back down again thankfully and the rest of the class passed by uneventfully. For a moment I thought I was beating this illness but when I got back to Joga’s place I felt worse than ever and I knew there was no way I could maintain this charade of pretending to teach. On the way back I bumped into Paola who noticed the yellow eyes immediately and said:
– You look horrible. You go to Tibetan Hospital. They will help you.
I had considered going to the Tibetan Hospital but I was sceptical. Wasn’t it based on the medieval system of wind, bile and phlegm? How could it possibly help? But Western medicine has no cure for hepatitis so why not try Tibetan medicine? I was too exhausted to even think about it. I had seen the Tibetan Hospital and it was big and crowded. I didn’t have the energy to hustle my way in there and I would need a translator. I tried to think about these problems in Joga’s place which was now deathly quiet, but I couldn’t focus and I drifted off into a long state of delirium.
Joga took action. She had met my Chinese friend Je Yang, who had come round to see the place, and she was impressed with him. While I slept she sent out her lady friends to search the town and locate him. I was awoken by a series of prods and there he was, Je Yang, sitting at the end of my bed rather sheepishly, refusing Joga’s offer of tea or chang. He said:
– I’ve come to take you to the Tibetan Hospital. Let’s go. I laboriously got up and followed him across the old town.
There was a big crowd in the Tibetan Hospital and we both took up our positions; me by the bike rack where I was dry retching into the undergrowth and Je Yang inside, arguing with the doctors and nurses, trying to get an appointment. Eventually we got to see a doctor, a young man who was speaking in rapid Mandarin to Je Yang. I was told to roll up my sleeve and he took my pulse with three fingers on each wrist, concentrating hard for what seemed like ages. Then he asked about symptoms and everything I said he would just nod as if to confirm his diagnosis. Je Yang translated:
– The illness you have, what you call hepatitis, is a typical illness that comes up at this time of year, at the change from autumn to winter. A lot of people get ill when the seasons change. This one is to do with the bile, you have a bile imbalance. He says your illness is well-known to them and common for this time of year.
The doctor then gave me some evil-looking black pills, which looked suspiciously like dried sheep shit, and sent us on our way. As we were leaving I asked if I needed to follow a particular diet and he said no. I was willing to try the sheep shit pills, I would have tried anything, but I was still sceptical about Tibetan medicine.
Back at Joga’s place I sat with my glass of boiled water and chewed the first of the black pills. They tasted horrible – musty, gritty and sharp – but they didn’t make me vomit and I swallowed them down faithfully. I lay down on the bed, expecting nothing, and wondering what I could do next; no health insurance, no western doctors here, no hope? Three hours later I woke up feeling fine and by evening my normal energy levels were back. I couldn’t believe it, the Tibetan medicine was working – and I had only taken one pill. Was this a dream? Was this possible? I was still sceptical and expected to wake up the next morning feeling as ill as I’d felt all week, but by morning I was better than ever. Complete recovery.
And good fortune had smiled on me on the work front too. I got the job as Roger’s replacement. Also – against stiff competition from their old friends – they asked me to look after their apartment which was the ideal convalescence home. Their flat was upstairs at the Shata courtyard which was, I learned, a former palace. The courtyard had been turned into simple flats and the whole place was rather run down, but Roger and Isabella’s flat had some of the elegance of the old days; curious wooden beams and a long sweep of windows that stretched the length of the apartment itself. It was spacious, comfortable, full of interesting books and, best of all, private. I couldn’t understand why they had gone off on a trekking trip in winter but it was the ideal place to cook the only thing I was able to hold down – boiled vegetables.
There had been a lot of debate about who would be the replacement teacher for Isabella and I had pitched in with my view that Frenchy would be ideal; although I knew him as a reprobate he could make himself look respectable if he had to, and he was great with the students. I had seen him with them at the party and he’d been lively and stimulating. But they chose Big Jack, another depraved American. Big Jack was a pain in the neck and I didn’t like him from the start. He styled himself as an intellectual and had spent time studying Tibetan culture at Dharamshala, the capital of the Tibetans in India, seat of the Tibetan Government in exile and home of the Dalai Lama. He was a far bigger know-it-all than any other traveller I had met. He claimed to have trekked across large parts of Tibet and he considered himself the font of all knowledge regarding the country. What made it worse was that he was also a macho man; he was big, had a beard and he wore a Tibetan Khampa cloak, belted at the waist, and a brown woollen Pakistani hat. I think he tried to imitate the style and swagger of the Khampas. Big Jack’s problem was that he had no sense of humour – the saving grace of the real Khampas. He was also a bad teacher: rigid, impatient and liable to fly off the handle. I was sure the students hated him, but they were far too polite to say so.
I do have to thank Big Jack for giving me an introduction to Tibetan medicine, one of the many subjects he could drone on about for hours. I was thirsty for knowledge of this mysterious science that had cured me of the dreaded hep. What caught my imagination was the idea that wind, which is one of the key elements, is believed to be a horse which carries the body. A week earlier I would have mocked such an idea but now I was open to it. Perhaps the most impressive thing about Tibetan medicine is the way they diagnose illness, by reading a pulse. When westerners read a pulse they are simply counting the heartbeats, but it takes a Tibetan doctor years to learn how to read a pulse properly. The Tibetan doctor use three fingers and they develop a sensitivity so fine that each of their fingers picks up two separate pulses. In other words, they are reading six pulses at the same time.
When I first heard that they use the ancient classifications (or humours) of wind, bile and phlegm as the basis for their medical system I couldn’t take it seriously – this approach to medicine went out in the Middle Ages. This is their method of diagnosing illnesses. When they take a pulse they are reading the wind, bile and phlegm levels of a patient and they detect illnesses by spotting imbalances in one of these humours. The pills are interesting too. I had assumed they were some kind of herbal remedy but their main ingredients are minerals. Traditionally, Tibetan doctors would spend several weeks a year on horseback gathering rare plants, roots and minerals. Mixing the ingredients and making the pills is an ancient science.
I later found out that Tibetan Medicine dates back to a mythical age when eight Medicine Buddhas wrote down about 80,000 different illnesses – from the past, present and future. Tibetan Medicine is well developed in India, where they teach it in monasteries, and where it has been credited with successfully treating cancer and also AIDS, a disease they claim to have known about for hundreds of years. In India and the in the west Tibetan medical practitioners keep a low profile and make no public claims about its effectiveness.
I went back to the Tibetan Hospital a few times to try to garner more insights, but nobody spoke English. One day I came across an old doctor in robes who must have been in his nineties. He had a spring in his step and a sparkle in his eye. He stopped me in the corridor, greeted me, introduced himself as Dr Puntsok and asked where I was from. When I told him he smiled enthusiastically and beckoned me to follow. We went through corridors, up stairs and into a distant storeroom where he rummaged around and pulled out a little glass bottle that he showed to me proudly. It said Bicarbonate of Soda and was obviously very old, perhaps dating back to colonial times. I took the bottle, looked at it and wondered what I was supposed to do. Translate the label? Maybe he had heard me say I am from Bicarbonate of Soda? I looked round but he was gone.
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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.
by Rupert Wolfe Murray | 11 May, 2019 | Journeys
This is chapter 33 of my Tibet memoir in which I make friends with a Chinese guy who’s English was not only self-taught but it was a lot better than many native speakers.
One of Sir Woo’s visitors stood out from the others. Not only was he taller than the rest but he was quiet and thoughtful and showed genuine interest in what I was teaching:
– How do you do? he said in perfect BBC English. My name is Je Yang, I am a friend of Sir Woo and I too am from Shanghai.
– Hi there, my name’s Rupert.
– Glad to meet you.
– Where did you learn such good English? I presume you went to private school and university in the UK. Or Hong Kong?
– Not at all. I taught myself.
– What do you mean? You didn’t go to an English school? You must have had a great English teacher. I’ve never met a Chinese person who speaks English as well as you. How did you do it?
– Like I said, I taught myself. I’ve never had an English teacher. I’ve never been anywhere except Shanghai, where I am from, and here, where I work. I did used to listen to the radio and that helped with the pronunciation.
Even in Britain it’s unusual to meet someone who speaks English so well. Most Brits have an accent that indicates their class or their region, and however well foreigners master our language – and some know it better than we do – I don’t remember ever meeting anyone who spoke it as fluently as Je Yang. He had been to the technical university in Shanghai and worked as an engineer at the Tibet Electric Company (no, they didn’t need an English teacher) and said that getting a job here meant that he got a better salary so it was a good opportunity to save money. He wore old fashioned sunglasses when outside and when he took them off I could see that he had gentle eyes. He looked rather shy at first but he was full of ideas and concepts that he wouldn’t have dreamed of mentioning to the rowdy mob outside Sir Woo’s place.
When someone is eager to learn the results can be electric. That was the case with Je Yang. We would meet often and talk for hours. They weren’t lessons – there was no lesson plan, curriculum or text books – and I didn’t charge him; they were more like wide ranging conversations. I was hungry to learn about China and he wanted to improve his knowledge of English peculiarities. I would think back through my life, searching out all the weird and wonderful expressions that I had squirreled away in my memory, and we would discuss them. I had heard a lot of sayings over the years and I would squirrel them away in my memory. He was delighted with the phrase Bob’s your uncle! and especially my story about Sheila, the secretary at Canongate Publishing who would say Mary’s your aunt! as a refrain.
Only now were all these expressions coming out and I was amazed at how many I knew. I had a glimpse into the massive warehouse of information stored away in my memory – information that I’m not aware of and barely use. What made it particularly interesting was that I wasn’t quite sure if my explanation of each expression was the correct one, so we would debate it, look it up in his dictionary and sometimes accost British or American travellers for their view on whatever expression we were debating that day.
Just when I was starting to form the impression that Je Yang was something of an innocent, he told me he had a private business interest. Private business? In Communist China? Isn’t that illegal? He shrugged off the suggestion and told me about his friend in the Government Unit that had access to a bus that had been forgotten about. The bus driver didn’t have to report to anyone, didn’t have to do a particular run and basically worked for himself. He had made a deal with Je Yang that involved running foreign tourists from Lhasa to the Nepalese border, stopping off at important Tibetan monasteries on the way. He explained that the bus wasn’t exactly new but they were able to undercut the official tour operators, and so the travellers were getting a good deal. The tourists could, of course, get the local bus but that was a two day marathon to the border and if you wanted to visit a monastery en route you had to get off the bus and chance your luck hitching through the wilderness. It seemed that Je Yang’s bus made everyone happy.
But Je Yang had a problem. He told me that dealing with these foreigners made him unhappy and nervous, especially the French who were always complaining. He said the Americans could also be very difficult.
Some days later I found myself sitting with Je Yang on a hotel balcony outside the Travellers’ Co-op, waiting for the thirty people who had signed up for the next bus trip to come and buy their tickets. I was terrified; I had never dealt with so many strangers before and my hands were shaking. This is more scary than teaching I thought. Je Yang was right, the travellers were tough, pushy and suspicious – and his attitude of meek servitude only encouraged them. Most of them had travelled through India or China to get here (the consensus was that it was much harder to travel through China). They were hard-bitten and experienced and all of them had been ripped off at least once. I could understand their reluctance to hand over a hundred yuan to a pair like us. Two weeks later we were doing the same thing and before long I had got the knack of it. I realised that however rude and tough I tried to be, nobody seemed to mind. It reminded me of a quote from Napoleon, who apparently said: If the King is a nice man the reign is a failure.
My routine in Lhasa had changed completely. Most lunchtimes I was teaching at the Chinese Hospital – doing more eating than teaching – and evenings were taken up with Sir Woo. I was still staying at Joga’s place but it was almost impossible to relax there. Many times I wanted to stretch out on my bed for a few minutes but there were always a couple of burly warriors on it, cheerfully insisting I drink another cup of chang. At weekends I would climb onto Joga’s flat roof and read novels by Henry Miller, whose description of decadent Americans in Paris in the 1930s seemed to resonate with the life I was currently living.
Perhaps it was due to the altitude, or the fact that I hadn’t worked for so long, but I felt continuously exhausted. Often I would go to the Cheese Factory and stretch out on Frenchy’s bed for a few minutes. They had finally got their own room, which had become a wasteland of half-eaten food and all sorts of rubbish. The cold was really settling in with a vengeance and their borrowed paraffin heater was in constant use – not that it made any difference as the cold air leaked in through the windows, the ceiling and the thick stone walls. There was nobody on the Cheese Factory terrace anymore, everyone was inside trying to keep warm – many of them crowding into Diane and Frenchy’s room in the vain hope that a large number of bodies would result in warmth. They were all eager to know what it was like staying with Tibetans but I didn’t tell them much; I didn’t have much to tell, and I certainly didn’t invite any of them round in case they tried to muscle in on my space.
Diane and Frenchy both seemed obsessed with health matters. She was convinced that AIDS was a major epidemic that would end up destroying everyone. She said that if you slept with one person it could bring you into contact with over a thousand people, a claim that didn’t make much sense to me. My view was that the media had distorted the risks of AIDS, as they had done with herpes before that, but she dismissed me as an ignoramus and shut me up by quoting statistics. Frenchy was more concerned with hepatitis, an illness that was much closer to hand, in fact just next door four people had it. We called the next room the Hep Ward and noticed that everyone who went to stay in it seemed to catch it – not that this stopped the never-ending stream of travellers looking for a cheap bed. Jake, an English guy we had known for months, was now called the Yellow Man. Italian Paola, who had sad eyes and long black hair, claimed to have been cured by Tibetan medicine.
– Bullshit, cried Frenchy. Hepatitis doesn’t have a cure. Everyone knows that. Paola’s bullshitting herself. With hep you just stop eating oil and alcohol and sit and wait. That’s all you can do.
Larry, another American with an opinion, said he’d heard that a lot of people had been cured of hepatitis and other illnesses at the Tibetan Medicine Hospital. He said that Tibetan medicine is an ancient tradition that seems to get really good results. I didn’t pay much attention to these discussions and Frenchy dismissed it out of hand – he dismissed Tibetan medicine as alternative, and said all alternative medicine was hocus-pocus. I would make the occasional provocative remark to try and keep the discussion going.
Paola was different from the Cheese Factory crowd in that she didn’t hang around in the rooms all day, moaning and groaning. She was intrigued by Tibetan religious culture and seemed to know a lot about it, although she rarely spoke. Her favourite spot was right in front of the Jokhang, the main Tibetan temple in the centre of the old town, where she would spend hours talking to people in fluent Mandarin. As a relaxing contrast to my other activities, I was spending more and more time at the Barkhor, walking the network of streets that surrounded the temple, as the pilgrims did. It was a good place to have conversations; you could walk and talk. One evening I was walking past the front of the Jokhang with Frenchy and we saw Paola, who turned to me dreamily and offered us a sliver of dried cheese – white cheese that had been hardened to rock and then cut into little slivers, probably with a cleaver considering how hard the stuff was. I had seen this stuff before but never tried it so I took one, thanked her, popped it in my mouth and tried to get some taste out of it. We walked on and Frenchy hissed into my ear:
– You idiot. She’s had hep! I laughed off his suggestion and thought how sad it must be to go through life with this kind of hypochondria.
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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.
by Rupert Wolfe Murray | 9 May, 2019 | Journeys
This is chapter 33 from my Tibetan memoir, in which I manage to avoid the law (and the backpackers) and stay with local Tibetans…
Although the Import Export people didn’t give me a job everything started happening at once. Life seems to work this way; once inside the magic circle you’ll find anything is possible, but getting inside it often seems impossible. The key is coming across the right people and impressing them, but quite how one goes about that is something of a mystery.
Things really started moving after meeting Asheya, whom I was introduced to at the new Kailash restaurant – the first place in town that played music. Asheya was extremely small, but he was solidly built and had a round face and warm, beaming eyes. He was middle-aged, lived in Kathmandu where he dealt in carpets and antiques and spoke fluent English. His family was from Lhasa and, for the first time in decades, he was able to visit them. He was much warmer than the other exiled Tibetans I had come across and was from a different generation to the disco-dancing crowd I had met thus far. Initially I was suspicious of his interest in me, although taking full advantage of it, and wondered what his ulterior motives were. Did he want something? If so, I never found out what it was.
He listened to my plea – I want to stay in Lhasa but I need cash, a job, and also a place to stay so I can get away from some annoying Americans. Although my demands were simple enough most people I spoke to seemed to have a problem understanding me. Maybe they didn’t want to? Perhaps helping a foreigner was too risky? Asheya got it in one go, thought about it for some time and told me to come back to this same restaurant the following evening.
When I returned the next evening I wasn’t expecting anything and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t turned up at all. Not only did Asheya show up, he came into the restaurant with two young ladies. These lovely ladies, he announced grandly, are your new students. They were Tibetan nurses from the big Chinese hospital on the north side of the city, both wanted to learn English and were willing to pay seven yuan an hour fee – each. I couldn’t understand why these two could pay me when Elliot’s whole class had refused. This was a real break; I knew that the big hospital had at least one English teacher and maybe this was a way in. Maybe I could get hired there? I thanked Asheya, spoke to the ladies and arranged to meet up with them three times a week.
The second amazing thing that Asheya did that day was to arrange my accommodation at his sister’s place. This was going beyond kindness as I knew it was illegal for Tibetans to accommodate foreigners and I had never heard of it happening in the city. He assured me that it was no problem, nothing special and wasn’t a risk. It was with a sense of glee that I went back to the Cheese Factory that evening and met Diane and Frenchy:
– Guess what? I’m moving out!
– Moving out? You can’t move out. You’ve just got your own room.
– I’m sick of it here. I’m sick of you guys.
– Hey, we like it here. We like this Little America.
– Well, I’m outta here.
– You Limeys are crazy. Where the hell ya’ going anyway?
– I can’t tell you.
– Why the hell not?
– Because.
Asheya’s sister was called Joga and she lived down a stinking alley not far from the Cheese Factory. The following day he led me down the narrow alley and we followed the open sewer which led into an earth-covered courtyard which had a ramshackle well in the middle. Asheya cheerfully pointed to the well and told me it was the only source of water. Did the sewage water leak into it? There were four low, shack-like houses around the yard and Joga lived in the smallest of them. We went into a tiny room with a mud floor, two small benches and a dresser. It was so low that I had to bend almost double. We sat on one of the benches and Joga served us drinks.
Joga was much smaller than Asheya. Although he never talked about it I could see that she was disabled: her spine was only about six inches long and twisted. She had a kind face and served us drinks with no trace of self pity. She could walk around with a strange gait and she managed perfectly, walking with her own particular gait. She spoke no English but seemed happy enough to have me to stay. She pointed to the narrow bench that we were sitting on and said that would be my bed. I was delighted. Even though the place was a dive – even my Tibetan friends said so when I invited them over – and the smell from the sewer was appalling at times, I was so glad to get in with a Tibetan family that I would have put up with anything. I had been hoping to get a job but had never even thought that I would also be able to live with Tibetan people.
Joga and Asheya were Khampas, he explained, from the Kham region of Tibet which used to stretch far into the Chinese province of Sichuan. The curious thing was that the Kham people tend to be huge, and they make themselves seem bigger by their bulky cloaks, their big hats, their big mouths and their swaggering walk. When I first turned up with my rucksack I was introduced to three burly Kham warriors who were sitting on the benches drinking chang. They all had big grins on their faces and insisted I share a drink with them.
A constant stream of Kham visitors came to Joga’s place and even though they were a noisy, drunken rabble they always treated her – and me – with the utmost respect. They would shout and curse at each other constantly, sometimes even strike each other to emphasise a point; but for them Joga was a princess. Every evening the room was full of chattering Khampas who had no intention of leaving. Not only was my bed inaccessible but when they sat on it they lifted up the blankets and sat directly on the sheet which, as a result, was always grimy. There were usually about six people in the room every evening, a mixture of big Khampas and Joga’s local women friends. Their main activity was telling jokes, none of which I could understand but I got into the atmosphere and appreciated the burst of laughter and applause at the punch line. The murky white drink they call chang was being poured constantly and every time I would take a sip of the sour brew my cup would be immediately refilled, even if I refused insistently. I learned that if you didn’t want to drink you simply don’t touch the stuff.
Joga’s place was always dark – the room had only one tiny window and it was usually blocked by a huge Khampa. This was a sharp contrast with the Chinese hospital where I would teach English in a room full of light. The nurses’ room had features I had never appreciated so much before — big windows, a clean concrete floor, running water and a kitchenette. There was only one student when I got there, the other one was apparently busy with her new boyfriend. No problem, this one was friendly, attentive to my basic lessons and would always make me a delicious lunch. She was pretty in a natural way but she ruined her appeal by applying too much make-up. I wondered if she fancied me? Did she put make-up on for my benefit? What was I supposed to do? The idea of sex with a local scared me, I had never heard of a foreigner doing it and hated to think what the consequences would be. The suppressed sexual tension between us contributed to a good atmosphere in our series of lessons-cum-lunches.
The next thing that happened was that Isabella gave me a job, as if by magic. She had a new evening student, a Chinese tailor called Sir Woo, but she didn’t have time to teach him because every evening she was running the Travellers’ Co-op. Would you be an angel and teach him for me? she had asked.
Without hesitation I accepted, delighted to have added another student to my slowly growing list. Sir Woo was small and lively and came from the great city of Shanghai, my eventual destination. He lived and worked in a small box that had been knocked together in the Chinese part of town. It was a space about the size of an entrance hall, enough to have an opening to the street and do his tailoring work. His bed consisted of a board that had been tacked under the ceiling. This space doubled up as our teaching room and the only way in was through the hatch that opened up towards the street; I had to climb in, which was fine by me. Despite the miniscule scale of his operation Sir Woo seemed to make plenty of money, most of which he sent home, and he always paid my fee on time. He later told me that he made 30,000 yuan a year which was ten times what the average Tibetan earned.
Teaching Sir Woo was fun because he was desperate to learn and animated in his responses, even though his pronunciation was appalling. It was also an opportunity to get an insight into the Chinese side of the city and learn some more of their language. His hatch was open to the street and, during our lessons, his friends from Shanghai would crowd round and watch us in awed silence, trying to hold back their giggles. As soon as we took a short break there would be an explosion of humorous chatter. The idea of Sir Woo learning English made them crack up with laughter. I learned about the textile business in Lhasa and how it is monopolised by people from China’s east coast, Shanghai in particular, and I understood that the hopeful traders and exiles who had come up from Nepal and India to trade clothes really didn’t have a chance.
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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.
by Rupert Wolfe Murray | 7 May, 2019 | Journeys
When I’m walking alone over a long distance, with no need to adjust my pace for other people, my subconscious takes over; it works out how far I have to go and then sets my body at the optimum speed – usually pretty fast. I felt myself powering over that mountain as if driven by some other force. I reached a village on the other side, had a break, crossed a stream and strode up towards a distant pass. One of the foreign travellers had told me that this pass was 18,000 feet high but this was no problem as I was flying up. I would arrive in a jiffy. Unfortunately it was a false summit that I had reached so quickly – and then there was another, and another. It was evening by the time I reached the pass and the weather was taking a turn for the worse. Dark clouds were being churned around by a strong wind and it felt like snow was on the way.
I was in need of shelter and was surprised to note that there weren’t any nomads around. I had been told that this was a common route for nomads to reach Lhasa from the south-east. Confident that I would come across somebody soon enough I charged on into the night, oblivious to the fact that I had walked about sixteen hours that day. Eventually I gave up on finding any nomads that evening; I found a spot between mounds of moss, in rough grass and stones, and settled down for the night. I started heating up some water for noodles with my petrol in the tin can trick, and laid out my sleeping bag and plastic sheet.
Suddenly there was a clash of thunder and a violent storm came crashing up the valley, with demonic energy. I forgot about the noodles and whipped out my plastic groundsheet – the Tamang porter’s raincoat that I had bought at the border – and tried to make a shelter. Just as hailstones started to spit furiously I got my boots off and crawled into the sleeping bag. The temperature dropped rapidly and I could feel water soaking into the bottom of the sleeping bag. The storm built up to a climax of fury and noise and was hurling down big hailstones. As long as this plastic sheet holds, I thought, I’ll be fine, and I stretched it to cover my feet. With an awful ripping sound the square of plastic ripped in half, exposing the sleeping bag to the elements. For some reason I started laughing; it served me right for being so unprepared, for sneering at the well-equipped travellers, for becoming so decadent. This was my punishment. It also felt like a test, as if the Storm Demon was saying: So, you want to stay in Tibet? See if you like this!
I tried to ignore the dampness and cold that was spreading into the sleeping bag from all sides and told myself I’m not cold! This isn’t so bad! Could be a lot worse! It’s not even winter. The nomads would laugh in the face of this storm. With thoughts of sunny days and warm childhood afternoons in Scotland by the River Tweed, and babbling continually to myself, I managed to get to sleep.
I woke up as soon as the grey light started creeping under the horizon. I was buried in snow. I couldn’t see my rucksack, boots or any of my possessions. I forced my way out of the sleeping bag, which had been frozen solid underneath. It took over an hour to dig out my gear. My hands – which I had used as snow shovels — were so cold that it was almost impossible to tie my shoelaces and pack up my rucksack. I kept motivated by running a dialogue in my head: This isn’t cold! This is nothing. What would the nomads say about you now? They’d call you pathetic! Get on with it!
Eventually I started walking and the movement brought welcome relief as my limbs got some heat into them. The snow was knee-deep and I had to wade through it slowly, each step was an effort and the valley in front seemed endless. It took all day to cross it and by nightfall I was lucky enough to find a cave where I fell asleep instantly. By the third day I reached Samye Monastery and the first thing I noticed was that it was surrounded by sand and I imagined for a moment that I was a French Foreign Legionnaire who had just survived an impossible march through the Sahara Desert.
Samye had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and was being rebuilt, but the atmosphere was totally different from Ganden: the place was overrun with pilgrims from the eastern part of Tibet, the unruly Khampas, and there was a reckless feel in the air. I was buzzing, delighted to be alive, and I was sure that this feeling would be crowned by the offer of a job helping with the restoration work, perhaps even on the murals. Before visiting the monastery I spent time in the workers’ tearoom, a huge space run by a cripple who leaped around the place with incredible energy. I made repeated visits to a vast cauldron that held delicious sweet tea. Then I wandered through the half built monastery and saw scores of brightly painted statues, each one more terrifying than the next. These were the guardians of the faith.
A wild family from the east took me into their makeshift room that night. They were gambling and drinking late into the night and people were coming and going constantly. Over the course of the evening I started to piece the story of Samye together: the monastery was a vast three-storey structure before its demolition during the Cultural Revolution; each floor represented Buddhism from a different country. Tibetan Buddhism was on the ground floor, the Indians were on the first floor and the Chinese at the top. The whole complex was built in the shape of a mandala – a tiny circle surrounded by bigger circles and squares. By the end of the evening I got the name of the man in charge of the restoration work and my confidence, fuelled by drinking too much chang and my luck at surviving the snowstorm, was at stratospheric levels. Surely they would be delighted to offer me a job? I would be an honoured guest, a respected advisor, a foreign expert living with the monks.
The next morning the wild family who had taken me in, and who shared my enthusiasm for my imminent employment, sent their youngest daughter scurrying off to find the boss. Soon she returned with him and I realised, to my horror, that he was none other than my drinking partner from the night before – in other words, he’d seen me at my drunken worst. He was young and businesslike and seemed unimpressed with my reference letter, which had been badly stained during the storm. He didn’t offer me a job. I pleaded with him to hire me, soon running out of the vocabulary needed to argue my case. He seemed unmoved and then had an idea; he searched his pockets, pulled out a picture of a Tibetan mandala, passed me a scrap of paper and a pencil and said copy it. The family crowded round noisily, expectantly, but I knew the game was up. I couldn’t do it, all I had learned in Vienna was to draw a straight line. What was I thinking? Who was I kidding?
I tried to recover from my humiliation by offering to show what a good labourer I could be, but the workers seemed to be under orders to ignore me. I watched lines of cheery Tibetan women wearing traditional, multicoloured aprons picking up baskets of sand, walking along networks of rickety wooden planks and dumping them in a pile. They had a good system going, they were working hard, and I started to realise that perhaps it would be inappropriate for me to try and insert myself among them. I would look totally out of place. There were plenty of children running around and they were used to fetching and carrying stuff for the women, and taking messages around the building site. They didn’t need me.
Not sure what to do with myself, I went into the monastery and climbed the stairs. I wandered into a huge room where a group of young monks in purple robes were sitting in a circle. They were printing text onto strips of paper which they then rolled up and stuffed into small statues. When they saw me they jumped up and insisted I join them. One of them went off to get a cup of tea but it was tepid and too buttery (if Tibetan tea isn’t piping hot you notice how greasy and disgusting it really is). One of them said What do you have in your pocket? and I pulled out the Swiss Army Knife I always carried around with me. They asked if they could look at it and each one of them examined it carefully. When one of them found that it had a small magnifying glass they leaped up in excitement, forgot all about their work and took it in turns to examine the murals that were painted on every wall of the room.
I left Samye with a good feeling. Although I had been humiliated by the boss I felt I had totally deserved it. That particular avenue of employment was now closed. It was time to return to Lhasa but there was no way I was going back over those mountains. I walked down to the main road and spotted an open-backed truck that had slowed down. It was packed full of pilgrims and I raced after it, grabbed hold of the tailboard and started climbing up. Strong hands grabbed me and hauled me aboard. I was surrounded by big, smiling, sunburned Khampas and there was a carnival atmosphere – they were heading for Lhasa, their holy city.
The truck only went as far as Tsedang. We reached a truck stop and everyone got off. The pilgrims started walking towards Lhasa but I wasn’t in a hurry and went into the town to see if there was an old Tibetan quarter. There wasn’t. Tsedang looked like a small Chinese settlement but I ran into some travellers who told me it’s one of the biggest cities in Tibet. They also told me there was a friendly PSB (Public Security Bureau) nearby where I could get my visa extended. I had completely forgotten about my visa and I quickly checked it, glad to see that the storm hadn’t totally destroyed my passport, only dampened the edges a bit. Oh my God! I thought, My visa extension has run out! I cursed my laziness and stupidity. What do they do to people whose visas run out? I thought as I hurried to the PSB, I expect they will fine me. They might even expel me from the country. The policeman who dealt with me was polite, dressed in a uniform, and Tibetan. He gave me a one month extension without fuss and didn’t seem to notice that my visa had expired.
Back at the Cheese Factory the scene was the same, but more Americans had moved in and it felt like they had colonised the place. Diane and Frenchy had stayed longer at the Lhasa Hotel, until they were thrown out for not paying their bill. Frenchy had seen a bucket full of aborted babies and felt nauseous for a week. My short trek had purified me of my previous decadence and I felt in a different mood now, healthier and determined not to binge. I would have to focus on getting a job or facing up to the fact that I would have to leave. I checked my money supply – just over $200 left – and knew it was time to move on.
I managed to get my own room at the Cheese Factory – a tiny, vile hole with black walls – but I was delighted as it put some distance between me and the Americans, a breathing space. One evening two hitchhikers from California pushed their way into the room, sat themselves down on the bed and started telling me their story. They talked for hours and I wasn’t interested; I wanted them to leave, but they were determined to tell me about their route (which they pronounced rout) of hitching from Chengdu, the Chinese province directly east of Tibet. They went into minute detail about avoiding police checkpoints at night, walking through mountains and jungles and beating off savage dogs. Although their tale bored me I did absorb the information that it was possible to leave Tibet by that route and it did sound more interesting than going through the northern desert. But I wasn’t so interested in going into China, or my initial destination of Shanghai, as my new priority was to stay in Lhasa. If I needed a new visa I could get one in Kathmandu.
The next days were spent asking everyone I had ever met if they knew about a job. I spent hour after hour walking from unit to unit, asking for a job. I asked Tibetan exiles, Chinese leaders, secretaries, teachers if they had any ideas. Nothing. Isabella was keen to help but she couldn’t produce a job out of a hat, she had had to wait four months before finding hers. Diane and Frenchy thought I had gone insane:
– Man, you can’t get a job here! This is China for Chrissake. Communism. Duh. Just go back to bed.
It was Wednesday and I set myself a new deadline: if I don’t find a job by Saturday I will leave. I would hitch down to India and make my way home. Every moment became precious as I realised this might be the last time I saw Lhasa, a city I had grown to really appreciate. I spent the mornings hustling for work and sat around gloomily in the evening with Diane and Frenchy, trying to savour my last moments in Tibet. I packed my tattered rucksack. I didn’t have much and was careful not to accumulate stuff, like the beautiful silver antiques in the market, as when you’re walking you regret every bit of extra weight and start thinking of what you can jettison.
On the Friday night I was psyched up to go, I had done my best to find a job and had failed. With a friendly Mexican I had just met, I went to the restaurant in the Snowlands Hotel and got into the party atmosphere coming from the neighbouring table – where ten well-dressed Tibetans were celebrating. They spoke some English, we got chatting and they invited us to join them. We said cheers in every language we knew (this is the one word I learned in every country I had visited). They were a handsome looking bunch and they told us they had just returned from two years in Beijing where they had been trained to come and work for the Tibet Import Export Bureau.
– Do you have an English teacher? I asked
– No.
– I am an English teacher. I am looking for a job. Could I come and be the English teacher at the Tibet Import Export Bureau? They talked furiously among themselves for what felt like ages and then said:
– We see leader. We say you good English teacher. You come Monday.
I couldn’t believe my luck, I jumped for joy, raised another glass, I had managed to get a job in Tibet. I didn’t need to leave after all.
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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.
by Rupert Wolfe Murray | 5 May, 2019 | Journeys
This is chapter 30 from my Tibet memoir in which I make the transition from a debauched life in Lhasa and head into the mountains…
What followed was a nightmare. I could hardly control my feelings of panic and confusion; how was I supposed to make a lesson out of this ridiculous kid’s book that Elliot had thrust into my hand? And the students weren’t making it any easier by sitting there silently, staring at me as if I knew what to do. It was the longest hour I ever lived through and what made it worse was the news that the pay was only five yuan an hour. After the class I protested and said I wouldn’t go on unless they raised it to at least seven yuan an hour. Surely such a big group could scrape that much together? I sought Elliot’s support but he had washed his hands of the situation by now and didn’t even want to discuss it. It’s your baby now was all he would say. I waited for them to agree on a raise but, perhaps realising how hopeless their potential English teacher was, they presumably decided to forget about the whole thing and I never heard any more about it.
I was living a double life in those days. With Diane and Frenchy I was a drunk, a hooligan, someone of whom decent people would disapprove of and keep away from their daughters. With Isabella, who was a textbook definition of a decent person, I portrayed myself as a clean-living, enthusiastic English teacher who didn’t swear, spit and drink too much beer. It seemed to work and I felt sure that Isabella would give me the first job that came her way. I was glad to be getting the best out of both these worlds but was always careful not to get too close to one group or the other as I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed as a boring English teacher – or as a drunk.
After a few weeks this exhausting, debauched lifestyle was getting me down. All those late nights and all that booze was starting to burn me out. As the New Yorkers would say, I needed to bag the scene, do something else, move on. I was starting to feel rotten inside. I was getting hooked into this routine of sloth and alcohol and while I knew I should clean up my act, there was nothing else going on in my life – no prospect of a job, nowhere else to go and the idea of hitching all the way to Shanghai seemed like a drag.
During this time I was sustained by the optimistic belief that something good would eventually happen to me in Tibet. This sentiment led me to believe that I had better see some of Tibet now, while I still had time on my hands, as who knew how busy I would become in the future. I built up my determination to get out of town for a while, to give the decadence a break and look for a job restoring murals at Samye Monastery, whose representatives in Lhasa I had recently met.
I found out as much as I could about the route from Ganden Monastery, which was about an hour away from Lhasa by bus, to Samye Monastery, which was about four days walk to the south. I thought this sounded feasible and I geared up mentally to overcome my sloth. I hung out at the Travellers’ Co-op just long enough to scrounge a sleeping bag and some tinned food supplies. I wondered if I could find a travelling companion who wasn’t a crashing bore. Of course, I realised, Diane and Frenchy can come with me. They liked the idea but the reality of walking further than the nearest teahouse was anathema to them. When I pushed them about it they called me a Limey dork. The weather was getting colder and this made it impossible to get either of them out of bed in the morning, and I realised that I would never be able to drag them on a four-day hike. I was on my own.
What gelled thought into action was a particularly decadent night at the Lhasa Hotel, the place where I had enjoyed a Yak Burger when I came back from the plateau. Diane had booked a triple room for the reduced winter rate of thirty yuan (₤3) and we all chipped in. Six of us crowded into the room and we took turns to luxuriate in the bath. We were astounded by the crisp cotton bed sheets, the firm mattress and the deep pile carpet was more comfortable than my bed in the Cheese Factory. Heat kept pouring into the room as if by magic. We drank a bottle of Old Suntory Japanese whisky, several crates of beer and played poker in clouds of cigarette smoke until dawn. When I woke up on the floor I had a powerful feeling that the age of hangovers had just come to an end, and with a fresh sense of determination, I left the room before anyone else was awake, went back to the Cheese Factory, packed my rucksack and started walking along the road towards Ganden.
It was afternoon. I had missed the early morning bus by over seven hours but I was so determined to get out of town that I would have walked all the way. Fortunately a truck picked me up and dropped me off, a couple of hours later, at a small village underneath the mountain that Ganden Monastery sits on. It was evening by now and I felt tired, thirsty and hung-over. I was glad to have left my American friends behind and I hoped I would never drink alcohol again. I looked at the muddy road leading up to the monastery and decided to try and find somewhere to stay in the roadside village. Soon enough I found an old couple who took me in and gave me a cup of tea, and just as I was getting comfortable and hoping to settle down for the night they said sharply:
– You’ve had your tea. Now get out!
It was pitch dark and the muddy road was steep and endless. I plodded up and lost track of time. A wild howling of dogs mixed in with the sound of the wind and the higher I got the louder the barking sounds became. There must have been hundreds of stray dogs up there and I imagined they were passing the word round that some new meat was on its way up. Ganden Monastery was said to be vast but there was no sign of it, no lights or sound (apart from the dogs). Had I come up the wrong mountain? Was it invisible? I was staggering, parched with thirst and frustration. Why hadn’t I organised this properly? Why hadn’t I brought a bottle of water? Where was the monastery? Will the dogs attack?
An old building with thick stone walls came into view. Weak candlelight was coming through the windows and I rushed towards it, hoping to reach safety before the dogs got me. I banged loudly on the wooden door and then screamed. No reply. The barking was getting louder. I reached down, grabbed some stones and started throwing them as hard as I could at the beasts, missing but momentarily keeping them at bay. I knew that when they had built up enough numbers they would charge.
The door of the stone building burst open and three young monks came rushing out and ran, screaming, towards the dogs. The dogs just melted away. Then the monks turned to me and invited me inside. I was safe. They all seemed to be teenagers and their chief, to whom they showed great respect, couldn’t have been more than twenty. They gave me tea and food and seemed delighted to have me in their midst. Was I the first foreigner they had entertained? They were laughing and chasing each other around the room, not the sort of behaviour one would expect from a Buddhist monk. By now I could communicate in basic Tibetan:
– The Guest House is over there, one of them said.
– Can I stay here for the night? I asked, pointing to the floor.
– No, you have to go to the Guest House. You’re not allowed to stay here.
– Please, I asked, I would much rather stay with you.
They argued about this for ages. The chief monk wanted to stick to the rules but the three teenagers obviously wanted me to stay. Eventually it was agreed that I could stay and I settled down for the night on a wooden bench. The three teenagers lay down on the floor and the chief monk on a bed. We were all in the same room and they joked late into the night. I slept like the dead. The next morning I woke early and everyone was gone. I stepped onto the porch where pale sunlight was coming through frozen, misty air . The three young monks were all sitting cross-legged, chanting furiously. Was this a way of staying warm? Each one of them had a curious collection of papers on their laps and they seemed to be chanting from what was written on them. I looked more carefully and realised that these were books with mantras, or chants. Each book consisted of about fifty or sixty thin strips of paper, all covered with ornate Tibetan script, and the covers of the books were made up of long pieces of wood. They would flip each page over after they had chanted it and each monk had two piles of paper in front of him – the pages they had chanted and the remainder. When they were done the monks gathered up the papers, closed them in their wooden covers and then wrapped them up in cotton – presumably against the dust. They piled these sock-like packages into a cupboard where hundreds more were stacked. When they had finished their chanting they gave me tea and tsampa, and started to mock fight with each other.
The ruins of Ganden Monastery are majestic. There are hundreds of gutted buildings, spread out on top of a crescent shaped mountain. It looked like the remnants of a small town. Seven thousand monks had lived here before the whole place had been dynamited during the China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1968. During that period, when much of China’s cultural heritage was destroyed, Mao Tse Tung encouraged the population to attack the Four Olds – old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas. In Tibet over six thousand monasteries were razed and thousands of monks were killed or sent to prison camps.
The effect of seeing these ruins was numbing and I wondered what it took for people to destroy such a spiritual place. Some of the buildings were being rebuilt and I could see Tibetan workers heaving great oblongs of chiselled stone and there was a boisterous atmosphere on the building site. Most of the young monks were allowed to run around and play like kids; nobody seemed to mind their shouting and pranks. It had the atmosphere of a school-yard. I was introduced to a monk who must have been in his eighties and his room was an ocean of calm and solitude. His floor was covered in rugs, his walls filled with icons – and a poster that seemed totally out of place: the Central Committee of China’s Communist Party.
He tried to talk to me about spiritual matters but my grasp of Tibetan was far too basic to understand anything. He showed me a photo of Ganden before the Communists had got to it and it looked like a full-sized town. I felt honoured to be in this man’s presence and I could feel the goodness and wisdom emanating from him, to such an extent that it didn’t seem important that I couldn’t understand his words. I never found out who he was. He asked if I would like to stay in his room but I politely declined as I felt more comfortable with the rowdy teenagers. I spent the rest of the day wandering around the ruins, catching a bit of sleep when I found a sunny spot, and by evening I was with the boys again, shouting, singing and laughing.
The following morning I was full of energy and ready for anything the heavens could throw at me. I got up at dawn, said goodbye to my young friends and confirmed with them that the narrow path heading into the mountain above Ganden was the right track for Samye.
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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.
