One wonders how much of Mao's lib­eration was motivated by simple covet­ousness. The name the Chinese gave their newly annexed terri­tory-Xizang-is tell­ing: it means "Our Westem Treasure-House." It had fertile farmland in the East and South, ura­nium, lithium, tungsten, borax, and gold, more than ninety totally unex­ploited resources, strate­gic importance-whoever controlled the Tibetan Plateau looked down on the rest of Asia-and above all, for the billion­plus Han masses, space.

       With the death of Chou En-lai in 1976, the oppression in Tibet eased up a bit. Some Chinese began to realize that horrible mistakes had been made in the way Tibet had been treated. By the early eighties it became clear that Beijing was not going to break the back of Tibetan culture. The Old Guard had all died and the cultural lobotomy was aborted. The new policy was: You can have your reli­gion, you can have your dogs (there was a tremendous resurgence of canines, though not the Lhasa Apsos-Nepalese strays, pariah dogs, which have become a real problem around the monasteries). We won't bother you too much, but we won't give you decent jobs or an educa­tion either. As long as you accept your degraded status everything will be fine, but if you demonstrate, if you start clam­oring for Tibetan independence, you will be cracked down on severely.

       But the genocide of the Tibetans by absorption continued. Han Chinese were given generous incentives to settle in Xi­zang and were rewarded for marrying Tibetan women. Currently, the Han-Ti­betan ratio on the plateau is estimated to be 7.5 million to 6 million.
 

      Happy Happy Happy

       The Lhasa Holiday Inn is a multi­million-dollar extravaganza the Chi­nese have sunk into Tibetan tourism, and it dominates the sterile, creepily 1984-like Chinese new town that has taken over much of the Happy River Valley, where Lhasa used to be. Tour­ism is about the only money-making proposition that the Chinese have going in Xizang, which puts the tourist in an awkward position because he is in effect subsidizing the oppression. On the other hand, tourists joined the demonstrations of the late eighties and can be credited with arousing in the Tibetans bourgeois capitalist cravings for things like self -de­termination and individual rights.

       So far, the tourists have not arrived in great enough number to undermine the culture, to turn the pageant of devotion into a replica of itself, as eventually hap­pens (look at Carnival in Rio, for in­stance). They are still outnumbered hundreds to one in the conga lines at the monasteries. Besides Jules and me there were a group of elderly Americans, gutsy widows who had taken it into their heads to see Tibet before they die, a German group (Tibet is the sort of place Germans go for-Hitler believed the masters of the universe, the old ar­cane sages, lived here), a young Bra­zilian named Marcos who was travel­ing around the world, and a couple of people like me and Jules, whose pres­entations didn't quite add up, among them a French diplomat who was right out of Casablanca, smoking coolly and traveling on a regular passport as a "manager."

       The Lhasa Holiday Inn has to be one of the most remote and surreal bastions of modernity in the hemisphere, if not the sphere. But Tibet as a touristic expe­rience-the monasteries choked with pilgrims, the dust-, glare-, and altitude­heightened Chaucerian time warp-was so intense and out of this world that I found myself feeling almost grateful for the amenities the hotel offered. It was a lifeline for the discombobulated in)i. with its hot running water, nightly vid­eos-Perry Mason reruns, James Bond, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest-on the TV, Coke (which had beaten Pepsi to the plateau but was no more the Real Thing than the local version of Kent cig­arettes). Something had also been lost in translation in the arrangements of Beethoven's Ninth and' 'Home on the Range" that emanated incessantly from overhead speakers: they sounded exactly the same. The Han Chinese who tried to run the place up to American standards all looked the same. They were nonindi­viduated, programmed porcelain dolls, like the girl who greeted me with a me­chanical smile and the words "Coupon, please" at the dining-room door, and the younger set at the disco: a dozen girls dancing in formation like aerobics class, soldiers in uniform box-stepping togeth­er to hot numbers like Rick Dees's 1976 novel­ty hit, "Disco Duck." Marcos had the perfect word for the scene: "massificado. " mental­ly massified. Happy mu­sic gushing all day long on the banks of the Hap­py River, happy bees go­ing about their little tasks, each contributing to the good of the hive, happy tourists, happy Tibetans, happy Han Chinese, everybody playing his part in the wary charade that life in Lhasa had become.

       At night Rinchen and I would sneak out of the hotel and, tying on the white gauze masks that everyone wore because of the dust, we would flag down a bicy­cle rickshaw, and be pedaled past undif­ferentiated concrete apartment blocks, barracks, and office buildings, all in the same sterile party architecture, to the Ti­betan quarter on the other side of town, where the Barkhor was, where the ac­tion, such as it was, was. There, in dark little dives straight out of indiana Jones. we would hear that things were not so great after all.

        One time we were led down the dark, rickety, second-story walkway of an an­cient, tilting building and seated on a hokey sofa in a low-ceilinged, dirt­floored living room. As the handsome daughter of the house poured us cup af­ter cup of salty, rancid yak-butter tea (definitely an acquired taste), we were told that Tibetans were becoming out­casts, second-class citizens in their own land, like Native Americans or Austra­lian aborigines. It was very hard for a Tibetan to proceed beyond high school because everything at the college level was taught in Mandarin. So there were the beginnings of a hang-out problem. No drugs or prostitution yet, but mah­jongg had sifted down to the masses (in the old Tibet, noblemen had gone on mah-jongg binges that lasted for days), and the young blades were playing bil­liards, smoking, and sometimes stealing to get along, The Chinese were making cheap radish liquor and rice booze avail­able, perhaps in a deliberate effort to ad­dict young Tibetans, as we did our Indians. It was also Chinese policy to encourage inter-Tibetan violence. Pick­pockets and robbers were given lenient prison terms-half weren't even sen­tenced. Truly disruptive elements were recruited as gyan-yi-' 'undressed po­lice"-by the P.S.B.

       We know the young monks and nuns are for the Dalai Lama and Tibetan independence, I told the man of the house, but what about the others?

       "There's no difference between the monks and the laity," he answered. "All have the same feeling."  But later in the evening, he said, "Sixty percent be­lieve in freedom, 20 percent don't care, and 20 percent-those who play footsie with the Chinese-don't want it."

       And how will Tibet gain its freedom, with the Dalai Lama ruling out violence?

       Pause. Rinchen translates: "He be­lieves it's not possible. Only if China falls apart again, as it did when the Man­chus were overthrown in 1911."
 

      Kathmandu

       One afternoon in Kathmandu I rode out to a transit camp for newly ar­rived Tibetan refugees on the back of a motorcycle with a young exile active in the freedom movement. I'll call him Sonam. Kathmandu has a thriving Tibet­an community with a dozen-odd monas­teries and several remarkable tulkus. A lot of Tibetans were coming over the border, Sonam told me, to attend a high­level teaching called the Kalachakra ini­tiation, which the Dalai Lama was giving the following month at Sarnath, the city in India where the Buddha him­self began to teach. "Most of them won't understand head or tail of the initiation, but they're hoping at least to get part of the blessing from the holy gathering, to catch a glimpse of the Dalai Lama."

The Chinese were issuing limited numbers of temporary travel permits­none to monks or nuns. False travel per­mits, which were actually hospital ad­mission cards, were selling like hotcakes in Lhasa for two yuan a piece to illiterate devotees. The soldiers were tearing them up at the border. A lot were sneak­ing over without permits, hiding in the backs of trucks and hiring Nepali coy­otes to guide them across, which was risky because some of the coyotes for a second fee turned the refugees back to the Chinese border guards. For those who already had a record of demonstrat­ing, refoulement was death.

       The son of nomads, Sonam had left Tibet in the '59 diaspora at the age of eight, and he knew a great deal about the nomads' folk beliefs. He told me about some Lilliputian beings less than a foot tall, called samishingmi, who sat on mule dung for benches and used blades of grass for arrows. "When I was a kid, my parents told me not to roll boulders down the hill onto the prairie, because they would scratch the surface of the grass. There was a place called Crystal Hill where rock crystals sparkled in the sun, but we were forbidden to break them off because they were the toys of the spirit babies." He told me that tur­tles were believed to be reincarnated "miser men," who, having never of­fered hospitality to anyone in their previ­ous lives, were condemned to carry their houses around wherever they went.

       We turned up a path that ran between fields where women in vibrant saris were putting in their last crop of cauli­flower and white radish. The Balagu ref­ugee camp was a former factory: two stories of rooms facing an inner court­yard. In the mess hall, all of the hundred or so refugees were glued to a video of the Dalai Lama. Catching sight of me, some of the refugees put their tongues out, a traditional gesture of goodwill and respect which, Sonam explained, was originally intended to show that one was not a Bon practitioner; practitioners of Bon, the shamanistic religion that pre­ceded Buddhism, were said to have had blue tongues.

       I spent the afternoon debriefing small groups of refugees. One of them was composed of three young nuns from the Ani Tsangkhun Convent in Lhasa. With their shaven heads and round faces they were quite indistinguishable from the young monks, except that their robes were brown, while the men's were ma­roon over saffron. Lobsang, a hefty twenty-year-old with an irrepressible smile and a sparkling gold eyetooth, said that she and her friend had gone over the ice wall of the Himalayas, the most im­posing natural barrier on the planet, nineteen days before.

       In the next batch of three nuns, two couldn't stop giggling. The other looked grim, hurt, angry. It was clear that something terrible had happened. Her name was Kunsang, and she said she had spent six months in the Kutsa Prison for putting up posters. Her brother had been shot dead through the neck in the big March demonstration.

       What was it like in the prison?
       "Everybody was tor­tured, except the snitches. Some went crazy. Only one-third of those who go to prison can come back to normal life. Two-thirds are permanently disabled. Our fellow nuns could bring us food once a month. I was stripped, kicked all over." Her lower lip began to quiver violently.

       What now? I asked.
       "I have no personal plans, except to continue to fight for the cause of Tibetan freedom."

       The video had ended and everyone was out in the courtyard enjoying the last hour of sun, laughing, playing cards. A dozen faces were pressed to the window. A rack of pleated, monsoon­slashed foothills rose in the background. Behind them stood the breathtaking white wall of the Ganesh Himal, and over the wall was Tibet-the forbidden country.
 

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