In that year, Phakpa, while in Beijing, offered his submission to the Great Emperor Kublai, grandson of Genghis Khan, who, in becoming the ruler of “All under Heaven,” was poised like a lion on the political throne of a great royal lineage. Subsequently, Phakpa was bestowed with a placement as head of management of religious matters. Generally speaking, these two young men were quite similar: while Kublai was the grandson of a tribal leader of a small herding community on the banks of the Wonan River, Phakpa was a descendent of the Khon lineage, which, in more recent history descended from one of the chief ministers of the ancient Tibetan King Trisong Detsen, and, in ancient history is considered to have descended directly from the heavens. The account of this lineage can be found in the text The Amazing Compilation of Sakya Scriptures, written by the Sakya themselves. Whatever the case may be, in the year 1264, when these two men, Tibetan and Mongolian, met near the Pacific Ocean, both far from their own homelands, each received positions that bestowed upon them the characteristics of heaven and earth. The grandson of the gods prostrated to the grandson of a tribal leader of men. A man from the highlands descended to the lowlands and bowed down to a man of the grasslands. Since that time, we have been unable to use golden ink to write our own history, a history that, even with a thousand lights, cannot shine forth.
Seven hundred and fifty-one years later, there was once again a Tibetan in Beijing, but I am simply one among the masses. Constantly, amidst the hordes of people squeezed into the subway, I am reminded of Phakpa. This city of the early twenty-first century is no longer called Tatu and is now called Beijing. I wonder whether in Tibetan it maintains the name of Northern Capital. Despite the fact that those two grandsons of more than 700 years ago, dissolving into the wind, have disappeared from Beijing, they are still hidden amongst the bustle of the crowd in the inconspicuous ideations of a modern man. In the year when Phakpa reached Beijing, he was twenty-nine years old. It is possible that he was the first ever Tibetan in Beijing. I sometimes wonder whether that young, twenty-nine-year-old man suffered from being alone in an unfamiliar and distant land, longing for his homeland.
In Beijing’s night, neon lights flash on and off and the shadows of Beijing’s inhabitants flicker indistinctly. Packs of cars on the main roads form a river of light. In the midst of that river—constantly flowing like the kleshas of desire, hatred, and ignorance and glittering like the variegated colors of the objects of earthly desire—the lights spewed forth from the depths of the night. When looking into the distance, one’s line of sight is obscured by a smoky fog. When looking at the sky, one’s head would have to float to the top of a skyscraper in order to see. This city was structured to mimic the cosmos, and in this most chaotic metropolis, a population of more than twenty million people clings on for survival. In this city, more than six million vehicles, large and small, race over its roads. This is Beijing. This is an utterly different world from the highland village in which I was born and raised.
It is 1999. A twenty-year-old me clinging to my youth, reaches Beijing for the first time. From that time until now, having spent sixteen entire years of my life here, discarded like a forgotten piece of garbage, I have been wasting away in this distant city. In this city, the petals of my youth have gradually grown old and that flowery smile that was originally always on my blemish-free face, has disappeared. This long period I have spent in Beijing and the associated feelings of estrangement have consumed all aspects of my life. However, the desire still never arises in me to depart from this city and return home to the plateau. I am not the only person who both misses the plateau and yet does not desire to return. There are many Tibetans around me who feel the same.
It is the year 1276. Unlike most contemporary Tibetans of Beijing, Phakpa departed from Tatu and returned to his homeland once again. He would never again come back to this mainland city. Four years after returning to Tibet, he died. Some historians of future generations suspected that he was poisoned by a Tibetan. Whatever the case may be, Phakpa was the first Tibetan to come to this ancient city. Afterward, a few centuries of history accrued during which no hint of a Tibetan appeared, in the open or in hiding, in any corner of this city. Although the circumstances have changed enormously, Tibetans who come to Beijing are still unable to move beyond the status of Phakpa, and he has, therefore, become a symbol. All Tibetans who came to Beijing from that point forward have held tight to the humble position he achieved by offering a bow. Therefore, no one maintains the dignity of the princes whose history was recorded in volumes of golden letters. Since that time, all Tibetans of Beijing, however handsome their outer appearance, in their hearts have great difficulty enjoying life because of the fearful demeanor they inherited from their faraway home, the rich Tibetan snow land. Maybe this is the collective psychology of all those who left.
A friend from Xining once jokingly ridiculed me: “All you Tibetans in Beijing, don’t get cocky about being there in the capital. Others don’t know, but I know. However well you pretend to be somebody and pretend to be capable, you still can’t penetrate Beijing’s upper society. That society is always pushing you to the side.” At first this joke did not affect me at all, but after living in Beijing for a long time, these words began to echo about in the chambers of my brain. Later, when I considered that conversation, I understood that there was some truth and some falsity to my friend’s claims. Although it is true that we Tibetans of Beijing have been unable to penetrate Beijing’s upper society, I believe that beyond the external exclusion we experience, Tibetans also maintain our own exclusion.
In Beijing, the way in which we guard and protect our own identity as Tibetans is one of the expressions of this exclusivity. For example, when we are not shunted to the side, but rather integrated into society, we are convinced that we will become like a snowflake caught in the palms of Beijing, that we will resemble a hunk of butter placed inside a warm room. Not long thereafter, we believe that our prior individuality will be completely dissolved, like droplets of water falling into the ocean. The snowflake, turning into liquid, becomes part of a wave. The hunk of butter, melting, turns into grease. Ultimately, we are certain it is possible for us to return to our own land. Moreover, we are convinced that this plan to return to our homeland must be carried out as quickly as one generation. Sometimes, when I see the non-Tibetan-speaking children of my older colleagues, an indescribable bitter feeling arises in my mind. At that time, these older colleagues, while patting me on the shoulder, say, “You of the younger generation must immediately take on our suffering reluctantly onto your own heads.”
Perhaps from 1949 to approximately 2000, the residents of Beijing have accounted for three generations of Tibetans. The first generation was those settlers who, immediately after Liberation, for political reasons, picked up their homes and moved to Beijing, as well as the subsequent generation. The 1980s marked the beginning of a second generation of Tibetan settlers in Beijing, who came to achieve educational and career-related goals. Because the Tibetan population in Beijing at that time remained quite small, most Tibetans knew each other and gathered together frequently. However, at the beginning of the new millennium, many people, including more and more students and temporary workers, were moving to Beijing. The Tibetan community continued to increase, so there were many Tibetans who did not know each other, and it appeared that even amongst those that did know one another, the deep affection Tibetans used to have for one another had diminished. Therefore, the older generation of Tibetans in Beijing perpetually discuss the warm meetings of the past, and tell us again and again of their disappointment with the frigidity of modern times.
In fact, I believe there is a relationship between this and the changing understanding of the concept of a distant land. In modern times, distances themselves have been shortened by the introduction of mass transportation. This is an essential point: now it only takes about three hours to go from Lhasa to Beijing by air, and not even forty hours by rail. In previous times, the trip would be made by horse and would be measured in years and months, making the journey appear like impossible magic to those Tibetans who came to Beijing. Not long after Phakpa was killed, Zhu Yuanzhang, who originally protected the dharma by clinging to prayer beads, ultimately chopped the vast territory of the empire, which was developed by the ferocity of the Mongolians, into pieces by clinging to his sword. In 1368, the Ming Dynasty was established. Originally, the capital was constructed in the southern city of Nanjing, but in 1421 moved back to its northern capital. From that time forward, that northern capital was called Beijing. By examining the circumstances recorded in documents of Sino-Tibetan history, we know that since that time there was a gradual increase in the number of Tibetans coming to Beijing. Although no images of the Tibetans arriving in Beijing during that period were recorded, I am sometimes able to conjure up a blurry picture of those Tibetans who traveled on the ancient pathways of Beijing: when they descended from the highlands, herding teams of pack horses, in swirling clouds of dust, and arrived at Beijing’s fortress gate, the people of the capital might have seen these men, whose appearances were unlike their own: a retinue of men, draped with saffron-colored robes surrounding a great man at their head, who was encircled by umbrellas, and attired in golden-colored robes. That man adorned in golden-colored robes was clearly an important figure, a man who came from the land of Tibet, arrived as a representative of the masses to offer prostrations to the emperor. He came to offer his submission and tributes as representative of the Kagyu, Sakya, and Geluk sects and their faithful. Looking at what has been recorded in the related documents, we know that on the pack horses brought along with his entourage, were countless objects loved by Chinese people: pearls, thangka paintings, copper statues, small stupas, turquoise, dried cheese, rhinoceros horns, rolls of woolen cloth, musk, deer horns, medicinal herbs, etc. Besides that, the best horses from the plateau were also brought as gifts. According to tradition, the emperor was also presented with tea, salt, and a fine silk scarf. However, these material gifts were not the main reason for Tibetans to come to Beijing during those years. It was instead the intangible objects, edicts, bestowal of rank and conferment of titles, etc., issued by the Heavenly Mandated Emperor, which were the ultimate goal of those who came to Beijing. Otherwise there would have been no reason for them to have pursued the long journey, on rough roads, of years and months to Beijing.
Although the road was long, since the fourteenth century, the number of Tibetans traveling to Beijing increased year by year. Religious and tribal leaders naturally and clearly understood the importance of Beijing. Because there were too many new immigrants, the Emperor of Beijing had no choice but to construct a northern and southern entry into the city and limit the roads by which Tibetans could enter Beijing to these two. Additionally, before coming to Beijing, immigrants needed to be given approval by the Emperor. It is clearly recorded in related documents that standards and limits were set concerning the number of people and number of crossings allowed. When I imagine the resulting expressions of despair and woe in the faces of those who did not receive approval, I realize that if they had had the same metal-winged planes and quick-wheeled trains as today, most cultured Tibetans and high scholars would have, like water springing forth from a dam, flowed into Beijing. There is no way to compare the Beijing of today with that ancient fortress of a few centuries ago. Likewise, if we were to compare the Tibetans residing in Beijing today with those who came to Beijing a few centuries ago, we would find many differences in their day-to-day realities. However, I am frequently reminded of these ancestors of mine from Beijing. I think again and again of their facial expressions and lives in Beijing. In the midst of these musings, I feel as if I have inherited the listless blood that flowed in their veins, which jumped over a gap of some time, and entered me. I think that my insufferable loneliness, my weak, powerless character, my tendency to be enslaved by a dependence on others, my excessive ignorance, my blindness, and the tears in my eyes come from their life-giving bloodline and seep into every aspect of my life. In these months and years of life in Beijing, a desire arises in me again and again to blame these ancestors of mine. Although this violent emotion comes honestly from the native Tibetans of the Land of Snows, our fatherland, it has become doubly intense in me. However, there is no way to turn back from this. No matter how many times we blame history, it is useless. It is now impossible for my ancestors to rise from their charnel ground and explain to me their sufferings and choices.
A friend from Lhasa said to me, “You had a plan at one point to return to Tibet.” I asked him in a joking manner, “Have you ever heard the song ‘Beijing, Beijing’ sung by the Chinese singer Wang Feng?” He had heard it. “Is it so good?” he quipped. Answering conversely, I said, “That song is so melodious that it has the power to touch the depths of your soul. On top of that, when it gets to the part where the lyrics say, ‘This place where I’m living, is also the place I will die,’ sometimes warm tears flash forth from the corners of my eyes.” When speaking to my friend in this way, he responded, “Like the lyrics of that song that go, ‘When, one day, I am powerless but to pass beyond, please bury me here in this place,’ if one day the conditions of your long life are exhausted, do you plan on being buried in Beijing?” To this I was left unable to find an answer. There are many Tibetans enjoying their lives in Beijing who, like me, would be unable to find a response to questions like this. However, this question is clearly unavoidable. The essence of what can be clearly understood from this feeling of indecision is that although all outsiders in this society are integrated, in the depths of their hearts, they have an unconscious desire: that it will ultimately be possible for them to return to the land of their birth. However, it appears as though this desire of so many immigrants is actually impossible to realize. I have been to the funeral services of a few older Tibetans in Beijing to offer my condolences. They, after Liberation, were the first generation of Tibetans to come to Beijing. How expedient is that funeral without any of the melodies of religious recitation or the smells of incense. I sometimes recall that one day I myself, no matter how familiar I think I am with this city, will reach the end of my life. And it will be in this unfamiliar, lowland city where I will be burned to all but dust in a steel incinerator. When I think of this fact, an unbearable pain swells up from somewhere in my heart.
Speaking from this perspective as an outsider, Beijing is a huge city possessed with a special quality of compassionlessness. Even though there are crowds of tens and hundreds of thousands of people hustling and bustling about, they have no relationship with you. It is possible that these people will never join you on the road of your life’s journey. Even if you have contact with two out of every hundred people, it is easy, passing each other by, for you to remain strangers. In this city, although you have been neighbors for ten years, you still do not know each other. Here, people remain suspicious of one another. Here, although the world is expansive, your own world is ultimately so narrow that you do not even truly possess your own apartment. Here, the transition of the seasons, summer, winter, fall, spring, become as meaningless as choosing between woolen clothing of various thicknesses from inside a wardrobe. When I discuss the phenomena of life in Beijing with the Tibetans of Beijing, most of them say that they agree. They add that time in Beijing moves so quickly! If Beijing were a limitless, vast desert, time is obstructed by nothing and moves swiftly, like a gust on the wandering wind. The image of a wolf trotting along in the wind—this is certainly the Tibetan of Beijing. Like those wolves sniffing about in the expanse of millions of grains of sand in the desert, we search this city for the scent of our own kind. Although we do not know whether the Tibetans of a few centuries ago, those who claimed to be imperial preceptors, ever looked for opportunities to gather together with their fellow Tibetans, today’s Tibetans of Beijing search each other out and gather together again and again. Even after a long time has passed, the memory of these gatherings can still bring a smile to our face and the old songs continue to resound over and over in our throats. We enjoy unending jokes, intimate conversation, the pleasant sound of laughter, and on top of that, sweet and delicious, fresh barley wine, nutritious and fatty sheep meat, roasted, sweet-white barley flour, etc. For a short time, we completely forget that the world outside our window is this Beijing, thousands of kilometers away from our homeland, the Land of Snows. We experience a feeling as if we have all been transported back to our homeland together. The flashing lights of the evening shimmer in the crowd and the ruddy complexions of the Tibetans of Beijing become flushed. All the while, the light catches on the tears caught in the wrinkles around our eyes.
Time in Beijing truly moves so fast. Tibetan residents of Beijing who were once children have become adults and those who were once adults have become bent with old age. When the Tibetans of Beijing, despite being close friends, meet after a long time at the wedding parties of their sons and daughters, the chief topic of conversation will definitely be how much they each have changed. Likewise, when asking after close friends and their children, the conversation about how much each has changed will also include an inevitable blaming of time. Really! If you pay careful attention, you can see fine fishtail lines etched in the corners of their eyes and a few strands of white hair amongst the black hairs on their heads. They investigate whether or not the bride and groom to be married are Tibetan, asking questions inquisitively. If both are considered pure and strictly Tibetan, a satisfied smile will appear on their faces and the couple will be congratulated repeatedly. It is said that it is extremely difficult to find a Tibetan husband or wife in Beijing, but still, if the bride or groom’s name on a wedding invitation is not a Tibetan name, there is a sense of great disappointment. Nevertheless, as long as the name is not a foreign one from some extremely faraway land, it is ultimately accepted. Gatherings like these are brief and normally there is not even enough leisure time to have warm conversations. The image of guests wearing woolen Tibetan robes, elegantly dressed in festive attire, fades away—like how the yellow, red, and green lights of a Beijing intersection appear and dissolve in one direction out from the gloom of the night—and there is no way to be sure when they will be able to meet each other again. In this way, as they disappear into the crowd of Beijing’s population, like a droplet of water mixing into the ocean, amidst this great city overflowing with material pleasures, they cannot hold onto the desire to meet another Tibetan upon the road. The Tibetans of this place are like individual fish disappearing into the depths of an ocean of throngs of other men. Sometimes, when the fish surface to breathe, their smiling mouths breach the water’s surface and send forth a ripple. What brings these smiling ripples to mind? It is possible that that ripple, like a flower, blossoms in the depths of the hearts of all the Tibetans of Beijing. The expansion of the ripples is the reverberation of each Tibetan of the older, middle, and younger generations. Those Tibetans, from the field of each of their professions, receive success and accolades and send back these gifts to their relatives in the Land of Snows, their fatherland.
It is the year 1644. For a long time, China’s northeastern lands had been sustaining its riches. Meanwhile, the Manchus, agriculturalists, overthrew the northern gate of the Ming Dynasty territory. From amongst the ringing sounds of armor, helmets, and troops and the stamping of hooves of superb horses, speaking a language the people of Beijing fortress could not understand, they established their political power of dominion over the land of China. And for the second time, a minority ethnic group became the leader of this ancient fortress. This was the Manchu Dynasty. In 1652, His Holiness the Great Fifth Dalai Lama Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso, on the invitation of the Manchu Emperor, arrived in Beijing from Lhasa and offered his submission to the Manchu Emperor. Up until today, on the walls of the Potala Palace, there is a mural of this meeting of two ethnic minorities, a lama and a chieftain. In this painting, these two men, layman and lama, in the way the sun and the moon face one another, sit at the head of each of their retinues. Future generations of Tibetans have placed great importance on how the two main figures of this painting are seated on thrones of completely equal heights and are thereby able to preserve the spontaneous, self-aggrandizing dignity which arises naturally in Tibetans of the plateau. However, when I touched the thick fortress walls of this red-colored, ancient, fortified city, the freezing cold of the truth pierced through my skin right to my nerves and I was struck with uncontrollable shivering. The historical annals written by later Tibetan generations carry on the weak powerlessness and shortsighted, one-sided contentions of our ancestors and determinedly hold on to what is actually a patch meant to cover our own asses: to conceal our own subtle faults. This patch was sewn with golden thread and ornamented with silver beset with stones. So, today, in Beijing, when I read historical documents, if I do not suppress my own mind, a surge of egotism, arising out of ignorance, swells up from the depths of my heart. Truly, our history has always been aflame with one thousand lights. It is not a patch. But Beijing’s thick and sturdy fortress walls turned the warm waves of my heart into ice. What good are one thousand lights?—they are not sunlight. Even when seated in the way the sun and the moon face each other, the sun is still the sun and the moon, the moon. Has anyone ever seen the moon amidst the light of the sun? Nevertheless, in the historical annals, our ancestors exhibit astonishing self-importance and matchless pride. What can destroy this self-importance? What can eliminate this pride?
Unlike the Tibetans of a few centuries ago, today in Beijing I speculate that our suffering is due to this sense of defeat. Because of the vast breadth and depth of Beijing, I saw my own deficiencies and lack of depth. Because of Beijing’s unaffected confidence and opulence, which seems to be embedded in its very marrow, a feeling of inadequacy and poverty arises in me. The representation of incomparable power in written history left me feeling self-satisfied, as if I myself had muscular strength. Yet during the course of living and sleeping in this city, I am again and again, even by the luxurious color of the great emperors on the walls of this city, made subconsciously aware of the true meaning of the concepts of “citizen” and “subject.” Likewise, it seems that the Tibetans living in Beijing today are unable to continue the lineage of pride and self-importance that appears in the history of our ancestors. Apologies. Sometimes when we take a leave of absence to return to our rich, snowy homeland, amidst the local people, we once again take on the attitude of those who argue there was not the slightest difference in the position of those two thrones in 1652 Beijing. Because of the influence of the self-importance and pride of our ancestors, the noisy arrogance of a supporter once again arises. This is the result of our historical patch-making. Yet, this is also possibly the penance of Tibetans. While completely aware that the discouraged depression of most Tibetans of Beijing is incompatible with a natural state of existence, it is possible to understand this as a constructive force that transformed self-importance and pride into caution and humility. Thus, the Tibetans of Beijing of today are merely diligently trying to survive. Although their well-planned and efficient lives are tormented by the appearance of being busy, a sense of self-importance, and an exhaustion of their bodies and minds, they find assurance and consolation in the industriousness of their time and the preciousness of human life. From Beijing, living life in this way, when the scorching summer sun singes you with heat, when the freezing winter air paralyzes you with cold, when breathing in the polluted smog cuts you and you feel death approaching, at those times, an unstoppable desire arises in me to separate from this place and return to my homeland. But this desire of the heart dissipates with the clearing of the smog, and my mind returns back to its original state. Now, once again, I cannot give an explicit answer as to why I do not wish to leave Beijing. If one day I separate myself from this huge city and return to my homeland, I think that the main reason could not possibly be the superficial factors of the seasons or the weather. However much I am still not used to these elements, and although they can cause harm to my primordial body, they cannot even slightly wound my right to be nor my feeling of being a Tibetan.
In the Beijing night, I see the white lights of the oncoming traffic flash before me and the red brake lights of the cars ahead of me sparkling. This incessantly flowing existence is simply the continuance of two rivers of white and red. When I walk along the side of the road, grasping the hand of my son, the red river is my own youth and dreams, which, once gone, can never return, wandering off and disappearing into the distance. The white river is my son’s life, being drawn forth and expanding in front of us. At that time, my son uses Chinese to ask me an inquisitive question. When I smack him upside the head, as if just remembering something, he straightens up and with an earnest expression on his face, tilting his head slightly toward the right, speaks to me in Tibetan. This is my way of reminding or teaching my son. After tilting his head to the right, he must speak only Tibetan, tilting his head to the left, he can speak in Chinese. This is my one desperate device to prevent him from mixing Tibetan and Chinese. We are entrusting the future hopes of an ethnicity unto these methods: my gentle slap and my son’s way of tilting his head to the right. If one day, I depart from Beijing and return to Tibet, it is possible that my instructive slap will become ineffective and no matter whether my son tilts his head to the left or the right, there will be no path for the continuation of Tibetan language.
From this point of view, it is possible that all Tibetans of Beijing have the same worry: that is not to melt like snowflakes into the palms of Beijing, not to melt like hunks of butter in a warm room. Yet when, like a snowflake, it is impossible not to melt, we want the place of our melting to be our highland homeland. Liquid is the result of that melting, so I think it is only right that I aspire to become life-giving water for a highland sprout.
Written in Beijing on December 18, 2015.
