Been playing cat-and-mouse out West on the Tibet beat, and the cliche resonates on a few too many levels. When your movements are cut off and cornered by shifting, shrinking boundaries, you're prone to feel like just some lab rat in an uncontrolled test of reform. It’s very hard to prove any side right, and much easier to slip into the trap of going wrong. 

Indeed some inconvenient slip-ups have occurred. In turn China's state media machine, along with many hostile Chinese Netizens, have pounced on the Western news media, accusing certain outfits of distorting images of the rioting and condemning the press corps in general for allegedly slanting coverage to demonize China and focus on the victimization of Tibetans. The topic of media perceptions is worthy of debate -- Western media did make some mistakes in recent coverage, including serious photo caption errors. But needless to say,  the government has cropped down its own narrow version of events. The state media lens trains on outbursts of violence by Tibetans, and blocks out government treatment of them before and after the fact.

In an awkwardly timed interview a week and a half ago, Reuters asked a top government media chief in London whether relaxed travel guidelines on foreign correspondents would be extended beyond the time of the Olympics and Paralympics in Beijing. The provisional guidelines, unveiled on Jan. 1, 2007 and due to expire this September, have freed up journalists to work in all regions of China (except for Tibet) without story-specific approvals from local government offices.  Unlike in the past, all that's needed now -- according to the new rules -- is interviewees' consent. "Since this new regulation is so popular," answered State Council Information Office vice-director Cai Mingzhao, “Why should we change it?"

One big reason the regulation needn't be changed is that its implementation still can and does change on the ground. Our boundaries sure have shifted over the last two weeks. Correspondents emerged from Tibetan hot zones with more first-hand coverage of being shut out of those areas than of the areas themselves. Most of those who got somewhere owe it to colleagues who reported back from the front on their run-ins with authorities.

Our story was a little bit of both.

I. Between Nowhere and Somewhere

I landed in Lanzhou on a Sunday morning (Mar 16) with the lamasery town of Xiahe in my sights. Lhasa was off-limits, which made Xiahe, the Gansu province haven to Tibetophiles and tourists, the next-best trouble spot to try. I was advised that it would not be easy. Just hours after young Tibetans began tearing up Lhasa that Friday (Mar 14), fifteen monks dangling Tibetan flags raced out of the Labrang monastery up Xiahe’s main drag. More  monks joined in, yielding when police, caught off-guard initially, pushed them back.

On the plane, I'd run into a old photog friend with one news wire who was on-hand to snap those atomic moments in Xiahe. He described having had to duck out of town real fast. It was still the off-season for tourism in Xiahe, and police would soon have a bead on any idle foreigners around. The innkeeper where he boarded was sympathetic but less-than-keen to let him stay. Other shopkeepers in town, mostly Han and Hui Muslim, wouldn't let him linger long enough to file.

The lamas of Labrang marched again by the thousands on Saturday, when a few other foreign journalists wiggled into town. But by evening fresh convoys of People’s Armed Police were dispatched down the expressway from Lanzhou. At the exit leading to Xiahe they established a strategic checkpoint.

Such was the pattern: In the days before the March 10 anniversary of the 1959 revolt against Chinese rule, and in some cases long before, many key Tibetan Buddhist communities like Xiahe were under heightened security alert. Monks reported being prevented from congregating en masse inside temples, coming out in groups, joining up with Tibetan followers and undertaking sensitive memorial rites. At the same time, they said, they were herded into "patriotic education" courses and pressed to denounce the Dalai Lama. At times such as these,  a Tibetan monk's religious ritual easily becomes a Communist Party official's political protest, and things are prone to devolve. If the community fouled up, then the clampdown only tightened: roads were blockaded, monasteries locked down, Han and Hui shops shut down, and Tibetan schools kept open (so that students stayed in class, not in the streets).

That Saturday night Danish photographer Mads Nissen, on assignment for Newsweek, flew into Lanzhou. By this time Xiahe was nearly impenetrable. Mads’ driver got tipped off about the key checkpoint by a buddy who'd already hit it; he turned back without even consulting Mads. The next morning, Mads thought of trying a public bus instead. But the long-distance station in Lanzhou was no longer selling foreigners tickets to Xiahe. Mads got a stranger to buy his ticket for him, and he managed to board.

On the bus, Mads slumped down in back, his blond buzz-cut and sapphire-blue eyes shaded under the bill of a navy Castro cap. After an hour and a half the bus pulled up to the freeway exit. Mads pretended to be napping. An armed police guard boarded. “Any foreigners on this bus?!”

All necks craned Mads' way.

Busted, Mads was ordered off the bus and told he couldn’t go any further. Military police in black gear hovered about. One officer spoke proficient English. He told Mads that all Tibetan regions had been declared off-limits to foreigners. “It’s for your own security,” he said, uttering a refrain frequently heard in recent days. A female British diplomat on vacation with her daughter was stopped there too. The diplomat squabbled with the police, arguing she should be able to proceed if she wanted. Not a chance. Soon Mads was hitching a ride back to Lanzhou in her car.

Ah, to be alive and free in Lanzhou. In the history of foreign media regulation, this was actually a sign of progress. Pre-2007, before the provisional Olympics foreign media regulations came into effect, unauthorized reporting in Xiahe might have resulted in summary interrogation in Lanzhou followed by a return trip to Beijing. But now Lanzhou was an open launching pad. So there I was at a hotel meeting Mads, who was now about to attempt his third descent into the greater Tibetan hinterland in twelve hours. The fresh start was a bonus, but a wasted half-day was the penalty. Our deepest fear was not getting detained somewhere. It was getting nowhere at all.

By this time I’d already hired a driver from the airport to take us to Xiahe - Driver L, I'll call him. He was Han Chinese and had his wife in tow, making the ride feel like a family affair. The couple hadn't tried to gouge me on the fare into Lanzhou as had some of the other airport drivers, who pay for special rights to that route. Driver L and wife often cruised the region with tourists, and he demonstrated some bare-bones knowledge about Tibetans in the area. “When there’s movement in one Tibetan area, there's movement in another,” he noted. Statements like his undercut Beijing's claim that Tibetan protests were the Dalai Lama's direct doing.

I told him about the ad hoc barriers to foreigners. He pulled out an old map and charted the various alternatives. There was one roundabout route through the next-door province of Qinghai. “Not many people know it, but here there’s a new road.”

Mads and I had some errands to run, so it took us a couple hours before we set out. Meanwhile reports were coming in from comrades I’d run across on the airplane: Organization X’s TV crew ran into a roadblock on the old state road parallel to the expressway. Y’s crew took the main expressway and got stopped at the same exit as Mads (I’d warned them, but a bit late). Z’s photojournalists tried the bus station, but couldn’t even buy a ticket. Now all were back in Lanzhou regrouping.

We ended up playing sherpa to the pack.

The road through Qinghai to Xiahe faded due west and curled south; it was double the length of the straight shot south via the freeway. At a negotiated price of two yuan per click, it must have seemed well worth it to Driver L. It happened that a mate of his from the airport was ferrying a couple wire reporters working for Organization W, and they were not far out in front of us.

Their original plan was to stop in Ping’an, the birthplace of the Dalai Lama. But the temple there was crawling with security, so they quickly changed their minds. Driver L's wife arranged to rendezvous with Organization W in a crap town called Xunhua. W's journalists were Asian. So we decided to hang back a kilometer or two and let them sweep for mines, so to speak. If they got stopped, we figured, we Whities wouldn’t stand a chance.

Our first sight of police was a few patrolmen standing around looking bored at Adai toll exit. We breezed right through. There were some concerns about loose rocks above: Organization Y later turned around for fear of landslides. Otherwise, though, canyon passes through the plateau were undisrupted. We were into Tibetan regions. Finally, there was legitimate reporting to be done.

Toward dusk, we stopped in a roadside village strewn with squared-off mud-and-brick houses of Tibetan design. I stumbled upon an old Tibetan man with a wrinkly bald pate and prickly wide brows, and with little prompting, he rambled on bitterly about the indigence all around. For him, the way out of poverty was the growing local market for religious infrastructure. He'd made his money over the years building stupas for surrounding villages, more than 20 in all. Thirteen years ago, with 500 yuan in profits, the man sent a younger brother of his to a monastery in India. The brother had since studied his way to an advanced degree. "So as a monk in India, his next life will be better than mine here."

Now night was falling. After driving five hours, our dilemma was this: Push through to Xiahe and risk discovery and likely banishment back to Lanzhou; or fish for what we could find in other parts of southern Gansu, where flare-ups in other temple towns were reported. Mads rang another Western photographer who just hours earlier had slipped past a checkpoint into Xiahe on a back road.  But the town was on total lockdown; all he could shoot was riot police out of his window.

We came to the turn-off for Xiahe, but decided to play for another day. Driver L was relieved. As darkness descended, his prejudices began to get the best of him. “That road’s really dangerous at night. Cars are always getting attacked by the Tibetans.”

II. “What if they burn our car?”

The next town was the county seat of Tongren, or Rebkong in Tibetan, renowned for its tangka painting and the 700-year-old Longwu temple. With 470 monks -- compared to the 3000-plus at Labrang -- this monastery was presumably much quieter. Three weeks earlier, though, stewing tensions here amongst Tibetans and Hui had ignited in a 24-hour-long cataclysm of fighting, beatings, rioting, arrests and protests sparked by an argument between two people, if you can fathom it, over the price of a balloon.

Ever since Tongren had experienced a paramilitary surge. Religious affairs cadres, already said to be hammering home "patriotic education" harder in the past year or two, made more frequent stops at the temple. Police slapped tighter restrictions on assembling in prayer, and mounted added surveillance cameras on electricity poles. Tongren was undergoing Lhasafication.

That very Sunday, unknown to us at the time, dozens of monks had flouted a week-long security lockdown on the monastery to conduct incense-burning rites on the mountainside altar above. According to one Tibetan witness, they chanted sutras to mourn Tibetan comrades whom, they heard, were killed by the hundreds in crackdowns on rioters and protesters elsewhere. (Body counts vary: between an estimated 140 Tibetans killed in the crackdown, according to the count of Tibet's government-in-exile, and 18 innocent civilians and one policeman dead in rioting in Lhasa, by Beijing's count). The witness paraphrased a line of verse for the deceasad: “’We don’t want to live, either / It’s as if you killed us!’”

He said that, as they retreated to their temple, monks had segued from performing rituals into protesting in the streets. They flung stones at security forces for ten to twenty minutes. Riot police dispersed them with tear gas. (Colleagues of mine who saw the procession suspected tear gas was fired, but could not get close enough to get a clear look).

Tongren's back-story would come together bit by bit over the following days.

As we pulled into town that night, authorities were enforcing an early curfew. We saw no signs of damage on the streets. But police vans marked the neon-lit main intersections. Groups of ten to twelve riot police, helmeted with shields and batons, patrolled on foot. Shops, restaurants and motels had been ordered to bed early, and at 8:45 p.m. the first inn we found claimed quite plausibly to be the last one still open. The adjoining dining hall served just three dishes.

A weaselly-faced man skulked around us as we chowed. He wore a “police” parka, but he turned out to be a hotel security guard. I asked him to explain the day’s events. He gave me one sentence: “Today in Tongren, Tibetans rioted.” Full stop. The term he used, baoluan, can mean anything from riot to revolt. While it probably fit accounts of the March 14 outbreak in Lhasa - "the 3/14 beating, smashing, looting and burning incident",  as it's termed in official-speak - I seriously doubted how apt a description it was for this day in Tongren.

When I asked for details, he answered: “That’s secret. It’s not good to talk about it. Not good to talk about it...” He sounded like a government spokesman. He was just an ordinary under-informed citizen, and a scared one at that.

Our driver’s wife took his word for it, in any case. Her mouth ran full with Chinese epithets typically directed at underclasses and minorities. “Scofflaws.” "Hoodlums." “Barbarians.” She vetoed my suggestion we take an evening whirl by the temple to find out what had really happened. “What if they burn our car?” she hissed.

After the conflagration that raged in Lhasa, it was hard to know just how to judge the racial trepidations of Han in the vicinity. Tibetans made up more than 70 percent of the population across Tongren county, and Hui much of the remainder. But Han citizens emitted the paternalistic aura of a dominant majority. "It's very scary,"   cautioned Ms. Bai, the Han restaurant manager. "Tibetan people are different from Han. Their nature is to struggle desperately, to fight to the death. We're more tactful and roundabout, more flexible with things."

Driver L. tried to be patient. He and I resolved to check out Tongren the next morning and try for Xiahe or places beyond in the afternoon.

Dawn revealed six police vans parked outside the front of the hotel. Atop the ridges of hills out back, Mads made out the silhouettes of officers posted on lookout over the town. Soon some 30 riot police stood on attention outside our window, preparing to move into position. But after a few tense moments it became clear that these forces had no interest in us. An armed police compound was located just a few doors down.

A photographer buddy from Organization Z called. He'd checked into the hotel after we had that night, and was awakened a few hours later when six other police in heavy gear had pounded on his door. After noting his nationality on his passport, he told me, they'd cleared out. Organization W, I later learned, were similarly awakened. The reason they hadn’t bothered us, I supposed, was that we had registered at the hotel under our drivers' name. That way, authorities weren't immediately alerted to our presence.

Now the security presence in town was steadily mounting. Still, eight foreign reporters together at one Tongren hotel was far too many to bother hiding. So after breakfast we all decided to take a cab over to the monastery, if we still could get in. It turned out we could, though it was obvious we were being watched. Under a photo of the Dalai Lama, a plump acolyte in the central prayer sanctuary did not stop lighting candles and tidying altars as he spoke, swiveling his gaze to and fro over our shoulders. He described to me and another journalist a cresting wave of tensions and controls. "Too many things to explain just like that," he said. "It just gets to the point where you just can't control yourself anymore."

Before long a colleague called: Organization Z’s shooters were caught in the act of journalism, and accordingly whisked away and questioned. Organization W had met the same fate a little earlier. Mads and I and a couple of others delved deeper into the compound, a nexus of sun-blanched cloisters and dusky passages. It seemed practically deserted.

Authorities had slapped strict rules on the monks: they were unable to congregate or go out in groups greater than two. So many were lounging in living quarters or had gone home to their families. Few lamas would talk out in the open, but we had no problem trying. I began to draw out one affable 19-year-old. "This isn't exactly what you expected when you came to the monastery, is it?" He grinned and shook his head in agreement.  Just then Driver L rang me in a panic from the hotel. The Foreign Affairs office was onto us. “You have to get back here immediately.” I fetched Mads and we cabbed back. The taxi driver was Tibetan. Thinking that I might not be speaking to many more Tibetans on this trip, I pressed him to explain the roots of the standoff in Tongren: "To put it simply, it's about 'Tibetan independence'."

At times like these, as foreign hacks who speak some Chinese and have been doing this job a while, it’s nice to think of ourselves as smooth operators in the clutches of a monolith. But usually they're just inexperienced tools and we're positive brats. We tend to slip into alter-egos hiding behind masks of imperfect Mandarin, and act up in ways we'd never dare try on authorities in our home countries. Of course we feel the circumstances fully justify our behavior, since the system compels us to find ways around it to do our job. But in the end, I tend to think, those authorities who let us off light are seldom persuaded by our arguments so much as they're just pleased to get rid of us. And though they rarely show it, sometimes they’re secretly tickled by our antics too. We’re these naughty little Western monkeys who happen to ape bits of their language.

In any case it cannot hurt us to put up a little fight. Having experienced the odd inconsequential detention over the years - longest debriefing: eight hours, in Henan, covering SARS for Reuters, in 2003 - that's my assessment. Stipulate your “rights” and any “violations” thereof. Counter questions with questions or non-answers. Yes, apologetic kowtowing does speed the process, if you have no other leg to stand on. Otherwise, I say, try a few histrionics. Look tough. Make a wise crack. Go a little batty. A modicum of brusqueness may discourage police from taking advantage of a detention-type situation. Not that anything is ever guaranteed. (Disclaimer: Such funny stuff not recommended for Chinese passport-holders.)

Two officials were waiting outside the hotel when the cab arrived. Having been dragged away in the middle of an interview, I was really in no mood to humor them. I must have come off as quite a ***. I walked straight passed them, leading them inside the hotel to talk. Then I asked to see their badges. The woman was the chief of the Tongren county foreign affairs office; the man was the chief of the public security. Both were Han. They muttered something to the effect that they supposed we were in Tongren because of the trouble. But our big mistake, announced the woman, was staying unregistered at the hotel.

The triviality of the claim made me giddy. I suggested the Foreign Affairs lady have a seat on the couch in the lobby, so we might discuss our little “situation”. First, I explained, it was just an honest accident. We checked into the hotel in such a hurry the night before that we all ended up registered under one name (not true, of course).

Her response, which was standard and easy to anticipate, was that as foreign correspondents we should have known better. So I told her that the fault was ultimately not ours or our drivers’, but the hotel’s. The Han hotel manager was standing right there, sullenly watching. I knew I’d stayed my last night at his establishment.

The Foreign Affairs chief wasn’t finished. She told me the hotel wasn’t even sanctioned to admit foreign guests. But just the night before I’d noticed this brass placard in a corner behind the front desk: shewai binguan. That meant the hotel was foreigner-approved. So I pointed out the placard. The police chief turned to the hotel manager and burst out: “How’d you get that sign!”

They asked to take our passports and copy them. We agreed. Ten minutes later, they returned to tell us we could go. The woman also gave us her cell number when we requested her contacts. A couple days later, I called her for an update on the situation in Tongren. She was hospitable but thoroughly unhelpful. “Sorry, I’ve just been here in the office this whole time.”

III. The Bearded Uighur Woman

The problem now was that our Red Flag sedan had been, well, red-flagged. Our plates were recorded and we were being tailed in Tongren, where there weren’t many private cars to start, and security vehicles now  outnumbered them. So we decided to ditch the town and make for nearby areas further south where unrest was spreading - Maqu, Luqu, Hezuo. Except the best roads south led through Xiahe – or at least the ones our driver told us of. We picked one, Organization Z another.

The vistas to that point had been a beige and blue blur, mostly badlands pocked with quarries of plundered minerals. Now the views separated into tan highlands framed by liquid-blue skies. Herds of yak grazed on a light fuzz of grass. The scenery conjured retro daydreams of Tibetan Khampa warriors on horseback. Just a couple days later, Canadian Television released images of mounted Tibetan galloping to assail a government offices in the sticks of Gansu. But their mounts were only ponies and they were repelled by tear gas.

Our mad visions were dashed. Within an hour, we’d all run aground at roadblocks. The officials there had been waiting for us since Tongren, according to our driver. They asked to see our passports. Organization Z texted to say they were being forcibly driven on to Linxia, which must have among the most inconvenient locales in the vicinity; from there you pretty much had to go back to Lanzhou and start over.

We and our pace car, Organization W's, had other options. The officials were mostly plain-clothed, county-level flaks whose main concern was to make certain we didn't infiltrate Xiahe. One guy wore jeans and Nike boots. Jotting down our passport details, he showed off by saying "hello" in a dozen European and Asian languages. The Tibetan flaks among them were especially apologetic. “Sorry, we’re just doing our jobs,”  one told us. Organization W asked to be escorted straight back to Lanzhou via Xiahe. To everyone's surprise, the officials agreed. We by contrast decided to turn back and see what else we could dig up around Tongren. This did not go over well with Driver L and his wife.

On the way back we stopped at a countryside grade school. A few weeks earlier electricity had reached the village for the first time -- and already the power was down, which may or may not have been linked to a deliberate brownout by authorities in Xiahe. Mads photographed Tibetan kids with mudstained faces.

Tibetans whom I managed to question on the plateau -- meaning, those who understood and could speak Chinese -- seemed fairly numb to the turmoil in the towns all around them. I didn't know if that was a good thing or bad.  I interviewed the headmaster of the school, a 30-year-old Tibetan who was assigned by the state to administer classes in Tibetan, Chinese and, in whatever time remained, English. He gotten most of his information about the trouble from two rival sources: calls on his cell phone calls from fellow Tibetans, and images beamed by state broadcaster CCTV. "To be honest, I don't even really want to hear about these things," he replied, "When I saw the news, I was extremely hurt. I cried, not in my eyes but in my heart."

The next 24 hours were a mad chase. We wanted to sneak back into Longwu. But Driver L wouldn’t take us. The officials outside Xiahe had taken down his phone number and, he protested, could track or call to check on our position at any moment. County authorities in Tongren had also threatened to make trouble for him somehow in Lanzhou. That seemed unlikely, Tongren being one province away and one administrative rank higher. But in any case Driver L and wife felt they already had two strikes against them; a third, they were afraid, would cost them their airport route. So we when got back down into the valley, we had them wait ten kilometers outside town. Driver L cut a deal with a long-haired Tibetan twenty-year-old: $10 to send us back to the temple.

The guy's rickety blue minivan was humdrum enough to escape too much attention, and on the way in we assumed preposterous disguises. At an army surplus shop in Lanzhou, I myself had purchased a cheap navy blue cap, and sunglasses. Between Mads’ get-up and mine we looked like a pair of gun-running vigilantes - not the look we were aiming for. So Mads recommended some adjustments. Semitic genes made me more versatile, but my nose was a liability. I tied a scarf around my head like a bonnet and covered my mouth and nose in a gauze mask, the kind street sweepers in Chinese cities use. If not for the whiskers, Mads and I agreed, I might have passed for a Uighur woman.

The ambush makeover was of questionable necessity. We slipped into Longwu unnoticed through a side gate. That afternoon, we got a few hours of face time with Longwu's red-robed inhabitants. Inside one dingy side-chamber, as novices bobbed in prayer outside, we stumbled upon a coterie of senior monks fiddling with high-tech toys of worship. One showed clips of the Dalai Lama on his cell phone; another, photos of the "illegal" Sunday rites on his digital camera; a third, video footage of the February 22-23 mayhem in Tongren on his IBM ThinkPad [see "The Next Saffron Revolution"].

The multimedia briefing was uplifting and revelatory. But the monks also harped on how the state had all the means to flood the airwaves with its information, and plug up theirs. Police monitored their cell phones and email, they said, increasingly confiscated illegal satellite TV hookups, and that week, simply snipped the Internet connection in their neighborhood. A bumpy-headed elder swayed with nervous energy. "Even if I just talk to you, they might grab me."

  Chinese modernity presented them with the very tools to protest its impact - and ample means to strip those tools away. In that little room, I must have heard the Chinese words meiyou ziyou ("no human rights") or  meiyou renquan ("no freedoms") 50 times. The Dalai was no plotter, the monks argued. But they could not deny he was a divinely unifying force, and all the more so in absentia.

     A Tibetan medicine man in monk's robes rubbed prayer beads in one hand and a PDA in another. He fast-forwarded through a recent MP4 hit: the Dalai accepting the Congressional Medal of Honor in Washington D.C. last October. One night, he recalled,Tibetans in Tongren had converged on the public square in front of Longwu and lit firecrackers all evening. Police, paramilitary and finally army troops had to be deployed to break up the party.

  "We know whatever the Dalai Lama says. We know whatever the Dalai Lama does," explained the doctor. I couldn't muster the gall to ask what would happen if the Dalai was gone. Lay Tibetans I asked generally didn't want to contemplate it.  

The next day, several monks also informed me, was the best day of the farmer’s annum to perform rites they termed wei sang. Despite the clamps on their movements, they intimated, they might again “rise up”, or qilai --  in other words, leave the temple and head up the hill - as they had two days beforehand. But monks hedged as to whether a religious ceremony was to be performed, and if so for what purpose. A Tibetan woman in the monastery suggested that the vows were dedicated to the onset of spring. Another Tibetan later informed me they were meant to commemorate the Buddha Sakyamuni committing himself to the order. A Tibetologist in Beijing said they were a tribute to the Tibetan god of war, often uttered on behalf of those lost or wounded in battle.

I asked questions to try to pin down the details. When I did, monks lowered their heads, or raised a hand or two toward their lips, or just looked away and walked on. "A lot of things are not easy for us to articulate," said one senior monk over phone days later, when I still couldn't get a clear answer out of him.

At this point, we were the only journalists left in Tongren. We felt we had to stick it out till morning. But we also knew that we couldn’t check into a Tongren hotel without being discovered. So we suggested we stay overnight with the monks in the monastery. But they didn't really answer, and we took their reticence to mean that was too risky. So again, we retreated. We sent home Driver L and wife, who by that time were all to ready to wash their hands of us. The minivan driver found another local Tibetan who would take us back the next day.

This fella was a blessing to us. Driver J., let's call him. A young father of one, he was styling in baggy sweats and shades and drove a recently purchased white Hyundai compact with tinted windows. In the past J. had chauffeured quite a few foreign tourists, and even maintained correspondence with a couple of them. He rifled through a sheaf of letters in English and German that he obviously treasured, though he couldn't read or speak either language.

He did however speak facile Mandarin, and came from a fairly well-integrated family. They owned several small businesses. His brother and sister-in-law worked as teachers with state benefits. Nonetheless he was full of zingers, when queried, about the cultural erosion Tibetans faced: “The government wants to ‘liberate’ our culture. What they don’t understand is, that is what we detest most.”

Or about the trickle-down socio-economic inequities: “The best-off Tibetans in China are the ones who flee to India and make it to America or Canada.” Or His Holiness the Dalai: “Because of him, I exist. Seriously. If he didn’t exist, I wouldn't be nearly the same person. It’s only because the whole world loves and care about him that we still speak Tibetan and so respect our culture today. If he wasn’t around our language, lifestyle and ethnic customs would be much weaker than they are.” 

    Far from diluting his Tibetan identity, J.'s education, connections and struggles for moderate success in the Han Chinese-run world only seemed to sharpen his pride in it. He was a paragon of Tibetan hospitality as well. We asked J. to recommend a restaurant. He fed us dinner. We asked to sleep the night in his car. He put us up in his home. We asked for a bathroom. He gave us his whole big backyard.

By later that evening we knew we made the right decision to stick around Tongren. Around 9 pm, I got a surprise call. It was from a monk I’d met earlier day. The rites were a go, he said. “7 a.m. We’re heading up.”

to be continued in Dharma Bummin' 2