Recently, I met a Tibetan man I will call L. By “met,” I mean that we saw and talked to each other through a small window on the screen of my computer. I teach adult literacy at the City University of New York (CUNY). In 2020, like everyone else, CUNY had to move classes online. CUNY’s high school equivalency classes are a slice of the rich cake that makes up New York: there are likely to be, in a single class, immigrants from places like Bangladesh, China, Caribbean nations, Guatemala, or Colombia, (just to name a few) as well as native New Yorkers who dropped out of high school for various reasons.

When I met L, I was excited. I’d spent two months in Tibet in 1987, and they’d been memorable ones. When I mentioned this in an email to him, he asked where I’d gone and I named the spots: Lhasa, Samye, Nam-Tso. Ah, he wrote back, all the pilgrimage spots.

And that was all.

I suppose I expected more excitement on his part—something like wow you’ve been to my homeland that no one around here has even heard of. But—nothing.

Later I learned more about him. When he was grade-school age, his parents had sent him from Tibet to India, a practice among Tibetans who wanted their children to have more chances and a better education than they were allowed under Chinese domination. His group was caught trying to cross the border and he suffered badly. He can never return to Tibet. He will never see his parents again. Once I knew this, I wondered how he felt when I blithely wrote to him about my travels there.

My own trip to Tibet was a lark. I went at an opportune time—in 1987 the border with Nepal had opened up after roughly 27 years. This made it possible to go overland from Nepal to Lhasa instead of flying to Hong Kong, then backtracking some 2,400 kilometers to reach Tibet.

Back then, there was a wild West feeling to the Kathmandu-Lhasa overland route. The travel companies hadn’t moved in yet, and there was no public transportation. Coming to Tibet this way, you took a bus from Kathmandu to the border, walked across the Friendship Bridge, then hoped, on the other side, that you would be able to persuade a truck driver to give you a ride to Lhasa.

I was in my 20s then, one in an army of backpackers who made our ways across Asia, clutching our Lonely Planet guidebooks, meeting each other in cheap hotels where we drawled out the names of the exotic places we’d been. There was a whole credo attached to what we were doing. We were travelers, not tourists, and by taking local transport, staying in local hotels, paying local price, we were seeing the real world; the places middle class Western travelers never saw. Tibet was the newest, coolest place to go.

Zhangmu, on the Tibetan side of the Friendship Bridge, was a mud circus. Perched on a hillside that looked over at the town of Barabise, in Nepal, the one dirt road led continually up, dotted with a few buildings on either side. There were four kinds of people: Chinese soldiers, dressed in light-green uniforms and curiously delicate white shoes; Chinese settlers; Tibetans, and the continually growing swarm of Western backpackers. There was only one place for Westerners to eat: a sort of shack perched on the edge of the cliff that leaned down over Barabise, the Nepali town below us. Inside that shack stood an energetic, slim Chinese lady dressed in bell bottoms and a floppy hat, who served up the only item on the menu: instant ramen noodles. You chose your flavor and she set a Styrofoam bowl in front of you and poured the water from a giant aluminum tea kettle she heated on an electric burner. When asked what type of money to pay her with (at that time there was, in China, “tourist money” and “people’s money” (reminbe), she crowed “Ziminbee!” joyously, then swept the bills you set down into her apron pocket.

There were two places to stay in Zhangmu: the industrial, overpriced Chinese hotel, or the Tibetan guesthouse. The “guesthouse” was a typical Tibetan home (red pillars painted with flowery designs), owned by a smiling Tibetan couple who dressed in traditional chubas. All twenty of us backpackers slept in cots one room—a giant slumber party.

We were a patchwork group. There was an Australian hippy traveling with her very unhappy four-year-old son, a Canadian couple in sensible shoes, a Californian surfer, two Dutchmen, and an American ex-pat named Oud who looked like a hippy version of Milton Berle, and had once been an advertising exec on Madison Avenue before, in his words “dropping out.”

The second day we found an empty Hino bus parked at the bottom of the hill and surrounded it. We were determined to make this the bus we took to Lhasa. When the driver came, a thin, jovial Tibetan in a newsboy cap, the bargaining continued for hours, Oud going back and forth from group to group, his jaw hanging down from the drama of it, until we finally struck a bargain. That night we slept on the bus to make sure the driver wouldn’t leave without us.

The road to Lhasa led straight up. At first, we peered out at jungle on either side of the road; then, after an hour or so of driving, we leveled out into what looked like a country of sand dunes stretching out in all directions–we were on the moon.

But it was still a party. After a few hours, we were able to persuade our driver to stop playing Chinese rock and roll. I gave him one of my Talking Heads tapes and we careened along the road in a cloud of dust with David Byrne crooning “We’re on the roooaaadd to nowhere.” At twelve, my father had given me The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test to read—the account of Ken Kesey and his band of proto-hippies, traveling across the US in a school bus. That day in Tibet, we were the Merry Pranksters, nineteen years after the fact.

It was a spectacular two months. A few memories: the dusty, red-cheeked faces of the children who crowded into the doorway of the bus and stared at us in wonder, the snot from their noses moving up and down like bungy cords; the dentist in Lhasa, who pitched a cloth banner with a picture of a bleeding tooth on the street across from our guesthouse and plied his trade right on the side of the road. The long-haired khampas, Tibetan cowboys, who strutted around in boots with huge coral and turquoise ponytail holders; the ruined outbuildings of the monastery at Samye, where we were allowed to bunk during a religious festival, and where I danced to the Rolling Stones in my Walkman past murals of buddhas and yellow-hatted lamas.

One thing stood out in my cross-cultural encounters with Tibetans: a good sense of humor. There was the boy monk at Ganden Monastery who, grinning, used sign language to teasingly encourage my companion and I to jump off the roof and try to fly. Or, in Gyantse, the man walking down the street with a giant dried sheep leg under his arm. When he saw me coming down the street from the other direction, he extended the sheep leg to shake my hand, then threw his head back and laughed.  

In contrast were the Chinese soldiers we ran into. One followed my travelling companion and I for several miles when we were out trekking, throwing stones at us when he got close. Another time, we were at a restaurant where a group of soldiers threw bottles at each other. My friend and I had to duck under the table to keep from getting concussed.

Before I went to Tibet, I had taken a few classes on Tibetan culture so I had read Exile in the Land of Snows. I knew something about what Tibetans had gone through since the Chinese invasion—forced labor, mass imprisonment, famine, the horrors of the Cultural Revolution.  I was curious about how things were now, but I hadn’t bothered to learn much more Tibetan than the words for “Yes” “no, “hello,” and “thank you,” and neither had my fellow travelers. Unless we ran into a hyper-educated Tibetan, we weren’t going to learn much about what things were like behind the scenes.

Instead, pouring into Tibet that summer in our Birkenstocks and Billabong tee shirts, clutching our Janson backpacks and our SONY Walkmen, we managed to delude ourselves that we were a sign of coming liberation. The Cultural Revolution was over! The border was open! Here we were—the good guys; the cool people, unlike those nasty Chinese.

A lot of Tibetans seemed to see it the same way. They were thrilled to have us pour into their guesthouses, always more rustic, but also cheaper, than the cinderblock Chinese hotels. During the two months I was there, I often wore a tee shirt that had a Tibetan prayer flag stenciled on it, and more than one monk lovingly read the Sanskrit mantras back to me. Once, a crowd of clearly impoverished rural Tibetans screamed with excitement when they saw us descend from our bus.

Perhaps we did give some Tibetans the notion that the bad times were over, and it was time to press for greater freedom. If that’s true, it proved to be an illusion. A month or so after I left, there were riots in Lhasa—Tibetans rebelling against Chinese rule. Then came the crackdowns: curfews, police and army at every street corner, mass arrests. Patrick French’s Tibet, Tibet chronicles the continuation of a Chinese police state, with numerous plain clothes undercover informers, in Lhasa up to the present day.

Ten years ago, when I began to write my novel, I knew that part of it would be set in Tibet. Not only was Tibetan Buddhism a presiding theme, but it also represented something I knew I wanted in the story—farawayness.

There have been many versions. At first, most of the story was going to be set in Tibet, and one of the main characters was an archeologist. But I didn’t know enough about what it was like to live there, because I’d only visited. If I wanted to know what it was like to be a Tibetan, I was going to have to do some research.

I did a lot of reading. Most of the books I could find fell into one of two genres: books about sufferings of Tibetans during the Cultural Revolution; and books by lamas, teachers, or academics describing various lesser-known religious practices (female Rinpoches; consort practice, chod). What was harder to find were books that gave me a feel for Tibetan culture now. After much searching, I was only able to find one English-language anthology of Tibetan short stories: Old Demons, New Deities. This gave me some ideas about what it might be like to be a Tibetan living in Tibet, but not as much as I’d hoped.

But I did find a book that showed me how little I really knew. Prisoners of Paradise was written by Donald S. Lopez, Jr,, a scholar who speaks and reads Tibetan. The book describes the ways that ideas Westerners take as “Tibetan” are in actuality products of the Western imagination. About the ubiquitous Tibetan Book of the Dead, for instance, Lopez writes that “it was the product of a chance meeting between a fourteenth century Tibetan author and a latter-day eccentric, Walter Wentz of San Diego, California.”   He goes on to show how subsequent translations and introductions re-interpreted the work according to the prevalent ideas of their time: for Timothy Leary, the Tibetan Book of the Dead was a manual for an acid trip. For Chogyam Trungpa, it reflected the wave of transpersonal psychology that was making its way across many circles in America. Lopez writes: “the work has taken on a life of its own as something of a timeless world spiritual classic. It has been made to serve wide-ranging agendas in various fields of use, agendas that have far more to more to do with the twentieth century cultural fashions of Europe and America than how the text has been used over the centuries of its use in Tibet.”

My novel, Hope for the Worst, traces a character’s involvement with a self-proclaimed American Buddhist teacher, and the way her life falls apart as a result. When I read Prisoners of Paradise, I could see the irony at once—my character, Ellie, believes heart and soul that enlightenment is just around the corner, only to discover it was all a fantasy she believed in order to avoid facing unpalatable truths about her life. How similar travel is—a chance to live a fantasy far removed from the reality of the everyday lives of the people who live in the place you are passing through. In some ways the Tibetan Buddhism that has been imported to the West is a form of travel also. We enter into an exotic realm of mandalas and mudras, katas and mantras, and in many ways, we really have no idea where we are.

For my character, Ellie, there is an eventual end to illusion, followed by several intense months of despair. Eventually, there is the beginning of a breakthrough. Not that all is well after this, but it’s clear that Ellie has grown, and as a consequence, there is reason to hope.

But that’s fiction.

For Tibetans both inside and outside of Tibet, it is not the same story. In Tibet on Fire, Tsering Woeser, a poet and blogger, poses the questions: Why are Tibetans self-immolating?” and answers the question succinctly: Tibetan’s beliefs have been suppressed and religious scholarship banned; Tibetan nomads have been forcibly removed from their lands to make way for development that is destroying the ecosystem of the Tibetan plateau; Tibetan students cannot learn in Tibetan; Han Chinese immigration to Tibet displaces Tibetans in their own homeland; and the Chinese government maintains a state surveillance system that has reached into every aspect of life in Tibet. Unable to protest legally, Tibetans have, in desperation, resorted to the one action left to them to advertise their collective dilemma.

That’s inside Tibet. Tibetans who have been able to escape face an array of difficulties—some may be undocumented (illegal aliens—what a term) here in the US, while others, like my student L, will suffer from the trauma of escape all their lives.

He’s a diligent student. From time to time he writes me polite letters in order to perfect his use of written English. With that level of discipline, my hope for him is that he will become a skilled writer in this language that is not his, able to tell his own story in English. The introduction to Old Demons, New Deities states that the anthology is the only one of its kind. As the diaspora ages, I hope to see more. I want to hear the stories. It’s the least I can do.