Memory in Tibet
Lanfu Liu
Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2024 (view all the winners)
First Prize, Nonfiction
Illustration by Connie Chang
Tibetan Plateau
The sky was high and blue. White clouds floated by like the shed feathers of some enormous bird. This was the typical picturesque scenery here—the Tibetan plateau, high above sea level, pure and uncontaminated like some heavenly realm hidden from the prying eyes of worldly people. I inhaled the bright air. "So, this is Tibet," I murmured to myself. I had prepared my mind and body for this journey for a long time. I knew that the road ahead would not be a pleasant one. I would not be doing horse stances in some golden Shangri-La high up in the mountains with wise, old lamas whose snow-white beards reached down to their knees. I was going to be a teacher's assistant in an impoverished Tibetan village. I was going to see for myself how the "other side" lives. Wen, the instructor proper, needed the help. She was not sure she could do it all by herself—the wound of a recent family tragedy still bled beneath her friendly demeanor. I hoped that the blue skies and white clouds would be all the medicine she would need. I did not know that I was going to depend on that bright air, too.
Newcomer
Local children ran shouting past the window. Wen and I walked into the classroom to welcome her new pupils in the village school, our words misting in the cold air. It felt like we were running a class at the top of the world. "Good morning!" she shouted with enthusiasm. The kids immediately stopped yelling and began to silently inspect this newcomer and her assistant.
I looked into their faces and saw equal parts trepidation and anticipation. They did not hate school. I could tell this would not be a problem class. I thought back to my own teachers and classrooms in the city. I never liked school. I did not want to be taught by others. I thought I was some caged bird of paradise, but I was also afraid to test myself. This contradiction tormented me for such a long time that I forced myself to enroll in the teaching program. Back home, Tibet was still a bit of a mystical place to me. I would sit in class and think about frontiers that I believed still had to exist. Yet, here were these kids, far away from traffic jams and skylines, and they wanted to be in that classroom.
I compared my life to theirs. If their parents were miraculously settled in the east, given jobs and property in Shanghai or Beijing, it would only be a generation or two before these children's children were sitting bored in class, daydreaming out of the same blue windows. Thinking about the place their parents left, or maybe not at all. Maybe there would be no mystical Tibet for them. Unable to look back, they would have to invent a new mysticism. I suddenly imagined myself as a villager pining for the city. Yes, I told myself. Maybe I would be just as unhappy here, too. Where did these kids get this hunger to learn? Was it actual hunger that kept them from fidgeting in their seats? I was thinking too much. I had to be alert, ready to help Wen in whichever way I could.
Wen was introduced to her students by the local teacher, Ma, a veteran of nine years. Quite impressive, I thought—nine years was a long time on these cold slopes. Ma had had opportunities to leave for the city, but she preferred to stay here, close to the students that she thought of more as her children than her pupils.
Wen taught Mandarin, mathematics, and painting for students from grade three to grade six. She was a skilled, talented instructor, but even she struggled to make the best of what she was given. The schoolhouse had no adequate rooms, and so all fifty students were packed into a single classroom. While students of one grade listened to the lesson, the others did their homework quietly until it was their turn to listen. It was hard at first. The local kids struggled with Mandarin while Wen herself could barely understand Tibetan. I picked up the language a little faster. Wen would joke that I was a prodigy when I'd feel brave enough to stumble through a sentence or two in front of the kids. They thought it was the funniest thing in the world.
Ma taught the younger students Mandarin, but she herself had only learned it in middle school. Her Mandarin was serviceable, but not quite there yet. She often had to resort to ending the class in Tibetan. Still, Ma was an eager, warm presence as a teacher, and as a woman, she was allowed to share her bedroom to make up for the limited space. Wen would pick up where she left off. She checked all the right boxes, after all. She was eager and warm, too—a tireless personality who seemed to love the act of teaching as much as the students entrusted in her care. She did not even ask for a salary. "I get paid in other ways," she would say as she would watch the kids run around the playground. I would learn later that she got paid in memories, in the proximity to her daughter's spirit that she felt through these kids. I was paid more traditionally, sure, but I was also paid in perspective. Look at these kids, I thought, playing hopscotch on top of the world, so far away from the tectonic grinding of egos.
Harsh environment
The first day was as much a lesson for us as it was for the students. The room was so cold that children often had to fill bottles with hot water at home before the day started. The bottles were poorly insulated, and tended to cool down long, long before they set foot in class. It felt like we were running a class in a meat locker. It should have come as no surprise: the temperature inside the school was barely higher than outside because of the lack of coal. In situations like this, the people had to settle for burning waste paper, leaves, and cow-dung, and even that was starting to run out.
Wen closed the windows and doors tightly. It was hardly enough. Her scarf was wound so tightly around her neck I feared she'd turn blue in the middle of a lesson. I had so many layers on my arms that they were stiff. She had already developed a way with the kids, and I took her lead. It is easy to be nervous in front of a class as an assistant. A good teacher is confident, relaxed, sure of their authority over their students but not afraid to be as kind and patient as they need be. Wen was growing into that role, and I was slowly following in her footsteps. I did not have to worry about how well I was doing. My job was to just teach and be taught, observe and actualize. Despite myself, I was beginning to learn a humility high up on the Tibetan plateau that I never would have expected was going to be a part of the job description. To say nothing of the cold. That was the physical test.
Around lunchtime, Ma would start to wash and cook the rice. The only other dish besides the rice was some yak meat and cabbage. This was the free, nutritional food that was paid for by the national government. For children of poverty-stricken families, this free meal at school was the best meal of their day. Now I understood those looks of anticipation that I saw in their faces earlier. School was not all drudgery to them. It was an escape from the squalor of their homes.
The headmaster was a kind man. He had arrived from a conference just around dinnertime to introduce himself after class. Wen had briefly stepped out and I had been taking my time cleaning up.
"I am sorry for not meeting sooner. Even a place like this can keep you too busy for your own good," he said. His Mandarin was halting, but strangely pure, oblivious of the language barrier.
"I am the teacher's assistant. It is a pleasure," I told him. "Have you been headmaster long?"
"Quite long. I can't just leave these little ones behind if I stepped down."
I felt this was a man I could say almost anything to. "The families of these children lead such harsh lives."
"It has taught them a gratitude you can't learn inside this classroom," he said with a wink. Was the headmaster going to be my plainclothes Buddha for the trip? The gateway to that mystical Tibet I had always pined for, the avatar of what I had been missing in my own life. I resisted the urge hear his every word as the proclamation of some bodhisattva, higher up the plateau still, a sun of loving-kindness speaking through his anointed below.
It was then that Wen returned, and introduced herself. I sensed that she was feeling the same things.
"I feel that the children depend on me," the headmaster said.
"They are such wonderful children," Wen replied. It felt good to her to tell someone how much she really enjoyed teaching them. "They live in a world where summer as you know it does not exist. For them, the sun is a freezing ball of cold, cold light. Can you imagine what that does to a person growing up?" Wen understood what he was saying easily.
She probably understood it better than anyone else. Sometimes Wen would walk to the corner of the classroom and take out a small photograph of a young girl, glance at it, and put it back in her jacket pocket. She thought no one would notice, but I did. She had more in common with these kids and their hardships than I did. I asked myself what I was doing there. I had no secret wound, no poverty-stricken background I was trying to overcome, no spiritual calling up there in those high Tibetan slopes. Wen's tenderness, the respect and discipline of the children—I envied these things. They were fruits of hardship. They were the things that made people three-dimensional individuals. I wondered when it would rub off on me. But I had a job to do. It was not the time to "find myself".
Struggle between school and making quick money
To learn more about the children, Wen began to pay visits to their parents in her spare time. Not many parents in the plateau saw the point of a formal education. Although they accepted that learned people could become "more powerful" in the future, they could hardly afford such an education in the first place. They preferred kids to start making money as soon as they were able to, usually through physical labor like digging or harvesting valuable Chinese caterpillar fungus, the most "precious resources of Heaven". This did not require any book knowledge. It just required a knowledge of the world they were born into. Formal education was a luxury.
"A half kilogram of caterpillar fungus can be sold at RMB 40,000; top level goes for over RMB 100,000," one of the students' parents told us.
"I can see why it would be so lucrative," I ventured to say. Wen and the students' parents nodded.
"It is quite tempting, isn't it?" the father said. Wen knew about these exotic Chinese medicines that supposedly cured every ailment under the sun, but had little idea about the bitter stories behind it. She fidgeted in her seat and fingered the photo in her jacket pocket.
"You have to endure the searching and digging, and moreover, you need to have the luck in your favor," the father continued.
"Luck?" Wen said, snapping out of her reverie.
"Oh, yes. You have to pay a lot to just set foot on the field, and then it's all luck. It's luck that pays back those costs, and then some. It is why we rely on the children the way we do."
Images flashed through my mind of children engaged in back-breaking work. I shook my head. No, that is not right. These parents were not taskmasters. They did what they had to do because they had to do it. Back home, in the cities I grew up in, people could afford to relax a little. Oceans of sweat expended for a little extra food and money in your pocket. Was it true that your inner life lived and died on the stomach? These villagers were souls stripped clean, like bones buried in the sky. Was all of a city just a surplus of calories? All of its lights and stimulation and certainty laced with the promise of uncertainty. My mind reeled at the harshness of these people's lives. No wonder Buddhism had managed to plant such deep roots in the Tibetan plateau.
"The kids here travel to the high, mountainous area to search for the fungus at around seven or eight years old because they have the best eyesight for it and their tiny hands don't break the fungus," the father continued, oblivious to my own inner dialogue. That necessity again: they needed the children to harvest the fungi so they don't destroy it, like you would need a child to navigate a small space. It was so easy to shake our heads at what people like this were forced to do to survive, back in the climate-controlled boxes we called our homes. As we would later be told by the headmaster, about 90% of the students went up into the mountains for the fungus every morning, except those too young to go. My mind reeled again. I remember complaining about having to walk a few miles to school back home.
These financial struggles lasted for years. Dan told us that many of the children go, and choose to never return to the classroom. Ironically enough, the busiest time for teachers was before the beginning of the semester, when they would make the rounds and try to persuade parents from taking their kids away from school. Dan thought Wen and I were up to the same business. He laughed when he told us this, patting Wen and I affectionately on the shoulder as if to suggest the absurdity of such attempts. As Dan got up to brew another cup of tea, I took a long glance around the room: a tiny shed built with a mixture of mud and yak hair housing a family of three. Dan and his two children had lived there all their lives, surviving on what little income Dan could manage from his ranching work and the children's fungus picking.
A Chinese national flag hung on the wall, more for the insulation than the patriotism. Here, in the roof of the world, I thought to myself, was the symbol of a nation a billion strong reduced to insulation, and flimsy insulation at that. Everything was upside-down here, I thought. Or maybe it was the other way around. It was the demand from the mainland that sent these kids trekking into the mountains to harvest caterpillar fungus. Was there anyone to blame? It was not as if the cities sculpted these mountains, and made life so hard for men like Dan and his two children. Who did Wen blame for what happened to her daughter? Somehow, I could not imagine these people shaking their fists at the sky for their lot in life. "Man plans, Heaven ordains," I thought to myself. That old saying: the pain of history condensed into a single, elegant formula.
"Are Mandarin teachers common in this part of the country?" I asked Dan.
"Yes. Sometimes I must travel to other villages, and every year I hear it being spoken more and more."
"So that is why the replacements are able to arrive so fast," I said.
"I try not to bother myself about it," Dan said, rising to his feet.
It suddenly occurred to me that the villagers probably never talked about politics. A waste of hard-earned calories, no doubt, and I was inclined to agree with them.
"You want some barley wine before you go?" Dan offered.
"No, sorry, we still have a few more families to visit," Wen said. I could tell she would not have minded a little bit of alcohol after everything she had just heard. I would not have minded a cup myself. However, we could not relax just yet. Outside, Wen asked me what I thought about the whole affair.
"I don't think it's right, but what are they going to do? Build rice paddies on the plateau?"
Wen thought that was funny. "It's a start."
"Wen, we didn't come here to play at social justice. We came here to do a job."
"What would you do if this was Africa and we were watching rhinos getting shot and killed for fat cats back on the mainland?"
"That's different."
"Is it?"
"Yes. Africa isn't the Tibetan plateau. Dinner grows on trees there."
She thought that was funny, too. "I'm not so sure about that."
"Well, get sure about it. I don't know. I know you mean well."
She looked off into the distance. I liked Wen. She was someone who didn't let the things that haunted her ruin her mood. I couldn't say the same for myself, not always.
"Let's accompany the kids on their next harvesting trip. We'll see for ourselves where the line should be drawn on the issue."
Fungus Picking on the Prairie
Even the rhythms of life are different there. Three seasons of snow are followed by a single season where it is possible to make some money. The caterpillar fungus clings to the body of the worms in the winter, devouring them from the inside out. From May to August, a short warm period arrives, and the fungus develops a "tail" that sprouts directly from the worm's body. The mummified worm and this grass-like tail together constitute the "caterpillar fungus". Shortly afterwards, whole families of farmers and herdsmen, after the long winter confinement, move to higher altitudes for this precious resource, like migrating birds.
It was freezing on the slopes where that valuable medicine is grown, 4-5,000 km above sea level. Its rarity was what made it so expensive. A great proportion of this miracle tonic was dug by those small, coarse hands, coarser than the rich hands that fed them. What a world, I would think. Where the hands of children are more calloused than their "betters". I wondered if I should have been thankful that there was such a demand for this fungus to begin with. Maybe the worst thing anyone could do is convince the wealthy that it is not quite the panacea that it is marketed as.
Toa was a thin little girl of about 12, and spoke very little. She had already gone fungus picking twice. She did not like the job as it required a long and very strenuous hike up the plateau. Wen and I joined Toa and the group of 20 children on their picking trip one morning, hoping to observe this mysterious and lucrative activity first-hand. I surmised that Wen's real intention was to take photos of the harsh conditions that the children had to work in. I was not sure that this was the right thing to do. If the government cracked down on the activity, what would this village survive on?
That would be rich, I thought. The story of a young man who arrives as a teacher's assistant in a village on the high Tibetan plateau, and lets his conscience deprive these people of their only real livelihood. Good intentions were going to lead to a disaster. I looked over at Wen. I wondered if she had put two and two together yet. The last thing the village needed was us publishing photos of their children hiking miles up the plateau to harvest caterpillar fungus.
I know Wen had her own personal reasons for doing what she was doing, and they were good ones. Mine were simply moral. I wondered if this was my test: saying No to the first opportunity I got to Do The Right Thing. It seemed to me that the point was that it wasn't the right thing to do, at least not after giving it some thought. If the government cared enough to send teacher after teacher there to teach the kids Mandarin until everyone was speaking Chinese and Tibet was no more, then putting a stop to this practice was going to be an early and very necessary step. If the government was going to "civilize" these people, then the fungus harvesting had to go.
The children packed some yak beef jerky for lunch and began their hike. Wen walked right next to Toa and I walked behind them, listening to their conversation.
"How are you, Toa? Pumped for the trip?" Wen asked, although she already knew the answer. She was just trying to make conversation.
"Not really, today is too windy. Not good for fungus picking," Toa replied. She was definitely not a girl of many words.
Wen and Toa walked in silence for another two miles before Wen tried again. She began by asking what her dream was. I was still behind them, and the wind had begun to bite through even my thick coat.
"I would like a thick coat for winter, because it is too cold up here," Toa replied, apparently misunderstanding the meaning of "dream".
Wen smiled. "I meant, what would you do if you did not have to pick caterpillar fungus? It can be anything in the world."
"For example, I would like to be a musician," I offered from the back. I did.
Toa's eyes immediately lit up. "I would want to play the flute. I heard it once and it was beautiful." Toa slowed her steps, savoring the memory of that unknown music. Wen slowed down as if she was remembering something, too. "You know my daughter Miga used to play the flute. She always pointed the flute right at me as if she were holding a wand right before she played, as if to say 'ready to be mesmerized?'..." Wen trailed off. The tears in her eyes hardened in the cold. She stopped, knelt down on the grass, and buried her head under her stole. Her sobbing was swallowed by the wind.
"Is something wrong?" Toa asked.
"No. She just really misses her daughter," I responded.
Toa knelt down by Wen and placed a tiny palm on her head. "I think Miga and I would be very good friends," she said. She took one of the bracelets off her wrist and offered it to Wen. "I only give these bracelets to my best friends, but I think Miga should have one."
Wen was stunned by Toa's act of kindness, and accepted the bracelet. She toyed with its red and gold thread. The wind screamed.
Change of Heart
Returning from the higher mountains, Wen became sick. She was not used to the conditions on the plateau. Her fever ran high for the whole week, and occasionally she would mutter "Miga" in her sleep, although no one except Toa and I understood why. Ma tended to her when she was sick, changing the towel-wrapped ice on her forehead once in a while. I had to take over teaching duty. I would go visit her after class, stand in the doorway, and watch her the rise and fall of her breath. One time, the doctor happened to be there. He reminded me of my father. "You are kind, and the Buddha is on your side," he told Wen.
Wen took a month and a half to recover from the trip. I would teach class and spend a few nights at the hospital making sure she was okay. It was my duty to observe, and not pass judgment on anything that was taking place in front of me. I was not the protagonist of the story. There was no Story, or what was the same, there were nothing but stories all around me. It wasn't much longer when I eventually came to accept that my task there was to observe other "protagonists" living out their own stories. It was a long time coming for me. I was young and had to stop living in my head all the time. I had to learn how to accept the existence of other realities outside my own. Become transparent. The sky was getting to me.
I did not say much. Still bedridden, Wen gradually opened up to me about how she had come to realize the real significance of the caterpillar fungi to the children.
"For kids like Toa, this is the only hope they have to fill their stomachs today and have the audacity to look forward to tomorrow. Without the money they get from collecting and selling that fungus, those kids would be facing starvation and all their hopes would be a mirage on the horizon. If I show the world those photos I took, it has to inspire at least national debate. Surely, the children will no longer be allowed to go fungus-picking, and more donations will have to arrive."
I remained silent. Her voice was back to normal.
"But would those donations really go to those who need them? Would Toa be able to learn the flute in a school-funded program? I doubt it. The donations that usually get sent to places like this disappear on the way. They can't actually be arriving here, at any rate. The school's proof of that. No one here has seen a cent of any it. But I won't let my moral objections take away their last light of hope."
Now I was starting to feel vaguely ashamed for not wanting to do anything about it. I could already imagine the tide of regrets that'd wash over me the instant I'd step back into my house again. It really wasn't about the right choice. It was about choosing the option that would weigh less on our conscience. Whistle-blowers had about as much to fear from enraged families as they might reprisal from the government.
"Did you see the callouses on Dan's hands the other day? I wouldn't want to get on his bad side."
"So, you're afraid of what the parents will do?" Wen asked.
"I'd let them do it. It doesn't matter what our intentions are. If we go snooping around, we'll be treated like nosy city folk who don't understand the realities of the world."
"Can we say that now, though, that we've seen the kids fungus-picking first-hand?"
"Back home, we never ask about where anything comes from. We paid people to grow and raise the food we eat and we didn't lose a wink of sleep over it. This mission that we're suddenly on, it should have started closer to home."
"I guess you're right," she said, nodding.
"We care about these kids because they have names. We call those names out every day during attendance. We didn't know any of them existed until we met them. How many other anonymous victims of circumstance are out there? Who can we save from the conditions of their life that can afford to have their face published in the newspaper?"
Just then, Wen shot up and told me to go to the nearest town with a landline and call her editor. She was sick, he would understand. He would have been expecting something by now, anyways, and she was not sure she would be out of the hospital in time. I did just that. The editor sighed in exasperation.
"She was supposed to be on a crusade against 'traditional Chinese medicine'. What people go to when the doctors aren't enough. Rhino horns, the fungi, stuff like that. Just tell her I am not sure she will even have a job when she comes back, and to think of her daughter."
"I won't tell her the last part," I said.
"Her daughter would still be here if any of that junk worked. Now she's getting cold feet because actions have consequences. Why am I talking to you, anyways?"
I had never seen him, but I already did not like the man. He reminded me of the people back home who needed authority to be loved. People who changed when they put on the uniform, or whatever it was. This man was everything that was being bled out of me in the village, by the cold, the isolation, the spare diet and blue dome of the sky. He did not remind me of my father.
The Bonfire Party
The villagers celebrated the completion of the fungus picking and harvest season by hosting a bonfire party. Wen and I attended, watching the kids and adults singing, dancing, and eating yak meat around the bonfire. Such a simple and contented people, I thought to myself. In the crowd, we noticed Toa, who was having the most fun out of all her classmates. Wen stole periodic glances at her daughter's photo. The lama headmaster approached her on one occasion. He offered me a drink with a smile and inserted himself into our little group like he was always there.
"I don't understand why God would take away my only daughter. She was so young. She could have done so much," Wen confessed.
The headmaster was silent for a while. The old man had always seemed to radiate a quiet wisdom.
"You know, Miga is quite close to a Tibetan word 'sam-gi-gyap', which means something that we as human beings can never capture. There are certain powers in this world that are simply beyond our understanding. Some push us towards life; others, death. But there is always a reason for what might have happened. Like what you have told me about the circumstances of your daughter's death. I do not think caterpillar fungus, or ginkgo tea or whatever it might have been, is to blame for your daughter's death. The medicinal value of these things is more like a spiritual power, and sometimes they are powerless to overcome the force of the malady itself. The only thing that saves a life is faith and kindness."
I could tell Wen was not entirely convinced by the lama's words, but she nodded all the same. We both gulped down our barley wine and stared at the ground. The headmaster suddenly pointed at the bracelet that Toa had given Wen, and asked where she got it. Wen told him.
"You know, red stringing bracelets are gifts that parents give to their children when they are born, and each child only has one. Toa lost her parents a long time ago, and that red line is the only thing that reminds her of her parents. The fact she has given it to you must mean something."
A complicated feeling must have arisen inside Wen. Equal parts shock, acceptance, empathy, reconciliation. The next thing I knew, she was off to find Toa.
The lama looked at me. "Ah yes, the quiet, but very observant assistant." He looked over at Wen and Toa sitting beside the bonfire. "What do you make of that?" he asked me with a smile on his face. He beamed with joy, actually, like some guardian spirit that had just succeeded in its mission of making the world a slightly better place.
"She's always been a good teacher." I took a sip of barley wine. I think I was getting used to the cold.
"And you are a good teacher's assistant."
"I wonder how someone is able to move on from something like that."
"Some do, some don't."
"I can't imagine it."
"Most don't have to."
"I remember the doctor mentioning the Buddha when Wen was sick."
"It is good that he did."
"It is a deep part of your lives."
He suddenly became quiet and did not continue our conversation, and I followed his gaze. I looked over to where Wen and Toa were. They were laughing like they were sisters sharing some secret joke. They were happy. Everyone was, because they had to be. They worked all year for a few brief, warm bursts of togetherness. Watching them there, with the sun setting behind me and the barley wine making my thoughts swim, I had to accept that pain was the only thing that made life real. I thought of my father, ground down by the routines of his job. If he had the day off, we would watch documentaries together. I was always a bit of a history buff, and I got it from him. In the other place where we are who we were born to be, he is a real man. But in this life, he was too tired to do anything but mediate our relationship through a screen. We had been watching a documentary about the war with the Japanese and he shook his head and said, "It is a curse to be a man." I believed it then, but I could not have believed it that night.
"Yes. The only thing that saves is faith and kindness." He spoke again after a moment of silence and then looked away. "At death our minds open like a flower."
I wasn't even sure if he had spoken that last line. The barley wine may have been getting to me. The sky was high and blue, bruised by the setting sun.
