nyamrup
ONE WORLD. ONE DREAM. FREE TIBET!
The Bus That Will Take Back Tibet
29 Aug 2007 15:06 EDT
After spending the whole summer in Tibet, in a place where I felt I couldn’t write without endangering myself and my friends, I find myself with so many things on which I now wish to write. However, the point at which I wish to begin is my last bus ride inside Tibet. This bus ride was unlike any other I experienced in Tibet, and as we moved along at a snail’s pace and got on and off the bus through the 5 or 6 times it broke down, I nonetheless found myself feeling that on this bus, just maybe, were a few of the future heros who would one day take back Tibet.
Nothing was going right that day. In Tibet, the long-distance busses leave their stations around 6am, which is fine if you’re Chinese and live in the Chinese towns where the stations are, but a big problem if you’re coming from the villages. So I woke up at 4am to catch a taxi which would take me to the bus station, which would in turn carry me to Chengdu (ཁྲེང་ཏུའུ་ / 成都) on my way back home.
Again, nothing was going right that day. My friends and I ventured out shortly before 5am to discover that the brilliant Chinese cab driver had gotten his car stuck in the mud, after which he then spent 2 hours getting it out rather than calling another car for us. We finally got to the bus station around 7:15, at which time all the busses to Chengdu had already departed, so I hopped on the bus that would take me the furthest I could go, hoping to catch another bus at the destination.
After getting on the bus, everything changed. A couple Tibetan guys on the bus had brought 2 huge boxes of lungta (small paper prayer flags) along with them, and as we ascended the first mountain, they proceeded to pass out wads of them to every single person on the bus. The spirit there was like nothing I’d seen in all my past 3 months in the country. Both the Tibetans and Chinese on the bus got really into it, and for once I found myself not angry and disgusted with every single Chinese person I saw.
There was also singing — and lots of it. Tibetans got it started with a mix of traditional and modern songs, with which many of the Chinese sang along. Then the Chinese would often take over with Chinese songs and Chinese-language songs by Tibetans, but inevitably one of the Tibetans on the bus would eventually start singing Sems kyi log phebs (སེམས་ཀྱི་ལོག་ཕེབས་) again and get the whole bus into a roar. This song is so popular in Tibet nowadays that even the Chinese would sing along quite well, likely not even realizing that it’s one of the most fiercely patriotic songs written in Tibet in modern times.
Along the way, the bus broke down again and again. With a broken fuel line spewing diesel out along the road, it was barely able to get enough power to make it up the mountains. Once we had to get out and walk to get the weight down enough that the bus could go on, and by the end of the day what should have been a 5-hour bus ride turned into an 8- or 9-hour ride. But nonetheless, the whole day was the happiest time I’d had on a bus in Tibet during my whole stay.
Seeing the people around me that day — Tibetan, Chinese, youth with untraditional and radical yet extremely un-Chinese hair styles, passionate singers putting their strongest energy into the song that most expresses the Tibetan spirit and identity, religious men giving away whole boxes of lungta only for the sake of the blessings and merit they believed would be generated by launching them from the tops of mountain passes — seeing all these things around me made me feel a hope and passion that was just what I most needed on my final day in Tibet. And a strange notion enterred my mind all the sudden. It wasn’t so much a rational thought about this all, but just a feeling. In that moment, I felt that among the crowd on this bus were some of the people who would take Tibet back from the Chinese.