On the road to Pingliang

Here on these dry, hot mountains you can see small caves that were, I guess, once used for homes. They stand, black and empty, visited only by the howelling winds.

The people now build their homes with walls and rooves made from mud and straw.. It is said that some of these homes have been used for 2000 years. When it rains, the people simply patch with more of the earth.

Far away from here, people make their homes of plastics and synthetics, materials which never need patching.. But strangely, their homes never stand long before getting torn down and replaced by homes of newer, more durable materials. The old plastics and synthetics, then, are thrown away into deep pits in the earth, full of all the other longer-lasting stuff that never wears out.

The deep pits are getting fuller and fuller and actually becoming quite like mountains.

Maybe someday, when all the pits become like mountains, and there are no more places to build new homes with new stuff, those people with start digging out caves for homes in their plastic mountains.

A little boy with two white rivers of mucus running down his nose is sitting on the high Tibetan hills, his village of mud houses behind him. He reaches inside his dirt-stained shirt and pulls out a sparrow to show me. A blue string is tied to its leg and as he opens his hands, the bird flutters away until the string is taut. He yanks the string upward and the bird flies awkwardly up and then is stopped in mid-flight by the string. He laughs and returns the bird to his body.

Another boy is sitting on the white-carpeted floor of his living room, his shirt ironed and tucked in. He stares ahead at a television screen, holding a plastic controller in his hand, busy fingers. A long black cord connects the plastic controller to a black box where a computer reads the signals of his fingers into the movements of the figure on the screen. He stares without blinking and doesn't know I'm there.

In Xiahe, one night, we were having dinner at a Muslim restaurant, in the Tibetan part of town. In a nearby temple courtyard, some monks were dancing. Young ones were twirling, round and round, faster and faster, their purple robes like tutus around their waists. The older ones stood in the center of this twirling chaos, dancing slowly, arms and legs cutting through the air with controlled precision. The sun was setting on these contrasting dances, throwing deep shadows behind them, while the colors--greens and purples and reds and browns--grew ever more brilliant and intense. It was mesmerizing.

I went down to take a picture and ended up in a discussion of sorts, with me sitting in the center of a circle of all these dancing monks. They didn't speak English well, and I don't speak Chinese, but we managed to have an interesting conversation, and a very enlightening one for me.

First, let me say that we spent the entire first the first two weeks of our trip to China in the east--primarily Shanghai and Beijing--where devotion and loyalty to the PRC government is passionate. Flashing eyes, scream "One China!" daring anyone or any country to contradict. But here in Xiahe, among these monks, I heard a different side to the story.

It started with a date--1958--written with a rusty nail in the sand. "Tibet," he said, looking at me and showing one fisted hand, and then, "China," as the other hand, came up fast, swallowing up the other hand. "Mommy," he said, then held his hands like you would a gun, "Chinese." More dates were written--1994, 1997--as they pulled up the long cloths of their purple robes to show me the scars on their wrists and arms and chests that the Chinese have given them for life. Deep thick long scars that tell me that "One China" is not being promulgated by all.

When asked where they are from, they answer, "Tibet." "Did you walk from Tibet?" I ask. They are confused. "No," they say, "This is Tibet." They are right of course if you consider where Tibet was before the PRC started eating it up and calling it theirs; before they started tying up and imprisoning all those who had something different to say.

We traveled to the grassland villages one day and saw the PRC and its forces: trucks, with wheels taller than most of the mud homes nearby; long rows of skinny cannons pointed at the wide, empty plains, opposite the village. Little men in green and brown walked around these machines proudly, looking at us from the corner of their eyes. And I wonder, "Who do they think they are?" setting up their artillery camp here in the peaceful grasslands of Tibet. There is a village just across the road--this is their land. They have children who used to play in the ditches where now the heavy wheels of the cannons have squashed the flowers. There is a beekeeper here, who sells honey for a living. What happens when they shout, "Three, Two, One, FIRE!" and his bees fly away? Why not just go away and let them be? Who are they hurting?

This, of course, is not the whole story. I know that there is another side. I know because I met many good people from the east who passionately support the government's actions. To them, the government is acting on behalf of the west--in order to develop it, in order to give the people a better life. Force may be needed sometimes, they say, to make order before development can start. So they are sending their armies. But at the same time, they are sending their best students, to study at universities in the west, where the problems are, so that these students can use the knowledge of the east and put it to the problems of the west.

So there are two sides to every story, with good people as believers on both sides. Where am I, I wonder? Do I even have a right yet to choose a side: after only a month there, I am still so far from an understanding of either side. But what I see happening in China, is what we have all seen happen historically when rich countries try to help poor countries. Setting out with the best of intentions (or sometimes not), too often the rich countries end up dominating, forcing, destroying the poor because they forget to respect. Without respect there is no reason to understand or listen or learn. China is not one country, but many countries forced under one name and one government. The people of the different countries do not understand each other, and yet the rich are moving ahead, attempting to develop the others. As we have seen in the past, this often comes with disastrous effects, especially to the cultures of the poor. And for this reason I fear for China.