Laji— Rural Tibet and Modern China

NAME: Silang Laji
AGE: 23
OCCUPATION: Road worker
FAVORITE TYPE OF TV SHOW: Kung fu epics

During the seven day National Day vacation, I traveled to the Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in West Sichuan to hike around Minya Konka, a 7,500-meter holy mountain. This essay was written based on the experience.

After seven hours on the mountain road to Minya Konka, our van suddenly halted next to a girl standing on the side of the path. She exchanged a few words with the driver in the sing-songy local dialect of Tibetan and promptly stepped in the van.

Before she got in, it was easy to recognize that the girl was one of the many laborers in the area working on road construction. Road networks are rapidly expanding in China’s Tibetan regions as part of government plans to foster economic development and increase incoming Han Chinese migration. So far, the plans have been successful, dramatically elevating living conditions as well as increasing access to goods for the majority of people. However, some believe that these benefits come as a double-edged sword. The price is the further opening up of the Tibetan world to the dominant Han Chinese culture (through migration, products, media)— the surrender of even more cultural autonomy.

The girl was easily recognizable as a road laborer because she displayed the distinguishing features of every laborer I saw.

First, she was a female. Because most young men migrate out of rural areas to work in urban centers, women (and the elderly) tend to take care of the work in the countryside—including physically intensive work like farming or road renovation. In the Tibetan areas of China, where traditional gender roles restrict women from leaving home, this trend is especially potent.

The second distinguishing factor was her oversized floral hat. Chinese culture resoundingly equates ivory-white skin with beauty. With the laborers working outside at high altitudes (over 3,500 meters), failing to protect their skin from the sun would amount to sabotage of physical appearance.

She sat in the middle aisle. A few moments of silence passed before she spoke to us.

“All of your skin… is so white,” she said in surprisingly fluent standard Chinese. “I’m so dark— it’s a little embarrassing.”

Taken off guard by both her language ability and self-deprecation, I responded by saying that it didn’t matter at all to me— that I thought she was pretty, actually. I added that in the USA, many people lay out under the sun to deliberately blacken their skin. The bizarre fact about a distant land didn’t faze her.

“Well, around here, I don’t count as that pretty,” she said, smiling.

Silang Laji was 23 years old, with callused hands and tan skin—marks of growing up in the countryside. When the driver picked her up, she had just finished her day’s work on the road. Under normal circumstances, she would have had to walk for two hours to her cousin’s house in a nearby village, but today she was lucky. Her uncle— our driver—just so happened to drive by.

A Chinese passenger met eyes with Laji, “How is it doing road renovation work?” he asked.

“Xiguan le” – I’m used to it— she coolly responded.

“What about the four hours of commuting everyday?” the man pressed on, “that must be difficult.”

Smiling, and with a playful bounce to her voice, she shot back—“Xiguan le!”

A few days later, we learned that it had been her second day on the job.

Laji was the first Tibetan I met in Western Sichuan that spoke standard, unaccented Chinese.  When she was 13, she committed herself to learning the language, despite the fact that almost no one spoke it in her town. With no one to talk to, she studied standard Chinese with the only resource she had available— TV.

TV is more or less the same all over China, even in remote Tibetan mountain towns with few speakers of standard Chinese. With television networks stubbornly broadcasting only in Chinese, Laji found a perfect study resource. She spent hours a day dissecting the foreign language she heard in the news reports, kung fu epics and dramas on the TV. After years of listening and practicing in her mirror, she was able to speak the language with little difficulty or accent. In the process, she took a special liking to the Korean and Taiwanese dramas, which she found to be especially romantic.

Television wasn’t the only place where she admired Han culture; she also preferred Han men.

“Tibetan men are immature,” she said, “they can be very traditional, even going as far as beating their wives.”

When I asked her how people could allow violence like that to happen, she blamed it on “feudal mentality,” evoking the politicized term used by the Chinese Communist Party to characterize the theocracy that governed Tibet prior to its 1949 liberation by the People’s Liberation Army.

“Han men seem much more mature, much more civil,” she added.

Over the next few days, I spent a lot of time with Laji, who decided to take off time from roadwork and hike Minya Konka with my group. While hiking, we sang (Han and some American) songs, told (Tibetan and American) stories, and told (Han) jokes.

After a few days of travel, we reached the most remote place we would stay at— a village of eight homes, located at the base of the holy mountain. One of the homes belonged to the 10-member family of Laji’s elder cousin.

It was nightfall. Fifteen people huddled around the wood stove, eating sour cheese and drinking Tibetan butter tea. The weather was cold, and the stove was our only source of heat. I wouldn’t have known what day it was until someone turned on the TV that was sitting in the corner of the room, next to the murals of various Tibetan lamas. The screen flashed on and an image of thousands of soldiers marching in formation projected across the room. At the back of the formation, a giant, red mural proclaimed “Long Live the Motherland!”

It was Oct. 1st, 2009, the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. The broadcast was the long-awaited military parade. In the Han Chinese world, there was an almost hysterical anticipation for the event.

But in the dimly lit room, something about the whole spectacle felt distant. The noise coming from the TV set seemed to be swallowed up by the vast silence of the towering mountain at our doorstep. I glanced around the room— there were two foreigners, two Han Chinese, and eleven Tibetans. Some of our hosts curiously watched the broadcast (despite probably not understanding the Chinese) and many others just ignored the TV.  Laji was wiping the dirt off the traditional Tibetan clothes she was wearing. An old Tibetan man wearing a knock-off Columbia windbreaker and boots sat in the corner. With eyes closed, he quietly rotated a prayer wheel around and around.

Laji, glancing away from the TV, told me that she preferred Korean dramas.