Ethnicity, Exoticness, Taste, Consumption

Last week we celebrated Devin’s birth. I thought of repeating Devin’s idea of releasing some fish into a river and birds into air when we celebrated her birthday two years ago in Hangzhou with my family, but Beijing is so large, I hardly see waters running through the city.Some taxi drivers told me there’re a few rivers crossing it, but honestly, I’m intimidated by this gigantic city with overwhelming traffic and poor service in most stores. So, we didn’t release fish and birds. My sister in Hangzhou did it and gave us some credit toward our merit.

Toward late afternoon last Thursday I thought of Makyi Ama, a Tibetan restaurant in Chaoyang District, which is about fifty-minute taxi ride from where we are in Haidian District. In the past my students and I had dinners and cultural events there. It is indeed a festive place for a birthday celebration. My assistant Jabeh quickly made reservation. By 5:00pm, Jabeh, his friends (our friends too), and we hopped into two taxis.

Makyi Ama is an upscale restaurant in Beijing. Its interior motif reflects the luxurious aspect of Tibetan cultural tradition: hardwood dining tables and chairs and the display of crafts of both religious and cultural significance. It is owned by a couple – the husband is a Tibetan and the wife is a Han Chinese. They started out successfully in Lhasa and now there are two more restaurants in Beijing. Most of Makyi Ama’s customers are North Americans, Western Europeans, and the new rich of China.

The phrase “Makyi Ama,” pronounced as “ma-ji-a-ma,” came from one of the fifth Dalai Lama’s poems. “Ma” means “not,” or “no” and “kyi” means “birthing” or “to give birth.” “Ama” means mother. So, it could be translated as “mother without giving birth.” Tsangyang Gyatso, the fifth Dalai Lama, was known for his love poetry. However, tantric practitioners and scholars contend with this claim by saying that his love poetry in essence conveys higher meanings of tantric practice, not just cheesy courtship verses. Anyway, Makyi Ama is a popular restaurant not just because of its food but also because of its Tibetan cultural contents. In fact it has become a window for local and foreign residents to experience Tibetan culture in a commercial environment.

So, we were consumers walking into this cultural window. Waiters and waitresses all dress in traditional attire with a Lhasa style. Jabeh reserved the best table for us, located in the center of the restaurant facing the stage where evening performance takes place each night at 8:00. Wendy, Devin, Merlin, and I arrived earlier. We took a slow tour in the restaurant. It has a small book/souvenir store. The jewelry displayed there is quite beautiful but expensive. It's probably twenty times more expensive than that I often saw in Qinghai and Gansu. The display of Tibetan kitchen wares in a corner particularly caught attention from Wendy and kids. Wendy began to take photos. One waitress told her photos were not allowed. The head waiter nearby then said to me, “You can take photos of yourself and kids but you can’t directly take photos of the displays in the restaurant…” He didn’t explain why customers could not take photos. One waitress standing next to him said, “Laoban (owners) said no photos allowed.” But I had taken one photo without people in it before we were told “No.”

Jabeh and our other friends, Gabeh and Sangdhe, arrived. They brought a Totoro Doll (a Japanese anime character) to Devin as her birthday gift. We began to order food. The menu is impressively composed with large photos and descriptions in both Chinese and English. Meat dishes are predominant choices. The owners have modified traditional Tibetan food because in general, Tibetans do not roast meat. Makyi Ama has assorted roast beef (yak) and lamb. Unlike the gamy texture of yak meat I have had in Qinghai, Sichuan, and Gansu, yak meat at Makyi Ama is soft to my teeth. What I like most at Makyi Ama is a type of thin pancakes made out of highland barley flour. The food was good so we quickly ate most of what we had ordered. I ordered an additional plate of yak meat, boiled not roasted. I knew Jabeh, Gabeh and Sangdhe all love meat.

Around 8:00, performance began. Dancers and singers mostly come from Kham and Amdo regions. Although I had seen the same performance quite a few times, I still very much enjoyed it especially the singing part because once in a while I fantasize myself as a folk singer. The performance is programmed to show customers different singing styles, choreography, and fashions from all regions of Tibet, namely, Lhasa area, Kham, and Amdo. There was a bi-lingual announcer on the stage who informed audience of the regional variations of Tibetan singing and dancing. Like previous times, my impression of Makyi Ama is colorful, expressive, and loud singing and dancing. This is what I see from Makyi Ama, as a window of Tibetan culture in Beijing.

Last semester I directed my students to make a video project on how tourists consume ethnic sites in Yunnan province. What we experience is similar to elsewhere in China – ethnic cultures are being turned into a type of commodity for consumption. I didn’t mean to kill the fun at Makyi Ama. Honestly, this type of fun is a one-time occasion. It does not sustain itself for the second time when you go. Tibet has a dichotomized public image in China. On one hand, its tradition, or what is referred to as “Old Tibet,” is portrayed by the Chinese state as a most barbarous society because of its feudalist system known as “serfdom;” thus, it “deserved” abolishment via revolution and reform. On the other hand, in the tourist industry of contemporary China, Tibet is being advertised as a place closest to the heavens. Images of Tibet as Shangri-la are well employed in Chinese tourist industry. So, Tibetans, somewhat resembling the image outsiders hold of Native Americans, are seen as “noble savages” – they have tantric Buddhism but they also carry swords and daggers wandering the highlands with their yaks and sheep.

This split image of Tibetans prevents non-Tibetans, especially in China, from seeing the humanness that is common to all of us, i.e. personal emotions, kindred relations, and the individualities of the young and old. At Makyi Ama, customers are physically close to the Tibetan waiters and waitresses, and the performers; however, they’re more than an ocean apart from each other. The sharp cleavage between tradition and modernity, and backwardness and progress is fully displayed at Makyi Ama. The divide between those on the stage and those off the stage making merry with their food and Tibetan performance, sets Tibetans apart from non-Tibetans, as if Tibetans were the presence of the past – a museum piece. Their colorfulness and expressiveness are to be looked upon but are too distant to be embraced.

I’m not saying that non-Tibetan consumers of Tibetan culture are the culprits who cornered Tibetans into this museum-like display. In many instances, they did, but Tibetans with resources, like anyone else, also take opportunities to make a better living in this age of economic globalization. In the meantime, Tibetans in China mostly rely on the means of the market economy to exercise their collective self-representation. For so long, Tibetan culture has been portrayed, in China, as the “darkest” social system on earth. So, why can’t Tibetans take opportunities to show the festive and glorious sides of their ancient civilization? Like anyone else in China, they also desire to be loved and cared for instead of being shunned because of their past. But, commercial channels are too narrow to let the river of Tibetan civilization display itself.

I haven’t been to all parts of Tibet. My association with Tibet is mostly with farmers and nomads in eastern Tibet, currently southern Gansu, western Sichuan, and most parts of Qinghai provinces. In these regions, I have never experienced the same luxurious gourmet that we find at Makyi Ama, but I have stayed with Tibetan families with integrity and dignity, who are not always in colorful and expensive outfits. I feel I’m experiencing multiple culture shocks in Beijing – the disparity between performed Tibet and lived Tibet, between the current China and the China I grew up with, and between the prescribed human destiny of modern progress and my own imagined utopia where differences give us stronger bonding and distances bring us kindred spirit.

Pilgrimage to Mt. Sedzong

I feel elated each time I return from a pilgrimage trip, including this time, regardless of my bus crash. As a matter of fact, I’m recovering very quickly. I was told by a doctor that it would take a month to recover. It has been slightly over a week and an half but my routine has been resumed, i.e. going to work, researching, and writing. Pilgrimage in general gives me a sense of rebirth, transformation of my consciousness in terms of my existential and spiritual positions in this world. The world goes on as it is with events of both happiness and sadness. The transcendental nature of pilgrimage elevates my consciousness from multi-dualities of our worldly mode of being. I feel restored, recovered, and renewed upon returning from my recent pilgrimage trip to Mt. Sedzong, a sacred site where Guru Rinpoche (Padmasambhava, founder of Tibetan Buddhism) had solitary meditation in a cave.

This time, my pilgrimage was not only a trip expressing my homage to the teachings and practices of a Buddhist saint. I was also connecting the sublime physical environment of Mt. Sedzong with human ecology. For this coming fall, I plan on making a visual documentary with my students on the relationship between Tibetan traditional wisdom and ecological health. Mt. Sedzong is an ideal site. Unlike Mt. Ani Machin, Mt. Gang Rinpoche and other sacred sites that require many days to complete a circumambulation, Mt. Sedzong is compact enough for my students to explore its natural beauty and caves of historical and spiritual significance in three days. It is also fairly close to the county seat of Xinghai, about an hour bus ride. Most importantly, there is a monastery on the south side of the mountain. It’ll be our base and a site for our students to have conversations with monks who know the history and folklore of Mt. Sedzong.

The rock formation at Mt. Sedzong is one of a kind in the region. It stands out among the expansive rolling mountains covered with lush grass in the summer. If a Chinese Fengshui man or an Australian aboriginal Dreamer happened to be at Mt. Sedzong, I am sure he would identify it as a celestial place or as a place where many songlines (passages of dreams) converge. This was how I felt when I was there: Buddhist practice in Tibet isn’t a lone business; on the contrary, when a lone practitioner takes residence in a cave, he or she immediately plugs into multi-interplay with other species and with both earthly and cosmological energy-fields. Enlightenment comes from within, but I wonder how much our inner landscape is nourished by sublime natural environments like Mt. Sedzong. In turn, from the perspective of human ecology, we also consecrate the landscape of our spiritual/religious choice. In the context of Tibetan Buddhism, the consecration is done in Buddhist terms.

The circumambulation of Mt. Sedzong goes clockwise. Direction-wise, it starts from the south toward the west, turns to the north, and return from the east to the south. The west side is uphill, a gradual slope leading up to a long ridge, resembling a long spine of a dinosaur, which separates the south and the north sides of the mountain. A long stretch of prayer flags were hung over the ridge. It was a spectacular scene. I began to see how humans are capable of sanctifying parts of the earth with spiritual orientations; thus, they’re immune from our utilitarian activities.

While I was standing along the ridge taking a photo of it, my Tibetan student cautioned me not to stand right on the spine of the mountain too long because I could faint. He grew up in the area and told me a few cases of local residents who had fainted on the ridge. He shared his folk education with me that mountain ridges are the intersections where deities, spirits, and ghosts frequently pass. They are the places where the living need to stay low and be respectful toward lives and things that are not visible to our eyes. In fact, I was feeling slightly light headed; perhaps, I was intoxicated with the congregations of the assorted invisible beings.

I felt much affinity with the north and the east sides. When I reached to the north side, it was around 5:30pm. The sun was tilting toward the west, shining on the north side of the mountain. Everything, i.e. rocks, grass and yaks, looked surreally uplifting. A nomad boy was singing on a rock while overseeing the herd of his family’s yaks. I caught a few verses of his song – “The sun is dropping to my height…my ama (mother) is beckoning me home…” I waved at him. He joined us for our walk on the north side. It was a long stretched slope with green grass on the foot of the mountain.

One tree decorated with layers of prayer flags caught my attention. It must be the “karmic scale” that I had read about prior to the pilgrimage. It’s a tall pine tree. Its uniqueness isn’t the prayer flags left on it by pilgrims. Of course, they certainly mark it as a special site. It is known as the “karmic scale” because a pilgrim can actually “weigh” how heavy his or her karmic retributions from wrong doings of past and present. The side of the tree facing Mt. Sedzong has a short, sturdy branch sticking out. One may lift oneself up by hanging onto it. The nomad boy demonstrated the weighing process. He was utterly serious about it. The weight of one’s karmic retribution is determined by whether or not one can see the “karmic mirror,” which is a large, round hole in one of the large rocks on the top of Mt. Sedzong. If one can see it, the weight is light. If not, the weight is heavy, unfortunately. This means one has much purification work to do.

We bid goodbye to the nomad boy when we turned to the east side of Mt. Sedzong. The caves on the east side gave me goosebumps and a warmth went up my spine. Entereing the cave where Guru Rinpoche had his solitary practice was revisting a history of Tibetan Buddhism. The precipice in the cave is smooth, having been worn by the hands of countless pilgrims. A sense of blessing and empowerment rose from within.

Besides Guru Rinpoche's cave, there are many other caves on the east side of Mt. Sedzong. Numerous monks, yogis, and yoginis followed the footsteps of Guru Rinpoche by taking residence in caves. These historical sites are marked with prayer flags and kadhas (honorific scarves).

These caves aren't quite historical in the conventional sense, as if they were only the relics of the Tibetan Buddhist past. There are current residents who have found new caves or have built cabins for their solitary practices. My yogi friend and I met four persons who currently live in cabins next to Guru Rinpoche's cave. One is a nun, one man is a cook for the other residents, and there is also a woman and her niece. The aunt has lived in her cabin for fifteen years. She hasn't left Mt. Sedzong since she arrived in 1997. She is the primary caretaker of Guru Rinpoche's cave, offering daily incense and water and cleaning the dust brought by the wind. Her niece joins her in the summer, before the family wheat wheat harvest. I took the aunt's long-term presence at Mt. Sedzong as a form of consecration and guardianship of the sacred.

The focal point of the sacredness is a Buddhist saint; however, what is consecrated has become a refuge for everyone who happens to reside here (besides the mountain itself). I particularly want to mention wild goats who freely roam the mountains. They walk fairly close to humans but keep enough distance to leap away. They resemble northern California's wild deer - brown, small and agile.

I feel very fortunate that I have a panoramic camera. For the last three years, I have got myself fixated on panoramic views of both interior and landscape photography. I considered being a freelance photographer, but it does not support our living. There’re tons of photos of sunsets, mountains, flowers, animals, that could be downloaded from the internet. I don’t know how attentive people are about landscapes and sacred sites. But I do believe awe-inspiring and sublime state of being is collectively felt.

three bridges

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Top: Beijing canal 7/2008
Middle: 2002
Bottom: 1991