In total, I've spent less than two months in Tibet. The first time, I was seventeen years old, sick and miserable and under the impression I was in China. The second time, I was twenty-one, awake (for the firs time?), powerful in my intensity, ready. It all came crashing down fairly quickly when I realized it was difficult--basically impossible--to be anything but a tourist in Tibet.
Following on that realization, I immersed myself in Tibetan refugee communities--in Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Kathmandu. People assumed I was a Tibet activist or a Tibetan Buddhist because if not, what was I doing? I wasn't an activist in the traditional sense and I wasn't a Buddhist. I was deeply, ceaselessly interested in what was happening around me. No, "interested" seems weak. What was it? I wanted to understand every word, every gesture, every moment in history, everything buried beneath it all. I wanted to to dig in the dirt on my hands and knees for every morsel of something useful, complicated, (un)knowable. Was I trying to possess things that weren't mine? Maybe. But I like to think I didn't do any harm.
For years, I circled--circumambulated?--the Tibetan border, entrenching myself in mountain-towns that were almost, but not quite, Tibet. The better I knew Tibetans, though--the more language I understood, the more cultural truths--the farther I got from Tibet. It became increasingly abstract. It was if the more I came to know the "border" (both tangible and in-) the less I believed in the center. People will say that I was so caught up in the fantasy of Tibet that I couldn't see the real thing. It might be true. But it's also true that I have a hard time believing that America is happening when I spend long periods of time away. Rather than an Orientalist, I may just be self centered.
I wonder if something similar is happening here, if I'm doing it again, less than 5 kilometers from Burma. My visa keeps me on this side of the river. I've walked along the Irrwaddy, my eye trained on Burma, trying to see the difference. I tell myself the buildings look shabbier, the trash piles seem higher. I strain my eyes to make out the faces of the people on the riverbank--it's really that close--and I tell myself they look more exhausted, less hopeful. But the truth is I've never looked at Mae Sot from that side, so I really can't compare.
At the same time, my life here is full of people from Burma. After six months, I'm learning how to interpret certain gestures, small hand movement, averted eyes. I know what that smile means, I know when my students are telling the truth and when they're re-packaging it for me, giving me something that only resembles it. All of the imperceptible things that make a culture are fitting together and I find that I'm less lost. The map that I'm following is only half-finished and frequently wrong but it's there.
Burma is also there. It's just on the other side of the river. But if I never cross the bridge, I might never meet Burmese people in their own country. I might stop believing (or never start believing in the first place?) that life is really happening there, that my students really come from there, that some of them left very recently, that many of them want desperately to go back and fear it just as much.
I almost married a man from Tibet. He often talked about how we could go back together to meet his family. I could picture them--his parents and grandmother, his sister. It took work, but I could. He would talk about how we could live there for half the year, or more, if we wanted. Here it was, then: I was going to be more than a tourist in Tibet. I closed my eyes and tried to be happy. But I couldn't marry the sensory-overload of his reality with those too-flat images and in the end, I couldn't marry him either. Geography, for all its definitiveness, is so far from tangible. I wonder who in the world has trouble believing that I exist, that this country exists, or if this problem is only mine.
Following on that realization, I immersed myself in Tibetan refugee communities--in Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Kathmandu. People assumed I was a Tibet activist or a Tibetan Buddhist because if not, what was I doing? I wasn't an activist in the traditional sense and I wasn't a Buddhist. I was deeply, ceaselessly interested in what was happening around me. No, "interested" seems weak. What was it? I wanted to understand every word, every gesture, every moment in history, everything buried beneath it all. I wanted to to dig in the dirt on my hands and knees for every morsel of something useful, complicated, (un)knowable. Was I trying to possess things that weren't mine? Maybe. But I like to think I didn't do any harm.
For years, I circled--circumambulated?--the Tibetan border, entrenching myself in mountain-towns that were almost, but not quite, Tibet. The better I knew Tibetans, though--the more language I understood, the more cultural truths--the farther I got from Tibet. It became increasingly abstract. It was if the more I came to know the "border" (both tangible and in-) the less I believed in the center. People will say that I was so caught up in the fantasy of Tibet that I couldn't see the real thing. It might be true. But it's also true that I have a hard time believing that America is happening when I spend long periods of time away. Rather than an Orientalist, I may just be self centered.
I wonder if something similar is happening here, if I'm doing it again, less than 5 kilometers from Burma. My visa keeps me on this side of the river. I've walked along the Irrwaddy, my eye trained on Burma, trying to see the difference. I tell myself the buildings look shabbier, the trash piles seem higher. I strain my eyes to make out the faces of the people on the riverbank--it's really that close--and I tell myself they look more exhausted, less hopeful. But the truth is I've never looked at Mae Sot from that side, so I really can't compare.
At the same time, my life here is full of people from Burma. After six months, I'm learning how to interpret certain gestures, small hand movement, averted eyes. I know what that smile means, I know when my students are telling the truth and when they're re-packaging it for me, giving me something that only resembles it. All of the imperceptible things that make a culture are fitting together and I find that I'm less lost. The map that I'm following is only half-finished and frequently wrong but it's there.
Burma is also there. It's just on the other side of the river. But if I never cross the bridge, I might never meet Burmese people in their own country. I might stop believing (or never start believing in the first place?) that life is really happening there, that my students really come from there, that some of them left very recently, that many of them want desperately to go back and fear it just as much.
I almost married a man from Tibet. He often talked about how we could go back together to meet his family. I could picture them--his parents and grandmother, his sister. It took work, but I could. He would talk about how we could live there for half the year, or more, if we wanted. Here it was, then: I was going to be more than a tourist in Tibet. I closed my eyes and tried to be happy. But I couldn't marry the sensory-overload of his reality with those too-flat images and in the end, I couldn't marry him either. Geography, for all its definitiveness, is so far from tangible. I wonder who in the world has trouble believing that I exist, that this country exists, or if this problem is only mine.
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