Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

Barbara Demick's Eat the Buddha is a clear-eyed look at how the situation in Tibet evolved from the early twentieth century, when Tibet was largely independent until today when 'Free Tibet' is the first thing many of us, especially in the West, think of when he hear mention of this place. (Full disclosure: the first thing I think of is that the Tibetan plateau is widely regarded as the most remote place on earth, requiring a journey of 21 days - one by car and 20 by foot - from the nearest city, Lhasa. True story, and one that I include in my urbanization lecture each semester, but I digress.) 

Like so many geopolitical issues facing the world today, we can thank the British Empire for meddling where they shouldn't have, and setting in motion the chain of events that has led to the current situation. As Demick notes, it was the euphemistically labeled "expedition" into Tibet by British colonel Francis Younghusband in 1903 which turned Chinese attention toward the strategic importance of this vast but lightly people plateau. And it's not just me blaming the British; as Demick writes, "many Tibet scholars blame Britain for the subsequent calamities that befell Tibet" (p. 20). Clearly, then, we can put this up there was the Opium Wars and the Sykes-Picot agreement. 

Brits aside, the challenge for the Tibetans, once China turned its full attention in that direction is that it lacked a major "sponsor" (such as the US or USSR) and was ruled by a teenager - the Dalai Lama. Although one can argue the damage has been done, Demick does state the obvious, lest the reader miss it: picking a successor [to the Dalai Lama, ruler of Tibet] be reincarnation is admittedly a dysfunctional system" (p. 258). Likewise, she can't help but pounce on the absurdity of the Chinese Communist Party declaring that it alone will control the selection of the next Dalai Lama, writing "the idea of these Communist technocrats weighing in on matters of reincarnation prompts much hilarity."

Although Demick's sympathies are clearly with the Tibetan people, her account comes across as balanced (she was a staff writer for the LA Times, after all), and provides a fascinating look at a little known corner of the world, particularly as she focuses her attention on the area around Ngaba, which is located in China proper, not, frankly, all that far from Sichuan and other better-known regions of that vast country. At a time when journalism frequently comes under attack, Eat the Buddha also serves as a reminder of the importance of the craft - and the run of the mill hazards journalists face under the best of circumstances (i.e., when they're not evading hostile security forces). For example, in the course of writing this book, Demick fell into an open sewage ditch. Good naturedly, she remarks that it wouldn't have been so bad, except that the water at the hotel was not working and she was unable to bathe. Journalism in Tibet is clearly not for the faint of heart for oh-so-many reasons.

In any event, Ngaba drew Demick's attention originally for the frequency of the acts of self-immolation that occurred there. (These Demick describes in detail, including the shocking, and horrifying, fact that many of those who committed the act would first consume petrol in order to burn from both the inside and the outside. On the plus side, this preparation virtually guaranteed death; as Demick explains, the only thing worse than self-immolating might be to survive such an attempt.) 

As a result of these regular acts of defiance, China cracked down on the region, and cracked down hard, such that from 2011 to 2013, it was nearly impossible to do so much as place a phone call from Ngaba to Beijing.You could forget about Internet, which was entirely unplugged, and heaven help you if you've spared so much as a thought for obtaining a passport. (Even leaving the immediate area to travel elsewhere in China can be daunting, requiring significant paperwork in a place where, not surprisingly given that much of the population still herds goats and yaks, "bureaucratic requirements were challenging for Tibetans raised in a nomadic culture that wasn't strong on paperwork." Strong on paperwork, me thinks is a euphamism about on par with Younghusband's "expedition" that left several thousand dead.)

No wonder, then, that so many Tibetans, especially young Tibetans, sought to flee, typically to India by way of Nepal. Demick follows this harrowing journey, including the necessary zip line across the roaring Sun Kosi River, whose rushing rapids comprise the border from Tibet proper to Nepal. The cost of this one way trip is $10,000 per head. Mercy. 

Eat the Buddha, whose title derives from the starving Red Army soldiers who resorted to looting the monasteries and eating the flour-and-butter religious statues, which to Tibetans, made it seem as though they were eating the Buddha, should be required reading for anyone who wants to better understand the tensions in Tibet, the history between China and Tibet, and the role outside powers, including Britain and the U.S. have played in the region over the years. More than that, though, this is an intimate look at lives lived much as they were centuries ago - men and women who herd yak and burn butter lamps, collect yak dung and caterpillar fungus, who generally want little more than to be left in peace, albeit with the same conveniences - cell phones and electricity, say - that are elevating the quality of life the world over. 

Demick's story ends on the cusp of today - the coronavirus makes an appearance in the closing pages, with Demick speculating how societal changes as a result of the public health emergency may lead to longer lasting measure even after the epidemic has passed. As she poignantly notes of those who have left Tibet - but which one could reasonably assume also applies to those who remain, "they were regular people who hoped to live normal, happy lives...without having to make impossible choices between their faith, family, and their country" (p. 273). Were that it were so simple, in Tibet and everywhere.

Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution

Helen Zia's phenomenal Last Boat Out of Shanghai focuses on the personal stories of four Shanghainese who fled from Mao. Annuo, Benny, Bing, and Ho came from vastly different circumstances - Benny, the scion of a comprador family and WWII collaborator; Ho, the second-son of a land-owning family whose greatest aspiration is an advanced education; Annuo, the disdained daughter of a Nationalist general; and Bing, a spunky orphan who must learn at the knee of Elder Sister how to watch out for herself - and how the game is played.

In the late 40s all were faced with the same decision: stay or go. Their choices would ripple through the years, impacting their lives and the lives of their descendants. All of this Zia presents in eminently readable prose, retelling their lives such that the reader cannot help but root for all of them. More than capturing their personal histories and the logistics of fleeing Mao's army, Zia also draws an astonishing portrait of China through the ages, of the corruption and incompetence of the Nationalist government, of the wavering support of the United States, of Shanghai at a time when it was known as the Paris of the East. (Side note: Shanghai is everything I love about Asia and some of the things I don't. It is glitz, and grit, and glam, high tech as all get out and inefficient as hell. It's futuristic skyscrapers along side alleys that were once opium dens. Laundry hanging from trees next to hotels whose marble lobbies gleam. Enough neon to turn daylight to night, and the mingling scents of incense and cigarette smoke. Food that is to die for and water that will literally kill you. Pollution thick enough to leave a layer on your tongue, but the sunsets sure are gorgeous. Millions and millions of people living and laughing and loving and also shouting, frequently shouting, cheek by jowl. It is awesome in the original sense of the word. My experience in Shanghai is obviously many decades after Benny, Annuo, Bing, and Ho haunted the international concession, but the essence of the city must remain largely unchanged even as the topography dances on, for I recognize in her words this city that is so magical.)

Like The Long Way Home and 97 Orchard, Zia also captures the broader immigrant experience, tinged, of course, with the massive dose of racism that Chinese encountered in the era of McCarthyism and a quote of 105 per year. In doing so, she also brings to life the Embarcadero, Times Square, and points in between (such as Ho's time at Michigan - Go Blue!) circa 1950. Every aspect of this book is top notch, and I cannot recommend it enough.

5 stars.

Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip

I was in China last month, and I was in awe. Shanghai, at least, is everything I love in Asia and lots of things I don't. It is high tech, and it is inefficient as hell. It is souped up Ferraris and ancient mopeds, the latter not infrequently usurping the pedestrians' right-of-way on sidewalks. It is gleaming skyscrapers and ancient temples and back alleys that were formerly opium dens. Gucci and Prada and "Gucci" and "Prada." You get the idea. And, yet, Peter Hessler makes me feel I have missed the essential China. (Admittedly, I felt the same after reading Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper.)

Hessler's Country Driving is a compilation of his adventures in China 15-20 years ago, when cars were rare(ish), roads were new, and farmers regularly tossed crops into the middle of the road, where vehicles could not miss them. (As Hessler observes, "there's no other act that so publicly violates both traffic safety and food hygiene," but the practice was tolerated "because threshing is easiest when somebody else's tires do the work.") Also, Hessler encounters a licensed Zhejiang Province Demolitioner, who he notes was fully licensed to blow up the province. Literally: mountain upon mountain met its end at the hands of this particular demolitioner, who carried a separate certification attesting to the fact that he'd never had an accident - no small thing in a place where Hessler repeatedly witnesses flame in close proximity to natural gas.

Some of the tales were familiar from his Strange Stones, and the commentary on immigration from farm to factory was slightly reminiscent of Factory Girls (whose author, I learned in the acknowledgements is Hessler's wife), but on the whole, Country Driving was a look at lighter and funnier side of life in China.

Five stars for those who love travel writing and tales of the wider world. 

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

Evan Osnos’s Age of Ambition is part Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper, part Factory Girls, and part Strange Stones-esque travelogue (particularly when Osnos joins a group of Chinese tourists on a whirlwind trip through Europe, in one of the most amusing chapters). From exploring the evolving nature of the Chinese communist party, to gambling in Macau, to the impact of the Beijing Olympics on the blueprint of the city, Osnos leaves no stone unturned in recounting his years as an expat journalist in China. 

Osnos is a serious journalist (he was the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker), and he covers a lot of heady material, from corruption to forced sterilization to freedom of the press, but what makes Age of Ambition so eminently readable are the stories of everyday life – Osnos’s American-in-China-everyday-life – that he sprinkles throughout. For example, a family of weasels colonizes Osnos’s roof. He calls an exterminator, who informs him that weasels are good luck. 

Age of Ambition is a clear-eyed look at life in China, one that anyone who wants to understand more about this rising power should read.

Four stars.

China Rich Girlfriend

I wasn't initially planning to read China Rich Girlfriend. Late last year I read - and enjoyed - Kevin Kwan's hit Crazy Rich Asians, but still felt like one volume was enough. I was looking for a fun, light, fairly mindless read for a recent trip, though, and my mind kept drifting back to Kwan's characters and, as luck would have it, CRG was available at the library.

China Rich Girlfriend is a sequel to Crazy Rich Asians, but set a couple of years later, with virtually none of the action in Singapore. These facts work to its advantage, as does the fact that Kwan does not devote precious pages to retelling the previous story (one of my chief complaints with Once a Midwife, for example.) He rightly puts the responsibility on the reader to know the backstory. If anything, Kwan rounds out his characters more in this second book, particularly by focusing on storylines other than those revolving around Nick and Rachel, whose wedding opens the book. (My favorite was probably the Bernard and Kitty storyline, which is sheer madness, but amused me all the same.)

Although the premise of the book and its title is that there is Crazy Rich and then there's China Rich, I think a more accurate delineation is not around the value of the fortune, but the ways is which money is flaunted...or how one perceives others to be flaunting it. Toward the end, Kwan even slips in a bit of sly social commentary on the state of wealth in a China where the uber-rich build "green" havens for themselves, while owning the factories that spew the pollution unto others. This would, presumably, be in contrast to Singapore, where the environment is a national priority and the safety net is very, very real.

What We Were Promised

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for great books (and the time to read them!), not least Lucy Tan's What We Were Promised. This novel is the story of a Chinese couple who has made good on the dream of American educations and American jobs and, finally, a triumphant return as expats to a China they discover they hardly know.

Wei, or Boss Zhen, is a highly successful marketing executive with a reality tv show that allows his estranged brother, Qiang, to contact him for the first time since he walked out of Wei's wedding 20-some years before. In the U.S., Lina was an energetic and popular Chinese teacher. In Shanghai she has devolved into the quintessential taitai; the book opens with her accusation of theft against a longtime maid that, coupled with Qiang's phone call seems to have sent the family, including 12-year-old, home-from-boarding-school-for-summers-only, Karen, into a tailspin. At the center of the action, and able to witness all of the jealousies, insecurities, and half-truths is maid Sunny.

Tan quietly tells their story from the alternating viewpoints of Wei, Lina, and Sunny, each of whom is trying to come to terms with past and present, obligations to family versus self, and the nature of incurring and canceling debts, especially the kinds that can't be counted in dollars and cents.

I absolutely loved this book. I was reminded frequently of Pachinko, particularly in regards to the nature of family dynamics and what is owed to the individual dream and the collective good.

Five stars.

Tai-Pan

I have a new favorite author. After some twenty years, James Clavell has displaced Margaret Mitchell atop my personal pantheon of authors. Last fall I fell in love with Shogun; my concerns as to whether Tai-Pan could live up to such lofty expectations were unfounded.

The Tai Pan is Dirk Straun, a Scottish trader who has risen to become the most powerful trader in Hong Kong, which in the midst of the Opium Wars is on the verge of the becoming a prosperous and beloved jewel among British colonies. To reach the apex of trade society, Tai Pan has had to fight not only other European and American traders to build The Noble House - sometimes in the literal sense of the word - but he's engaged in his fair share of politicking and intrigue with both the Chinese and the British. On the eve of unparalleled success, his future plans are sullied when he learns that his wife and most of his children have succumbed to one of the many epidemics that swept England in the early nineteenth century. Now he must recalibrate and bring his young son, Culum, into the fold earlier than he anticipated while ensuring the future of all of Hong Kong.

Like Shogun, James Clavell does an absolutely remarkable job of creating authentic characters in original settings. His description of the trade routes and wars, the history of the opening of China, and the early days of the settlement of Hong Kong are lovely to read. I also loved the juxtaposition of Straun's English and Chinese families and the dialects that practically call out from the pages. Clavell's characters are complex, multifaceted beings, and the experience of reading Tai Pan is enriched by the conflicting emotions each of the characters is able to generate in the reader. If it's true that the Russian sub-plot was slightly far-fetched, it's also true that it's the only questionable or ham-handed aspect of the book.

Five stars.

Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China

I have such mixed feelings about Fuchsia Dunlop's Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper... that it's hard to know where to begin. I'll start with this: I most enjoyed the pages that read as travelogue, that recounted China on the verge of its rapid transformation from Old World to New World, that helped me to see places that no longer exist as they once did. 

I least enjoyed much of the writing about food, for reasons that I've been trying to put my finger on for the better part of a week. I think, ultimately, Dunlop's expose, if you will, on Chinese cuisine feels too voyeuristic, and there is too much braggadocio in her reminisces about what she ate and when. I have traveled extensively, in China and elsewhere in Asia. I have eaten chicken's feet. I have eaten duck's heart (better than it sounds). I have eaten duck webs. I have drawn the line at whale and also carpaccio of horse. Other cultures eat "weird" things. Trust me, my local Oriental Mart carries pork blood and beef stomach, along with the ubiquitous chicken feet and duck webs. But then, all cultures eat "weird" things (Cheez Whiz, anyone?), and while I don't doubt that Dunlop has the utmost respect for the Chinese culture, I can't help but feel that this book is simply an open invitation for readers to activate the gag reflex and shudder a collective, "ewww."  

With that said, the book itself is well-written, engaging, and informative about Chinese culture, particularly for those with little knowledge of its history, geography, or demographics. For that, I give it four stars. It's all the rest, what I might term the "gut check," that causes me to lower my overall appreciation of the book and hesitate before recommending it too widely.  

Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West

What better reading material for a trip to Asia than a collection of short stories about the craziness of life in Asia (and particularly in China)? Peter Hessler's Strange Stones is just that. Although many of the stories are a decade old, they still resonate today, particularly those that have anything to do with driving and traffic.

I mean, of course a large tourist park is bisected by a single-late road and of course a van parks on the road - at the curve, no less - and then the tourist trolley barrels through and hits the van, blocking the road and subsequently sending the legions of scooters on the grass (there is no sidewalk in this tourist park) and the pedestrians can but pray they don't end up in the (highly polluted) drink as they are wedged into a narrower and narrower strip between the scooters and the reservoir. I'm sorry, I digress; that's my life in Indonesia this week, not Hessler's in China. As another aside, perhaps it was because I was reading Strange Stones that I had to keep reminding myself many times that I was not in China.

The long and the short is that this is fine travel writing. I was slightly partial to the one story set in Japan, a follow-up with Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice, and also anything involving traffic, if only because it makes me feel better about my own experiences like the one above. A couple of the stories explore life in Colorado, Hessler's home after a decade-plus in China, and are well written but seem just a teensy bit out of place.

Hessler's writing style reminds me a bit of Paul Theroux, but funnier. Many of the stories were laugh out loud funny and all of them were a pleasure to read. Travelers, in particular, will enjoy Hessler's work, but I have no qualms at all recommending Strange Stones to any and everyone.

Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China

I'm sure Riding the Iron Rooster was a better book when it was written in 1988 than it is today. The Iron Rooster is a Chinese Train, one of dozens that Paul Theroux travels in as he criss-crosses China for months on end seeking to better understand the country in the late '80s. His adventures are amusing, but rarely more, and his descriptions of China are now so dated that it's hard to see beyond that. I actually found his stories from the Soviet bloc, then in its final throes, though few knew that at the time, to be more interesting than many of his dispatches from China.

I much preferred Paddling the Pacific and Hotel Honolulu (read in the pre-blog days) to Riding the Iron Rooster and, honestly, likely wouldn't have finished it at all if I'd had anything else to read on my way to Japan. Final verdict: only the most serious Chinese history and/or rail travel lovers need apply.