A Year in Tibet. Sun Shuyun

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       FOUR The Learning Curve

      IT IS 4 A.M., THE STARS in the Tibetan sky hanging enticingly close, when Yangdron wakes her two eldest sons, Jigme, aged twenty-two, and Gyatso, twenty-one. ‘Time to get up,’ she tells them. ‘You don't want to be late.’ Jigme sits up immediately, but Gyatso pulls the blanket over his head. When he finally walks into the dimly lit kitchen a little while later, the rest of the family is having their tsampa and drinking butter tea. Yangdron hands him a wooden bowl. ‘Who wants to eat now?’ he snaps. ‘I want to sleep!’

      Downstairs Dondan starts the tractor, startling the cock, which begins a raucous crowing as though it too hated to be woken. Today, 13^th October, at 5 a.m. — the hour that Tseten determined is most auspicious for their departure — the boys will be leaving for university. Dondan will drive them to the main road, where they will catch a bus to Shigatse, and from there travel on to Lhasa. Then Gyatso will take another bus to his college in southern Tibet, and Jigme will board a train on the newly opened railway to his university in Xian, home of the Terracotta Army, in Central China.

      Yangdron puts khatas round her two sons' necks. Mila places one hand on Jigme's shoulder, counting his rosary with the other. The boys have each packed a couple of small canvas bags, and Loga tries to pick these up, but Gyatso snatches them back from him. Not everyone will be travelling to the station: Tseten was concerned that having too many people on the tractor would invite the jealousy of the local deities. This also explains the early hour: too much gossiping from the neighbours and villagers could irritate the family's protective deities, and so they are leaving well before the rest of the village is awake.

      Though I am getting used to the Tibetan way of thinking, I still find myself amazed: two of their sons are going to university and this is something to hide? An event like this is a rare one for the village — if this is not a cause for celebration, what is? When I was accepted by Beijing University, my parents told the whole world. My grandmother was particularly proud. I can still remember her saying to anyone who would listen, ‘My granddaughter is going to university — the first in our family to do it. A phoenix has risen from a hen's nest!’

      I ask Jigme what he thinks about the early departure. He shrugs — aside from feeling sleep deprived, he does not see anything wrong with it. He trusts his uncle's judgment; after all, Tseten accurately predicted his results in the National Exams.

      The National Exams take place in June every year. They determine who will go on to university. They are notoriously difficult and fiercely competitive. Only 4 per cent of secondary school leavers in the whole of China will pass; the number in Tibet is even smaller. They are make or break for Jigme and Gyatso, who are in the same school year, despite the difference in their ages. Success will open up the world for them; failure means they will stay in the village. It is the same for so many young Chinese. Twenty-five years on, I can still remember my anxiety on exam day. When I looked at the sea of heads in the exam hall, I felt not so much intimidated as lost. What chance did I have? Who would be winners and who would be losers? The odds seemed to be stacked heavily against me.

      Back in early June, a few days before taking the exam, Jigme had called home from a payphone near his school to ask Tseten to divine his results. He waited an hour for a response, pacing up and down. He looked up at the banners hanging across the street leading away from the school: ‘Best Wishes to All Students Taking the Exam!’, ‘Be an Honest Winner!’, ‘Report Cheats!’. When the phone rang, he dashed for it.

      It was his mother calling him back with Tseten's forecast. Yes, she told him, both he and Gyatso would succeed in the test — they would both be able to go to college, though perhaps not to their top choices. ‘Put your mind at ease and concentrate on your studies,’ Yangdron said. ‘Don't worry. You will pass.’

      ‘Did you believe it?’ I asked Jigme, when he told me this story.

      ‘Why not? Uncle has done it many times for others. More than seventy students and their parents have asked him this year. He has got a reputation now.’

      Here, Jigme paused, not sure he wanted to tell me anything more. ‘I'm not the only one in my class who did this,’ he said. ‘Most of my classmates had it done too. We also went to the top of the highest mountain outside Gyantse and hung up prayer flags, so the wind could carry our prayers for the Buddha's blessing.’

      I had seen something similar one day at the Palkhor Monastery. There I'd watched a smartly dressed, middle-aged woman take half a dozen pens out of a posh handbag and hand them to a monk on duty. I'd thought at first that she was making an extremely unusual offering, but then I watched as the monk climbed the stairs to a thirteen-foot statue of the Sakyamuni Buddha and rubbed each pen against the hand of the Enlightened Being. After that, he touched the pens against the massive volumes of Ganjur (the Tibetan Buddhist canon) stacked along the walls. The woman explained, ‘If the Buddha can give my son a little blessing, he will put down the right answers with these pens.’ Her faith reminded me of my grandmother, who had prayed fervently to her favourite Bodhisattva, the Goddess of Compassion, in the days leading up to my exams. At the time, I was ungracious and scornful: ‘I don't need your goddess's blessing,’ I told her. It didn't occur to me that I might have benefitted from the kind of reassurance that Tseten gave to Jigme.

      Despite Tseten's divinations, the three weeks spent waiting for the exam results had been acutely anxious. The tension was palpable. Jigme spent most of his time helping Dondan and Yangdron with work around the house, feeding the cows, making cowpats for fuel, or carrying bricks for neighbours who were building houses. He worked until dark and went straight to bed. Very occasionally, when Jigme and I crossed paths, he would ask a question or two: ‘What's Xian like? Do you think I will be able to fit in with the Chinese students if I go there?’ But he never seemed to expect an answer; before I could respond, he was off.

      Meanwhile, Gyatso slept a lot. Only Loga could not understand why the family was leaving Gyatso alone — why he was allowed not to work while everyone else slaved away. Loga tried every morning to wake him, pulling at his blanket, gently whispering his name, then shouting at him. Invariably, Gyatso howled back, ‘Get lost, you stupid idiot!’ Often when Gyatso saw us, he shot us looks like daggers of hate, muttering curses loud enough for us to hear: ‘What a shameless lot! Why do they keep bothering us? Don't they see they aren't welcome?’ And perhaps it was more than just a teenage grudge. Perhaps by following his family, we were drawing unwanted attention to them, even bringing maledictions. Or perhaps Gyatso simply felt exposed — it might be embarrassing for him to have friends and classmates watch our series on television.

      Yangdron was very worried. She tried to be positive, but she told me this was the most anxious time of her life.

      ‘More anxious than your wedding day?’ I asked.

      ‘Yes, at least then I knew my family would find me a good match. And I knew the Rikzin family СКАЧАТЬ