Vignettes of the World
No one has ever seen the dead body of a vulture. The sky burial might be one of the most fascinating and unique aspects of Tibetan culture. When I talk about the sky burial with people outside of Tibet, they often tell me, “that is …
The trip to Shigatse was the highlight of this trip, if not the highlight of my life. Shigatse’s status in Tibet is next to Lhasa. Our experience in Shigatse was second to none though, because we saw him. The Panchen Lama! What I thought to …
We visited the Potala Palace on our first full day in Lhasa. In the morning we went there to see the building from ground up. We were pleasantly surprised to find ourselves walking amongst an avid morning worship by the Tibetan people. They walked the streets with their prayer wheels swirling in hand, their eyes half-closed, their minds preoccupied with one scripture or other. They were not concerned with the tourists who took pictures of them as if this scene were anything new. Facing the Potala Palace, they bowed down completely, full body styled. Hands together, down to the heart, bowed to the ground, kneeled, and their bodies laid on the ground flat with their hands sliding along.
We noticed that the Tibetans like dogs, and they brought their pets along for this morning worship, dogs wearing lovely collars with big round religious bells. It was an awesome display of the Tibetan people’s faith, undeterred by the busy traffic along Beijing Road. The Tibetans have embraced the pace of development without giving up religion, the root of their existence.
The hike up the Potala Palace in the afternoon was even more strenuous than the hike up four floors in our hotel, and we were embarrassed to find ourselves the last ones to arrive at the ticket booth, us being the youngest ones in our tour group. Soon enough I have entered the Palace, and was facing the burial altars for the former Dalai’s.
There are many kinds of burial in Tibet, and I will talk about the sky burial in an upcoming entry. The Dalai’s, though, have a special kind of burial called the “sitting burial.” When they pass away, people put them in sitting posture and build a burial altar for them, with special embalmment to preserve their bodies. The burial altars are different for different Dalai’s. The Dalai that contributed more to the wealth, development and well-being of Tibet are immortalized with more gold and treasures. We could tell that the Dalai that died young received less and had a smaller altar.
There was no altar for the Sixth Dalai, and that intrigued me.
The reason being that he wasn’t following one of the most important rules for the Buddhist monks, namely, celibacy. Legend has it that, because the Sixth Dalai was chosen when he was 15 years old, he had already learned the art of human love, and he would go out to the city at night to woo beautiful women with romantic poetry.
The main idea in Tibetan Buddhism and politics is that the living Buddha (the Dalai being the political leader) keeps reincarnating. One life after another, when one living Buddha passes away, he will reincarnate to his next life. The next Dalai is chosen amongst very young children, some one to five years after the death of the last one, when the child reaches five to six years old. It is believed that the living Buddha is living one life that doesn’t end. In his sixth life, the Dalai had romantic emotions; as he was capable of loving, he did not deny the nature that made him human.
The choosing of the Dalai’s seems inhuman to me, the foreigner, as how is it fair that a five year old is told to be the political leader of a people and to forego all the pleasure there is that life offers? Would he later come to question his own identity as the real Buddha reincarnated, and would he wonder whether Buddhism is the ultimate truth? The very idea of picking a Dalai goes against the precepts of western modernity, which upholds a self-chosen destiny.
I came out of the Potala Palace satisfied, having learned that, for once, the Dalai had known life as a common man.
When we arrived at Lhasa, we were told not to shower or exercise on our first day. We did both, as who could pass up the first chance of showering after two days without it on the train? The walk up four floors to our …
The Qinghai-Tibet Railway was newly opened when my friends and I decided to visit Tibet. We joined a tour so that we could be arriving in Tibet on the train. The ride was nice as the train was new and equipped with individual oxygen supply. …
Time flows at an exceedingly slow pace in Australia. I feel like I can take each second and weave it into the tapestry of a day, thread by thread. Perhaps it is the lifestyle here making it so, for people are just so laid back. It is in here that I am able to appreciate the minuteness of time, pruning life for its freshness, being aware of its very essence, and having the leisure to reflect daily, sometimes even half-a-daily. I have, after so many years away, come to embrace the Melbournian way. My heart beats in the same rhythm, my walk the same rate, as if merging unto a transformation that is measured, assured and deliberate.
In the Southern Hemisphere, life seems to operate at a complete reversal from that in Hong Kong. Besides the seasons being reversed and requiring adjustments, the amount of time I spend in solitude is in opposite proportion here. I stay with my family, and so I must make special effort in order to spend time alone, whereas in Hong Kong solitude is the default way of life. I am unsure whether I like this constant companionship, with people caring about the most insignificant things such as what I am having for breakfast, but this condition being temporary does put things in perspective for me. I am able to appreciate it for what it is worth, and to be honest I am happy here.
My only excuse for time alone is work. I divide the day into a few sessions and usually I am at a coffee shop for the morning session, and I can easily extend this solitude to lunch. Then comes afternoon and I make myself available at home to see if I may be of help. I am determined that this is a work holiday and I must be helpful to my aunts somehow. That includes fixing a stubbornly stuck LED light in the kitchen, or a car remote that has been out of battery, both of which was service that I have satisfactorily rendered.
I do remind myself every now and then that the priority here is to spend time with my grandmother who is at the very senior age of ninety-three this year. She has trouble walking now. As she takes every step with difficulty, it hurts me to see the expression of an undeniable old age, that the one who once took one hour journeys to take care of me when I was young would be at the time in life that five minutes of walking requires a half hour of recuperation. Yet I know that she does enjoy life despite all the infirmities that come with age. And she is happy that I am here. Her happiness in turn brings me a sense of contentment that I struggled to have in the oh-so-many-times I have been in Australia. Her happiness keeps my restless self at ease. And I do not miss the busy-for-nothing lifestyle in Hong Kong, well at least not for the past few weeks.
For two times each day the aroma of steamed rice greets me in the apartment that my grandmother lives. It is a distinctly Chinese memory, yet only in Melbourne does this smell strike me as extraordinary. For it is not just rice, but more so it is my grandmother’s Australian rice. When my aunt carries the pot and sets it on the table, the presence of this staple food, cooked in my grandmother’s way, permeates my senses. The way it looks, smells, tastes and is remembered triggers a flux of emotions in me. My grandmother is very strict with her food. They must be prepared in a certain way that allows for little deviation. She can taste the difference if not enough water was put in the vegetables. Therefore the presence of her food contains her very person, with eight decades of cooking behind her.
As dusk befalls I clear the sofa and line up three chairs as an extension to make a bed. At that moment I find simple comfort in the fact that I shall be resting this night in the company of my family. I often stare at the skyline of Melbourne City as I lie down, seeing in plain view a modest (the neon lights here do not compete for attention) yet assured (the buildings attest silently to Melbourne’s booming economy) display of its success. Melbourne has been known for being the most livable city of the world and I come up close to the heart of commerce that defines one aspect of Melbourne. At some point I fall asleep. Perhaps in my dreams this view of the City lingers, and becomes the peeping hole of the twenty years of personal history that began when my family first migrated here. There has been a sea change in Melbourne since I first set foot here. There has been an incredible growth in my life since I left a year later. And when I wake the next day to the sunlight of the southern hemisphere, shining evermore warmly, I am reminded that Australia is as much in me as I am in it.
By Martin Booth In this delightful memoir, Martin Booth shares about his childhood exploring Hong Kong in the post WWII period as the son of a British civil servant stationed in Hong Kong. This was the time when Hong Kong was blossoming from a sleepy …
As I am based in Hong Kong, I also intend to share with you about Hong Kong life. Although I consider myself American, my perspective on Hong Kong is half-way local and half-way foreign, since I did spend the first sixteen years of my life …
By Kyung-sook Shin
The last time that I was aware of the idea of a “Korean farmer” was in 2005, when hordes of them came to Hong Kong to protest against the WTO meeting held here. The Korean farmers organized more than a thousand members to rally behind their cause against globalization. That there are still peasants living in the industrial powerhouse that is of South Korea today is beyond my ordinary stretch of imagination. Yet the “Korean farmer” comes alive in this book by South Korean author Kyung-sook Shin, who tells the gripping tale of a countryside mother lost in the metropolis of Seoul and the fruitless effort to search for her by her family.
The story of this heartbreaking disappearance is told through the eyes of four people in the family, with regret being the thread that weaves together the joys and pains of fifty years of family life in the countryside. Park So-nyo, the mother of the family, can grow anything that she touches. Amidst flavorful descriptions of the rustic food that she makes, the story unfolds and lays bare the tensions felt between generations, spouses, in-laws, and siblings. As the protagonists in each chapter reminisce their time with mom, readers are led into a world of delicate balance between familial obligations, personal sacrifices, spousal loyalties and the hopes and dreams that parents had for their children, all taking place in a difficult period of post-war reconstruction followed by a take-off of significant economic development and urbanization.
Yet despite its setting in a faraway place and time, in a peasantry and poverty that is little known even to most of the South Koreans today, the human emotions, aspirations and frailties revealed are familiar to all of us. As the readers are told in the first chapter that mom buys her eldest daughter the first book she owns in her life after selling a litter of puppies, the daughter’s choice of Human, All Too Human seems to foretell the lament with which the readers will greet the ending. This book has the power to elicit my deepest sympathies and moved me to abundant tears.
This book has been recommended by the Guardian’s World Literature Tour.
By Andrea Hirata Laskar Pelangi, meaning the Rainbow Troops in Indonesian, is a title that conveys hope. In this autobiographical novel, Andrea Hirata tells readers about a childhood in the struggling village school of Muhammadiyah Elementary in Beilitong, an island province in Indonesia that had …