I promise, at some point I’ll start talking about my actual memories again instead of hopping on my soapbox every few minutes. It’s just very difficult to do so after reading the news.

I’ve been trying to find the words to express how angry and sad and frustrated I have been since this violence started.  It is a very strange feeling to look at pictures coming out of Lhasa and recognize in the burnt-out shells places I and my classmates passed every day for three weeks. Yahoo has an extensive photo gallery of Lhasa and Tibetan protests. In the rubble, so far I’ve recognized a teashop in which I got a wonderful cup of tea, a little Chinese dumpling shop that would belch out the noxious fumes of cooking cabbage and unidentifiable meat, and various shops near the Barkhor. Of course, we can’t contact any of the people we met in Tibet, so we don’t know if they are safe or not.

Perhaps the most perplexing and frustrating thing is China’s absolute stubbornness and refusal to let Tibet go. It’s reminiscent in a way of the Exodus story from the Christian Bible; the more people beg, the more Beijing hardens its heart.

Chinese commenters on the internet are just as infuriating. They insist that without China, Tibet would be a backwards hick country, and that the global protests are a result of the Dalai Lama’s brainwashing. If you try to discuss this with them, and they find out you’re from America, they of course bring up the horrible things we did to the Native Americans, and the African Americans, and the Central and South Americans, and, well, pretty much everybody. And I don’t really mind that; I’ll discuss that stuff all day. I’ve got a good healthy dose of white guilt about ‘most everything the US has done, and I’ll be the first to admit that we shouldn’t have done any of it. The thing that gets me is, the Chinese commenters seem to be using our actions as justification of theirs; it’s as if they’re saying “Well, you did this to your people; why are you getting in our faces when we do it to our people?” Many of us have learned that this is not the way to treat people. We would like to try to help others learn from our mistakes so that oppressed people don’t have to suffer. Certainly we don’t want the horrific things we did to the Native Americans to be an example of how a country should act.

There’s also an overwhelming response of “why don’t you mind your own business?” And this is another area in which America shouldn’t be an example, but rather a warning. Five years ago, our president stood up in front of the world and said, I don’t care what you think; we are going to war; and if you don’t like it, mind yer own damn business. And what has it gotten us? Thousands of unnecessary casualties, exposure of the lies of our administration, a lack of confidence in and pride for our country, and on top of that, nobody else on the planet likes us. We are coming to realize that we need the world’s support. This is something that China does not seem to grasp yet. (Hopefully, when this year’s Olympic Games become the lowest-rated broadcast since the last Stephen King TV movie, they will begin to understand.)

Since we started even discussing the Tibet trip, I’ve tried to be mindful of the everyday Chinese men and women, who I could not believe would wholeheartedly swallow the lies of their government. I tried to remember that there were plenty of people in America who understood that our government was lying through their teeth, and that we must surely have counterparts in China. If they are there, they’re not speaking very loudly. All I’ve seen is “mind your own business, Tibet is ours.” (If you know of a place where I can read an opposing viewpoint from China, please, let me know in comments.)

Here’s the bottom line for me. It shouldn’t matter that China has brought various modernizing technologies to Tibet. It shouldn’t matter that a lucky few Tibetans are living better now. It shouldn’t even matter that Tibet was a theocracy before, and would have a bit of work to do to keep from returning to theocracy if it were independent. What should matter is that the vast majority of Tibetans want to go home. They want to govern themselves. So what if we think they’re not doing it right? Let them do it. China seems to feel very paternal toward Tibet; another argument I’ve seen is “without us, Tibet is nothing”. This denies that Tibetans have the brains to do for themselves, which I have seen firsthand that they can do whatever they want. They’re just people, just like the rest of us, and all they want is the freedom to do what they want however they want to do it. What is so bad about that? Why is that so hard for China to accept? What are they losing if Tibet is free?

I bought a little statuette of Manjushri on the Barkhor, and now it sits on my desk at work, promising to smite ignorance with the flaming sword of gnosis. But sometimes, it sure is hard to believe that ignorance is anything but eternal and all-pervasive.

I hope that Tibet will find peace before Beijing slaughters all the remaining Tibetans.

You can see the video by going to YouTube and searching for “bjork tibet”. (For some reason, embedding the video here broke everything else.) I recommend not reading the comments unless you enjoy being angry.

The Prince of Wales has snubbed the Chinese government by refusing to attend the Olympic Games in Beijing this summer.

The Prince made his decision known to campaigners for a free Tibet, who had been calling on him to show solidarity with those who believe the Games risk obscuring China’s human rights record.

He gave no reason for his decision, and neither did he say whether he had received a formal invitation.

But recently he has been wooed by the Chinese, and particularly their new ambassador in London, who had made it her personal mission to encourage him to go.

“As you know, His Royal Highness has long taken a close interest in Tibet and indeed has been pleased to meet His Holiness the Dalai Lama on several occasions,” a letter, written to the Free Tibet Campaign by Clive Alderton, the Prince’s deputy private secretary, said.

“You asked if the Prince of Wales would be attending the opening
ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. His Royal Highness will not be attending the ceremony.”

Separately, the Prince’s staff have made clear he will not be attending the Games at any stage during the summer.

Although the letter avoids backing the group’s position on the Games, the Free Tibet Campaign welcomed the decision, with which it intends to launch a campaign to persuade other prominent figures not to attend in protest at Chinese policies.

“We welcome Prince Charles’s decision to stay away from the Games, and call on other public figures and politicians to follow suit,” said Matt Whitticase, a Free Tibet Campaign spokesman.

“The deterioration of the human rights situation in Tibet and China since the Games were awarded is deplorable and can only mean that these Games rightly are destined to be known as the Games of shame.”

The Prince of Wales has long had a frosty relationship with the Chinese, culminating in the leak of diaries written at the time of the Hong Kong handover in 1997 in which he referred to senior officials participating as “appalling old waxworks”.

He is an admirer of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetans’ spiritual leader who has been in exile since an uprising against Chinese rule in 1959. In 2002, he received at Clarence House two nuns who had been tortured in the notorious Drapchi prison in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, and had escaped to the west on their release.

His reputation as China’s leading critic in the British Establishment was what encouraged Fu Ying, the country’s most senior woman diplomat, to single him out for attention when she took up her appointment as ambassador to Britain last year.

This led to a special “Chinese day” last autumn, when he toured
Chinatown, had lunch with visiting Chinese businessmen and women, and attended an awards ceremony in the evening with Madam Fu.

Royal sources suggested that the decision not to go to the Games did not mean that the Prince had lost interest in China. His charities are already involved in collaboration with China on urban regeneration projects, which will continue.

One reason for the rapprochement was concern shared by the government and his private secretary, Sir Michael Peat, that his hostility to China might become politically difficult at a time when the British government was seeking improved relations with Beijing.

That was highlighted a week ago when Gordon Brown, the prime minister, on his visit to China made little mention of human rights and gladly accepted a Chinese invitation to the Games’ opening ceremony.

He will join President George W. Bush, and other world leaders who are refusing to go along with boycott campaigns such as that led by Mia Farrow, the actress, who has called them the “Genocide Games”. She accuses China of supporting the government in Sudan, accused of responsibility for massacres in Darfur.

Meanwhile, the importance the Chinese attach to the Games was
highlighted at the weekend, when the new mayor of Beijing, Guo Jinlong, said that ensuring the event’s success would “contribute to the realization of the 100-year dream of the Chinese nation.”

The dream of the Chinese nation, according to often repeated propaganda, is to shake off the humiliation of 160 years of colonisation, invasion and economic failure to retake its rightful place as a leading nation on the world stage.

This has also involved bitter attacks on the Dalai Lama, whose enduring popularity remains a thorn in the flesh of the Communist Party as it seeks to win world approval.

Last Thursday, a government spokeswoman said he was not a true religious leader, after he gave an interview in which he appeared to give his backing to calls for peaceful protests at the Games against Chinese policies in Tibet.

“The goal of all of his schemes is to split the motherland, sabotage
ethnic unity, sabotage China’s relations with other nations and
interfere with the Olympic Games,” Jiang Yu said.

“So he is in no way a religious or spiritual leader. He is purely a
general leader bent on pursuing separatism and sabotaging national unity.”

Mr Whitticase said the speed with which the Prince’s staff replied
suggested it was an issue to which thought had been given.

A spokeswoman for Clarence House said: “Visits abroad are taken on the advice of the Foreign Office. We wouldn’t discuss in detail any request that has been made or not made.” The Foreign Office said it was unable to comment, and no-one was available for comment at the Chinese embassy in London.

So there you have it. One prominent world leader has taken the vital first step to helping the world see what a horrid thing it is to have the Olympics in a country with such an atrocious human rights record. Wonder who else they can get to boycott. I’d imagine that the leader of Germany might go along. Sadly, Bush doesn’t care about non-white people so he is happy to go.

Thank you, Prince Charles. I think the people of Tibet would thank you too, for bringing world attention to their situation.

I don’t really watch the Olympics anyway (despite a secret guilty weakness for the figure skating), but this year I will be actively boycotting.

In other news, the Dalai Lama says that not only may his successor be chosen before he dies, Tibetans may choose not to continue his office at all. I’m still gearing up for a post about that.

Here in Mississippi we’re only a few feet above sea level, and on the coast, many folks are below sea level. The atmospheric density is far above Tibet’s, and the humidity is much higher. Moving quickly from this low altitude to the high one–as we did–can produce symptoms in some people. (It’s not so much the altitude itself as it is the speed at which you move to it.) However, even this doesn’t always determine whether you will get sick–some people just seem to be more susceptible than others.

I turned out to be one of those susceptible people. From the time we touched down in Lhasa to the time we left (a space of three whole weeks) I felt dizzy, short of breath, and tired beyond imagining. Physical exertion of any sort made me feel faint. (This was a very bad thing, considering the apparent Tibetan love of steep stairs.) I felt like I was breathing through wet cloth the whole time, and often wheezed. Hiking comes relatively easy to me at home, and I love to do it, but the walking we had to do in Tibet absolutely wiped me out. Toward the end of our stay, when it was becoming clear that I just wasn’t going to feel better in time to really live it up, I gave in and started taking rickshaws and taxis when I could. (This was a life-threatening situation in itself, as the Chinese driving philosophy seems to be “if you can’t go faster than me, you don’t deserve to be on the same road.”) The really weird part was that when I had been exerting myself too much, I could see my heartbeat in my own eyes. A sort of pall would come over my vision, and I could see my blood vessels pulsing. It was creepy.

Toward the end of the stay, we traveled up to Lake Namtso and Reting monastery. In order to reach Namtso, we had to cross a pass that was nearly the same altitude as Mount Everest base camp–an altitude of over 17,000 feet. I was reduced to lolling about in the bus for this time. After the pass, we descended to Namtso, which was still at 14 or 15,000 feet. It was at this time that I felt really bad. At sundown a group of us went to meditate at the water’s edge. I could not concentrate, I felt so bad. As we walked back to the guesthouse, I began to feel as if I might faint, but my husband pushed me to stagger as best I could. Finally I could take no more, and I’m sorry to say that I broke my years-long no-vomiting streak in front of a few yak herders, to my eternal embarrassment. It was also the first time I’d been physically sick in front of my new husband. Oh, I wanted to die. But mysteriously, as soon as I’d thrown up, I felt like Popeye after his spinach. I felt like I could dash back to the guesthouse and do jumping jacks. That didn’t last, but it sure was nice.

As filthy as Beijing’s air was, I took a heaping lungful when we had touched down, grateful to have a clear head again.

Only one or two others in our group got this sick. Most of the others were just dandy, or at least knew how to push through their illness. Those of us lagging behind mostly felt like out-of-shape jerks who were holding the more fit travelers back. So apart from physically feeling crappy, we felt bad mentally too.

Of course, my damn husband felt great the whole time. The only real adverse effects that he noticed was that he was sometimes out of breath and his eyes became badly bloodshot and stayed that way until we got back to the States. So I felt bad that I was ruining our honeymoon too. Oh well…an excuse to travel somewhere else later on.

There are medicines that you can take to reduce the likelihood of altitude sickness. The most popular is Diamox, which I could not take because I am allergic to sulfa drugs. The other, a type of steroid, I refused because my doctor told me it caused radical, rapid weight gain. Instead I opted for a foul concoction from an online herbalist. It got the approval of the herbalist who came on the trip with us, as it was full of vasodilators and bronchodilators, basically designed to help me breathe better. It didn’t work too great, and was so nasty that I hardly wanted to take it. Two things actually did help: canned oxygen and canned rhodiola juice that was not only tasty but also conquered nausea.

The Travel Doctor has a good article on altitude sickness if you want to know more.

His speech and the speeches of others at the ceremony reemphasize that he is not a “splittist,” as Beijing claims, but simply a crusader for peace. He restated that it is not independence he is after, but actual autonomy, something the “Tibet Autonomous Region” utterly lacks. He thanks the American people for their support, and is rather politic in thanking the Bushies for their “support of religious freedom” (heehee, I don’t think he’s been reading the US news much…).

Beijing, of course, threw a little tantrum about “splittists” and “interfering in China’s internal affairs” and “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people.” Um, first of all, even a redneck like me knows that if you want people to admire your lawn, you need to clean it up. If Beijing treated its people like people, we might not be so concerned about its internal affairs. Secondly, how many times does the Dalai Lama have to say, in public, in the company of powerful foreign leaders, that he is no longer seeking Tibetan independence before you will acknowledge it?! Just because you say things you do not mean doesn’t mean everyone does. The Dalai Lama sees that you are too petulant and ignorant to think about Tibetan freedom, and he has tried to compromise, and still you can’t take it. Finally, I doubt most of the Chinese people have time to have their feelings hurt by the activities of a religious figure they probably know little about, what with the time it requires to make all those wonderful lead-based Barbie dolls and the coal-smoke pollution with which you clog their lungs and the lack of freedom of expression and thought and all. Get off it, Beijing. We all see through you.

Congratulations to the Dalai Lama for his award, and a big “thank you…FINALLY” to the Bush administration for doing something decent for once.