"What sort of lady would have intercourse with an ox?"
"I don't know," Mr. Xun said, "because it is covered up."
The buildings were not beautiful, nor even pretty, but they had a rough mountain charm, and some of the carved pillars looked both godly and weird. The attractiveness of the place was in its life, its pilgrims and monks, the novice monks fetching water and eating Popsicles, and penitents draping the white and yellow gauze on the statues, and burning butter, and whirling prayer wheels, and prostrating themselves in a sort of religious athleticism that was very impressive—they are required to flatten themselves against the ground 100,000 times a year. It is not a fastidious kowtowing but a calisthenic so vigorous they wear mitts and knee pads to prevent bruising.
Mr. Xun and I walked down the road, past the souvenir stalls and the little shops, and had lunch in a restaurant that was otherwise empty. We had grilled yak meat, melon, squash, pig fat, buns, seaweed soup and french fries. The yak meat stuffed into the buns was my Dish of the Day, and I entered it into my notebook under dumplings and smoked duck and all the rest of the dishes I had favored.
We were sitting near a Franklin stove with a ten foot tin chimney. Mr. Xun said that he had visited the United States the previous year. He had been an interpreter for a trade delegation. In order to secure this job he had had to pass a competitive exam in English. He said he had traveled all over.
"I went to San Francisco," he said, and smiling, he told me how much he had hated Chinatown. He regarded the very word as insulting, but also he had found it all hackneyed, ridiculous and embarrassing. "And the food was bad," he said.
"What did you think the first time you saw New York?"
"Not as nice as Vancouver."
I then asked him what he had bought in the United States to take back to China.
"A pen. A book of stories. A photograph album."
He had no money. But what things he would have bought if he had had the cash! A refrigerator, a motorcycle, a television, an electric noodle maker!
We talked about Tibetans.
"They have black and red faces," Mr. Xun said. "The Hans are white and red. You can tell the Hans by their red cheeks. And the Tibetans are very dirty."
"There isn't much water around here," I said.
"On the grasslands in the west of Qinghai there is no water at all. The people wash their hands in yak's milk. And they never take a bath in their whole life."
"How about the Hans?"
"We wash once a week."
Mr. Xun said he usually went to a public bathhouse in Xining for a bath—on Fridays. He lived in a three-room apartment on the outskirts of the town, with his family.
Without warning, Mr. Xun said, "'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife...' "
"You read Jane Austen, Mr. Xun?"
"My favorite book is
A very Chinese title, when you come to think of it. He also liked Dickens and Thackeray. There was apparently plenty of time out here on the high plains of central Asia for the plump and populous English novel. He said that he also read religious texts. After middle school he had decided to become a Buddhist. "I wanted good fortune in my life," he said. He was now a firm believer.
"Want one of these?"
"Oh, yes," he said, gratefully accepting a portrait of the exiled Dalai Lama.
I had brought fifty pictures of the Dalai Lama with me. I had been told that they were impossible to obtain in China and that I was likely to win friends among people in this region if I handed them over. It was a simple expedient. I had no personal objection to presenting pictures of this solemn bespectacled incarnation of Buddha; and it seemed to work.
On the way back to the monastery we ran into a pilgrim who said he was a yak herd—he had about thirty of them. They sold for about $100 each (but Chris Bonington was paying $8 a day just to rent them), and he had had to sell two of his yaks to pay for this pilgrimage to Taer'si with his wife and two small children. The Chinese word for yak meant "hairy cow"
Taer Monastery is known for its butter sculptures, and as yak butter is the medium they are pungent works of art. A hall about forty yards long held statues and friezes of multicolored flowers, cherubs, trees, temples, little animals, and gods and goddesses. One of the largest statues was of Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy. But the Yellow Sect interprets this deity as having thirty-six forms, and in this yak-butter statue she was a mustached man.
The monk watching over the butter sculpture took the portrait of the Dalai Lama I offered him and folded it into his robes. Then he gave me a surreptitious blessing.
"You have made him happy," Mr. Xun said.
