Jan Wong's China by Jan Wong

Author:Jan Wong [Wong, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-67440-9
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2000-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

In July, 1994, Lena and I left Beijing in great secrecy. In Chengdu, the tour agent didn’t bat an eye at our blank passports. The next morning, on the pre-dawn flight to Lhasa, I used a felt pen to alter the numbers on our Xeroxed visas so the deed couldn’t be traced back to our tourist friends. I couldn’t do anything about the watermarks. The high-quality photocopier had picked up the watermarks of shadowy American eagles. Belatedly, I realized I should have “borrowed” a visa from a Canadian. I just hoped nobody would notice that the eagles on my fake Chinese visa didn’t match the maple-leaf watermarks on my Canadian passport.

Norman had come with us. Usually he stayed home with Ben and Sam whenever I traveled. But this time I feared that looking Chinese in Tibet would be a barrier to chatting up dissident monks. With his beard, he even looked like an aging pro-Dalai Lama backpacker. As a non-journalist, he had no trouble obtaining a Tibetan travel permit. But because his Chinese visa branded him as a journalist’s spouse (Chinese bureaucrats left nothing to chance), we had to pretend to be old friends who had bumped into one another on the flight into Lhasa. Of course, that meant we’d have to sleep in separate hotel rooms. I told Fat Paycheck a good reporter had to make sacrifices.

On the flight, we popped some anti-edema pills and began guzzling water to prevent altitude sickness as our Lonely Planet guidebook instructed. Looking out the plane window, I saw moss-green massifs, some with a dusting of snow, poking through the clouds. But I didn’t see any sign of human habitation until our descent onto the banks of the sparkling Brahmaputra River. At nearly 12,000 feet above sea level, Tibet’s skies were deep azure, the same as Beijing’s had been in the 1970s, before the veil of sulfur and coal dust closed in. With a bump, we landed on the single airstrip.

No one questioned our blank passports at Ganggor Airport. Pemba, our Tibet Tourism guide, bought our story about meeting Norman on the plane and added him to our package tour. After martial law, authorities tried to discourage backpackers by forcing “groups of one or more” to buy expensive packages.

At the Holiday Inn Lhasa, the reception clerk flipped through our blank passports. “Visas?” he said, with a puzzled look.

I whipped out our photocopied visas. He unfolded them. Without a second glance, he filled in the paperwork that would be forwarded to the local police station. We had made it!

Only one-fifth of the Holiday Inn’s 500 rooms were occupied. Built in 1985, Tibet’s only three-star hotel looked reassuringly normal. But its outdoor pool was polar-bear cold and its Himalaya Restaurant offered yak tartar. It also offered a gizmo in each room that piped oxygen directly into the bedside table so you could ostensibly lie in bed and gas up. But like the elevators, the oxygen system wasn’t working. A call to housekeeping brought a Tibetan woman bearing a bag of room-service oxygen.

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