7.1.1 An American experience

In summer 2010, I led a travel seminar for U.S. scholars to Tibet with a theme of religion, ecology, and identity. None of the participating scholars were Tibet specialists; they had backgrounds in China studies, environmental studies, religious studies, and comparative literature. The purpose of the seminar was to have contemporary Tibet as a field case for curriculum development. All thematic, academic lectures and discussions were completed in Beijing before commencing travel to Tibet Autonomous Region. Tibet, in the seminar room, was a discursive subject matter addressed in individual lectures on such topics as Bonpo, the tradition of reincarnate lamas in Tibetan Buddhist history, mountain culture and its ecological implications, Sino-Tibetan Buddhist interactions, and imagined Tibet, among others. Intellectually, Tibet appeared graspable with these informative lectures and discussions: Tibet as a Buddhist nation, a place being modernized, and a place being imagined out of proportion in geopolitical and popular religious realms. In the meantime participants were anxious to set out to Tibet. In TAR, Tibet continued to be a subject of discussion and debate during breaks and in cafes and restaurants, but the actual landscape and monumental cultural sites drew many of the seminar participants into an emotional and poetic state of mind. While marveling at the ancient architecture of Lhasa and the visually striking Tibetan Buddhist motifs, everyone spent extra time at places where the natural landscape and human cultural elements were entwined, such as Yumbu Lhakang, Samye Monastery, and Drul Yelpa Caves.

At Drul Yelpa Caves, for instance, we initially scheduled a two-hour visit. In reality, we spent over four and an half hours there. The group walked uphill, visiting individual meditation caves, shrines, and the main Dharma hall together before eventually dispersing into solo explorations and small groups with common interests. The vista points outside individual caves, the terraced shrines and the main Dharma hall were the first places to captivate participants’ attention. The wide valley from which we had come was spectacularly imposing under the white clouds. The horizon was distant and yet intimately experienced by the senses from the fresh air mixed with the scent of juniper incense and the green, colorful rolling surface of the earth extending from where we stood to the edge of our vision. A comparative literature scholar remarked, “My eyes, vision, and the sight are one and the same.” Standing next to her, I felt mesmerized, too. The landscape was not merely visually touching and unified with the faculty of vision but was fully enveloping and invading each of us. To me, it was an experience of turning inside out and outside in, as if my body was becoming the body of the landscape itself and vice versa.

We further delayed our schedule when a senior monk invited us into a large meditation cave. It was the place that held us the longest, with most of the group taking the opportunity to try out Tibetan Buddhist style meditation. Noticing that many of us settled in like advanced meditators sitting on our cushions, he brought wool robes to cover our backs against the cold cave air. Donning the maroon wool robes had the result of unifying the meditative mood. Besides the faint cooing of a lone wild dove outside the cave, the only sound in the silence of the cave was everyone’s calm breathing. The religious backgrounds of these “advanced meditators” were agnostic, Baha’i, Buddhist, Christian, Confucianist, Muslim, and Taoist. They were not Western Dharma bums but were seriously playful when trying out a Tibetan mode of experiencing one’s inner world in a cave, the ultimate inner space of the earth. Tibet was no longer a discursive topic only but personalized in each of us, just as we meditated within it.

The travel seminar program was based on a field course I had taught about religion and ecology in contemporary China with a theme of tourist consumption of native landscapes in Southwest China and Tibetan regions. The collectively euphoric moments experienced by the faculty members were akin to those experienced by my American students. In the field, whether in Yunnan or Qinghai, American students were paired up with local students. In Yunnan our field sites were Lijiang and Shangrila. Qinghai and a few tourist sites in TAR were our Tibetan sites. My American students’ experiences in the townships of Suhe, a small town in Lijiang area, and Shangrila were similar in the sense that both places have almost identical urban landscape design and tourist infrastructure, e. g. cafes, bars, and teahouses with ethnic motifs. Their resemblance is expressed in the discernible architectural flavors and interior decorations, all of which are geared toward showcasing local authentic traditional cultures in fine masonry, carpentry, craftsmanship, and folk arts. Both places are compact and tourist-friendly, and yet send out a potent visual and haptic sense of time lag to visitors, as if they have traveled back in time to discover a place of a distant past undisturbed by the intrusions of the modern world.

In modern China tradition is often perceived in the past tense regardless of its coevalness with the contemporary world. In the tourism industry human talents are mobilized to utilize visual and haptic effects to temporalize a life style or a cultural motif as something from the past but they are spatialized in a well-crafted place that stimulates the senses and imaginative faculty of the visitor.

In Shangrila, paired up with local students, my American students explored the small but enchanting cityscape which receives over six million tourists annually (Li and Guo 2011). What they soon found out about this bustling township is that most houses along the streets are not residential quarters but shops, cafes, teahouses, restaurants, and art galleries, most of which are decorated with Tibetan prayer flags or other cultural symbols. The names of these businesses often contain words like “Tara,” “Tantra,” “Khampa,” “Makyi Ama,” “King Gesar,” and “Snowland.” Their owners vary from Khampas and Amdowas and Naxi to Han Chinese, Nepali, Indians, and Europeans. Interspersed among the Tibetan-looking businesses, one can find Western restaurants like Helen’s Pizza Ristorante and Socialist Bar. The cityscape of Shangrila is undoubtedly a recent creation for tourist consumption, a reconstructed “tradition” with a sense of adventure contained within an aesthetically pleasing and physically comfortable place. In comparison, those students who went to Qinghai yielded a different experience of Tibet. We mostly stayed in the homes of Tibetans in villages where there were no bars and teahouses. The absence of city lights and a bustling consumer environment presented us no other choice but to interact with our Tibetan host families. Our daily activities included herding goats up to the mountains in early mornings, helping village doctors dry and grind medicinal herbs, stacking up hay for winter’s fuel, soaking ourselves in hot springs with local Tibetans, taking lessons from elders about the geomancy of their villages and local sacred sites, hiking on goat trails up to surrounding mountains, and sitting around the kitchen fire at night. Culture shock and physical discomfort also accompanied many of my students who experienced gendered divisions of labor and differing social spaces for women and men, absence of shower facilities, and repetitive foods and drinks, e. g. noodle soups, salted black tea, and sheep meat. Taking a drive to a hotel in the nearest town for showers and laundry was often considered a “luxury trip” for those who needed a break from the lifestyle of their host families. The most memorable parts of my students’ experiences in Qinghai were their felt intimacy with local people, livestock, and landscape. One of my students wrote in her ethnographic assignment:

My recollection of my students’ field experiences in Qinghai is not meant to make an arbitrary statement that Tibetan villages in Qinghai present a more organic Tibet than their counterpart in Yunnan. I admit that a part of my subjective engagement with Tibet is concerned with the idea of authenticity of what I experience, therefore I could imaginatively entertain the idea of an authentic Tibet; however, as a social scientist, it just does not work with the plain facts of the recent history of Tibet which has and continues to undergo China’s modernization in both ideological and physical senses. Tibetan society no longer adheres to the past pattern prior to the introduction of China’s socialist system in the middle of the last century. My students’ experiences in Yunnan and Qinghai are both authentic in their own ways.

On the Qinghai side, the authentic experience refers to the students’ direct living experiences with their host families, gender dynamics, culture shock, and communal intimacy. On the Yunnan side, it means the tourism-mediated experience of Tibet. In the township of Shangrila this “mediated Tibet” entered the minds of my students when they were sipping hot tea, drinking noodle soup, or walking on streets adorned with signs and symbols of traditional Tibet comprised of mostly Buddhist elements and motifs. Comparatively speaking, natural landscapes, especially those considered as scenic sites, are being fenced in as geological parks or natural reserves more rapidly in Shangrila than in Qinghai. However, regardless of these two differing authenticities, both the images and physical presence of Tibet impresses and even brands itself indelibly on the minds of its visitors as a stunning, luminous place of simplicity. I re-emphasize such an appearance of Tibet as the optical, environmental, and eco-spiritual phenomenon I attempt to articulate thus far by evoking my students’ experiences. It is not exclusively a Western experience shown in my American students’ experiences, but is transnationally and transpersonally found also in experiences of Chinese travelers.

7.1.2 A Chinese experience

It is worthwhile to dwell on the case of Shangrila a bit more in terms of how Chinese Tibetophiliac scholars’ experiences promote Tibet as a paradise on earth in China. The success story of the tourist development in Yunnan’s Shangrila could be equated with the success of marketing Zhongdian as Shangrila, the name invented by James Hilton in his bestseller fiction Lost Horizon (1933). The name change process began with the tourist industry and soon involved Zhongdian County and Yunnan provincial governments. Finally the State Council officially approved the new metamorphosis of Zhongdian into Shangrila (Luo 2002, 19) and since that time tourism has changed all aspects of this small township. In this process it seems indisputable that human imagination is materialized in a concrete place.

It could be well said that Hilton posthumously brings economic prosperity to Shangrila, his imaginative creation now part of the local economic miracle. Naturally, his Lost Horizon is once again a popular read among Tibetophiles in China. My American students purchased the book as a reference for their writing projects and it is readily found in bookstores and souvenir shops in Shangrila. The English version is reprinted and distributed by Yunnan People’s Publishing House. Next to the English version, I noticed four Chinese versions translated by Luo Cheng (1999), Hu Rui and Zhang Ying (2006), Bai Yixin and Zhao Jinqiu (2007), and Zhang Tao (2011). Bai Yixin and Zhao Jinqiu’s version published by Yunnan University Press interested me the most, with its pictorial additions of local scenery, architecture, and art. Landscape photos, portraits of unknown Tibetans, and travel route illustrations are inlaid together with the text of the translation, combining Hilton’s fiction with a pictorial guide book, giving the impression that the translators or the publisher intentionally conflate the fictionality of Hilton’s Shangrila with the reality of the local geography. In 2011, when I was flipping through the colorful pages at the bookstore, I asked the young salesperson, “Among the four Chinese versions which one is sold most?” The answer was, “This one!” – she pointed at the version in my hands. On the way back to Beijing that summer, I saw this translation again displayed visibly in the bookstores at the airports of Shangrila and Kunming.

What interests me about this Chinese version of Hilton’s fiction is not its pretentiously colorful page layout that has no direct correlation with the fiction’s storyline, but its introduction by Li Xu, a senior researcher at Yunnan Provincial Academy of Social Sciences and the author of Portraying Tibet: the Distant Horizon (1999) and Guests of Tibet (2000). Li titles his introduction as “The Not-Yet Disappeared Horizon,” an obvious reference to Hilton’s “Lost Horizon” in which the fictitious Shangrila is a lost but rediscovered paradise on earth. While he reminds readers that Hilton’s Shangrila is a fiction, Li establishes a common ground with Hilton by narrating his own story of the past eighteen years of wandering through the mountains, forests, and human communities in Shangrila as a concrete place. He writes:

Shangrila is apparently Li’s home away from home. He describes it to his readers with a flood of poetic phrases eulogizing the unique landscape of the Shangrila region – “exceptionally charismatic,” “soulful intoxication,” “supernatural tranquility,” “hearty delights,” “profoundly affecting,” and “wildly peaceful” (Li 2007, 3 – 5). His succumbing to the enchantment of Shangrila is visibly topophil-ic; he finds its landscape animated with supernatural powers of nature and thus it speaks to him with an irresistible sense of religiosity. Li narrates such a state of his mind in other passages:

Reading between the lines I see how the physical landscape of the mountains and the plains conjoins Li’s mindscape and engages it in a poetic style. In the midst of clouds, wind, water, earth, flowers, and colors, the landscape’s horizon and his mindscape seem to move in unison. They are woven together with Li’s sense-scapes. Thus landscape enters mindscape, and vice versa. Shangrila brands Li’s mindscape of Tibet as “a utopia” (2007, 2) causing him to profess the same sentiment as other Chinese Tibetophiles.

In such writings, linear logic – that Tibet is imagined, marketed, and consumed – does not fully explain the heightened fascination of tourists, backpackers, artists, and writers toward Tibet. To reiterate what I have attempted to establish thus far, Tibet is, to start with, a power place. Commercial manipulations and fantastical projections of Tibet are preconditioned upon its geological, environmental, cultural, and eco-spiritual potency.

7.4.1 Geo-poetic affordance

Tibet is simultaneously branded as a commodity and branding a mindscape of dreams and fantasies in China (Kolås 2008). Meanwhile, I argue that Tibet as an actual geographic-cultural place plays the antecedent role in expressing itself as a power place and generating an earth-inspired spirituality in China and elsewhere. As Sun Jiong and his subsequent government supporters “authenticated” at the outset, Shangrila stands as a replica of Hilton’s fictive Shangrila: “a silent serenity,” “concentrated loveliness,” “a deep unrippled pool,” and “a living essence, distilled from the magic of the ages and miraculously preserved against time and death” (Hilton 2006, 242, 261). The geo-poetic nature of Hilton’s fiction is reproduced in contemporary Shangrila, but at the outset, it is the place itself that inspired imagination and was then the setting for making imagination present.

Reading through Lost Horizon, I find that Hilton’s Shangrila is not entirely his own creation. He references and fictionalizes personal accounts of Antonio de Andrada, Athanasius Kircher, Jean de Thévenot, and Cassiano Beligatti, who traveled to Tibet as missionaries and explorers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Hilton 2006, 144–145). Hilton’s cultural portrayal of Shangrila is a mini-Tibet to which was ascribed a “lamasery,” “theocracy,” and “the heathen Tibetan” (Hilton 2006, 144, 154, 189). These terms reflect the cultural conception of Tibet in the West in his time. Tibet was not absent in Western cultural consciousness in the 1930s; thus his fictional writing possesses a detectable amount of factual representation of Tibet from credible sources. Tibet as an actual place spoke to him indirectly through the writings of missionaries and explorers. Thus, Hilton embeds his findings from secondary sources into his characters. For example, in one scene, Conway, the protagonist in Lost Horizon, walks into the night under the silver moon:

I add the italics to indicate that his poetic and theatrical prose is sustained by his knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism enacted in a monastery: monks’ chanting in unison, the golden light from the butter lamps, and their devotion to meditation and enlightenment. In fact this monastic scene under the moonlight could be found in many places in contemporary Tibet. Hilton did not go to Tibet but Tibet entered his mindscape through the travel writings of missionaries and explorers he read before writing his fiction.

This is what I refer to as “the mirage effect” of place, which bounces from landscape into mindscape, and can eventually become a creative motor in the human mind. In the literal sense a superior mirage is an illusory image of an actual place projected in the sky by the atmospheric refraction of light; thus it is both illusory and real. Its visual effect often sparks awe, marvel, and imagination. In the context of contemporary Tibet, the mirage effect refers to a range of images, publicly shared imaginations, literary works, and creative arts, which portray Tibetan landscape, people, culture, and religious practices based on personal accounts of travel and work experiences in Tibet. Unlike Hilton’s Shangrila or Tibet drawn from secondary sources, the “mirages” of Tibet in the mindscape of writers like Li Xun or Tang Shijie are often a combination of their own travel experience, culturally-conditioned perceptions and images, and inner responses to all external inputs in imaginative, poetic, or intellectual terms. These “mirages” do not stop or fade into the horizon of the individual mindscape but become present in the social realm through the person’s creative activities. In the context of Tibet, the mirage becomes a shared mindscape with a life of its own, generative and contagious in nature.

The Chinese mirage-makers of Tibet are a special group of Tibetophiles. Most of the authors and artists I have mentioned so far belong to this unique class of people whose literary works and creative arts based on their personal experiences in Tibet are widely published in China. In their careers they have been zangpiao (藏漂) or “Tibet drifters,” meaning that they have lived or traveled in a Tibetan region for at least a year or longer. The phrase “Tibet drifter” is an established term in contemporary China, indicating Tibet-inspired New Age spirituality among Chinese. Mainstream media, such as Xinhua Net and Baidu, also recognize this Tibet-based popular trend. Xinhua News featured an article in 2009 titled “Tibet Drifters in Lhasa: In Search of a Spiritual Home.” The reporters wrote, “Tibet drifters are a part of the special cultural landscape of Lhasa. These drifters from outside Tibet reflect the unique spiritual charm of Lhasa” (Liu and Cao 2009). These two sentences are identical to what is written in Baidu Encyclopedia about Tibet drifters. It is not clear who cites whom; however, both sources highlight the spiritual aspect of the “drifting.” Baidu Encyclopedia says, “Tibet drifters are those who work, live or travel in Tibetan regions of China but are not residents of Tibet…They roam between the sky and the earth of Tibet, and on the streets of Lhasa searching for ‘Shangrila’ in their ideals and for what was once lost in their souls” (Baidu). A very popular recent writing of a Tibet drifter is titled Tibet Drifting published by Oriental Publishing Center based in Beijing (Mu 2012). The author Mu Ge, a scholar specializing in Western philosophy, lived in Tibet for four years as an aid worker. He wrote the book, a fictional story, in which the breathtaking Tibetan landscape is a space where his characters express the sense of spiritual homelessness and existential meaninglessness all too common in modern urban China.

In discussing Tibetophiles and their mirages of Tibet, I wish to re-emphasize Gibson’s idea of affordance concerning place-organism relationship, which is generally understood as how a given environment provides organisms with that which fulfills its utilitarian needs. In relation to humans, an affordance of place often goes beyond the utilitarian dimension, as Gibson writes, “The perceiving of an affordance is not a process of perceiving a value-free physical object to which meaning is somehow added in a way that no one has been able to agree upon; it is a process of perceiving a value-rich ecological object” (Gibson 1986, 140). Among the elements the Tibetan landscape affords the mirage-makers in China are light, color, mountainous topography, space, and water in the forms of glaciers, ice, lakes, rainfall, rivers, and snow, with all of these elements becoming mediums of their thoughts, imaginations, fantasies, and soulful narratives. Mirage in the mindscape is thus also an optical phenomenon manifested as visions, dreams, and imaginations transmitting the real and the illusory simultaneously. When place-rooted ecological and cultural elements enter the mindscape of the Tibetophile, they become a unique type of affordance allowing the mirage-maker to transform the Tibetan landscape into a geo-psychic terrain of his own making imbued with emotions, sentiments, existential conditions, and spiritual states, all unique to himself and his own social environment. This mirage of Tibet emerges as a poeticized, romanticized, reshaped, or re-appropriated Tibet; a special domain in which the self of the mirage-maker is environed and finds its lost soul restored in the land as a spiritual Other. I call this particular type of affordance “the geopoetic affordances” signifying the value-rich and value-added Tibetan landscape with all things included: the geological, the geographic, the meteorological, cultural, social, psychological, religious, spiritual, the medical… you name it.

The mirage effect from the writings and artworks of many influential Tibetophiles in China has a clear pattern of simultaneous transposition, transference, entwinement, division, and polarization between the mirage-maker as Self and the perceived/experienced Tibet as the Other. On one hand the Tibetan landscape as an Other overpowers the consciousness of the mirage-maker and subjects it to a confessional mode of being. On the other hand the mirage-maker remaps and re-projects the Tibetan landscape as an archetypal spiritual destiny or an ever-expanding horizon of a heroic journey. This dialectical poeisis of Tibetan landscape and the Tibetophile’s mindscape expresses itself in the dualities of escape and reunion, ailment and healing, failure and triumph, doubt and confidence, reverence and condescendence, and frontier and centrality.

7.4.2 Utopian attributes of Tibet

The materialization of Hilton’s Shangrila in Yunnan over the last decade has been premised on the existing popular fascination of Tibet in China known as xizangre () or “Tibet fever.” This popular fascination has been reshaped, redirected, and refunneled into the tourism industry as a consumer desire for a paradisiacal place of beauty, magnificence, and peace – or simply as what Chinese travel writers often refer to as “the last pureland on earth.” This advertising motif parallels the publication of creative works by Tibet drifters, or rather Tibet mirage-makers in this case. Herein I draw a fine line between the mirages of Tibet floating in commercial images and literary works, arts, and motion pictures, and the Tibetan landscape itself. With persistence I emphasize that it is the landscape that empowers the mirage-makers with its visually-stunning and spiritually awe-inspiring qualities. Non-Tibetans’ narratives about Tibet have never been absent of these qualities since the Jesuit missionaries of the seventeenth century and later explorers and seekers set eyes on it. In actuality many parts of Tibet could be named after Hilton’s Shangrila.

Prior to the formal state recognition of Zhongdian as Shangrila, there already existed the talk of a Greater Shangrila in the neighboring territories of Sichuan, TAR, and Yunnan (Hu 2010, 1), not to mention other Tibetan regions whose astonishing landscapes resemble or even surpass Hilton’s Shangrila. These breathtaking places were (are) just inaccessible for tourists because of natural barriers of waters and high mountains and the absence of infrastructural support to accommodate the massive number of tourists locations such as Shangrila and Lhasa now absorb annually. For instance, in the eye-witness accounts of individual travelers and exploratory writers, the pre-1997 Shangrila was “very primitive, very poor, very cold and lacking oxygen, but had immense mountains, large rivers, expansive grasslands, and big forests” (Zhang 2007, 48). It was a place that had a “stunningly beautiful landscape but was extremely poor, and was socially harmonious but behind the times” (Liu 2009).

What I am arguing here is: Tibet was (is) a utopia in the topographical sense. Its utopian attributes continue to stream into the public sphere of China through the works of mirage-makers like Tang Shijie and Li Xun. I see the conflation of their personal fantasies and dreams with Tibet, but it is absolutely critical to me that I illustrate how the mirage-makers re-possess Tibet as the space of their own nostalgia, dreams, and visions – the illusory components reflective of their personal and social conditions. For the following paragraphs I make a legitimate supposition that Tibet, as a utopia, was not as a fictitiously perfect human society as the word “utopia” often signifies but a place with natural barriers limiting access to outsiders in the past and so it was able to retain a cultural uniqueness in addition to some degree of protection from environmental degradation. Thus, utopia in this part of the chapter is a toponym that has a corresponding topography of horizons, frontiers, edges, gaps, and in-betweens (Marvin 1993, 407–408) that constitute its inaccessibility but which possess potentially contagious poeisis and sublime inspiration that provokes psychic and spiritual responses from those who come into contact with it. This is the moment when the self of the mirage-maker recreates itself in the otherness of Tibet. In this process a topographical utopia is turned into a fantastical utopia of the mindscape.

7.4.3 Escape, self-exile and metamorphosis in “magical Tibet”

Chai Chunya, the writer I reference in the introductory chapter, is now a celebrated author and a documentary filmmaker. His popular recognition rests upon his lived experience in Tibet from which he has drawn his creative inspiration. His works are going beyond Mainland China and are distributed in Taiwan and Europe. “Tibet fever” is spreading widely in China; however, the number of the mirage-makers of Tibet is only a handful. The “chic” group in Beijing are not found in academia but comprise a small number of creative writers, artists, and filmmakers, such as Tsewang Norbu, Dai Wei, Xie Fei, and Ma Lihua; however their publications and artworks reach a wide audience in China. Through Pema Tseden and Tsewang Norbu I met Chai in 2009. Subsequently he visited my class at Minzu University. In 2010 he gave me his A Vagabond in Tibet (2009a) and Red Sheepskin Book of Tibet (2009b), both of which were published in Taiwan. Expecting more robustly forthcoming accounts of his experience in Tibet regardless of his fictional rendition of it, I was nevertheless impressed with his narrative skill and creative talents that brought me into the world of his Tibet – a “magical Tibet” as he calls it (Chai 2009b, 9). In this magical Tibet, the grass is green, the snow is white, and the sky is blue; however, it is revealed more as the psychic field of the author than the actual ecological and cultural world of Tibet. Its imagery is woven together with the author’s felt sense of loneliness, wilderness, harshness, barrenness, primitiveness, nakedness, uncertainty, poverty, exile, silence, and spiritual rebirth. Chai’s Vagabond is particularly telling of his Tibet journey as a journey of being saved and reborn as a new person. Chai writes:

The affordance of the Tibetan landscape to his poetic prose is self-evident, but when he enters Tibet, or “nature” in this case, it is not all home-like. It rather becomes a place “totally separated from the world,” as he continues his narrative:

In this narrative Tibet becomes a time lag, a marginal space, a harsh, desolate passage for a neophyte to complete a rite. What is obvious is that Tibet is not at all as animated as the “nature” he dived into earlier; instead it is metaphorized as a self-built prison for a spiritual breakout or break-through. I wonder if Tibetans are permanent prisoners in “Dostoyevsky-like exile.” In any case, this Tibet is the ground on which the author edifies himself to a spiritual peak experience with Jack Kerouac. Chai shapeshifts Tibet into Kerouac’s Desolation Peak – a passage to the universe of enlightened beings. In truth Kerouac spent a summer not half a year on Desolation Peak. In the end the solitude on the Peak was too much to bear and he “wrote to Snyder that his Buddhism was dead” (Tonkinson 1995, 27). Kerouac’s writings are spiritually inspiring but his Buddhist destiny still remains unclear, posthumously. After descending from Desolation Peak, depression, alcoholism, and a split spiritual state between basic Buddhist morality and his perceived omnipresence of Zen mind in alcohol and sex accompanied him as he expressed in The Dharma Bums (Kerouac 1986).

Chai’s Vagabond is a fiction; thus, historical, cultural, and ecological inaccuracy are acceptably secondary to its storyline; however, he makes it known to his readers that this fiction is fully based on his lived experience in Gama Village of Dege County in Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province and that the protagonist is himself (Chai 2009c, 132). As Chai also publicly admits that he is a Nyingmapa practitioner, it is natural that his readers wish that he could have given credits to his Tibetan teachers for his felt spiritual euphoria in Tibet rather than to Kerouac.

On April 4, 2011, Chai gave a talk at Renmin University titled “My Incurable Loneliness,” in which he narrated his literary success story to a large audience. A Tibetan participant commented that many Tibet-related literary works were written as outsiders looking in. Chai responded, “This is the issue that I must confront. I must prevent Said’s style [referring to Orientalism as critiqued by Said] and avoid looking at Tibetans and Tibetan culture with our Han worldview. I must place myself in the position of Tibetans.” Chai had received similar comments from his Tibetan readers in the past. In 2009 shortly after the publication of Vagabond, Unitas, a monthly magazine in Taiwan, featured Chai’s article “Magical Journey to Tibet in Troubled Times,” as a self-introduction of the newly famous author. Chai reminisced about an encounter with a comment from a Tibetan friend of his: “It is impossible for me to connect your work with the Tibet where I have lived. The names of people and places, and past and present events in your book all appear very Tibetan but, honestly, there is a thick wall separating my Tibet from yours” (Chai 2009c, 131). Chai lashed out with criticism of his friend:

I know this Tibetan friend of his. She is a globally acclaimed author based in Beijing and Lhasa, and a critic of China’s policy implementation in Tibetan regions. It was she who lifted Chai out of his existential and spiritual breakdown in 2005 by introducing him to Gama Village as a schoolteacher. Chai seemed to have a momentary discrediting reaction to his friend’s comment and, at the same time, a solidly self-edifying affirmation. Earlier I called this the post-Orientalist phenomenon and the heart of the issue is the question of authenticity and representation on the personal level and its accompanying social impact.

It is not unusual that Chai evoked Edward Said in his success story. Said’s Orientalism is a widely read text among contemporary scholars, writers, and cultural critics in China, especially in relation to the topic of Tibet. The first Chinese translation available in the PRC came out seven years ago (Wang 2005) and it is commonly read along with Foucault’s works on power. In many ways, the availability of Said’s Orientalism in Chinese has energized China’s version of post-colonial studies in which Said’s critical perspective is mostly utilized for analyzing the Orientalized image of Chinese in the West (Ma 2006, 26). Among scholars of contemporary Tibetan studies in China, Wang Hui and Shen Weirong are the most active ones who allege that Westerners Orientalize Tibet, along with using Lopez’s Prisoners of Shangri-La (1998) as their primary theoretical ballast. However, in the midst of critical backlash at the Orientalism of the West, both Wang and Shen are also facing the growing awareness of the Orientalization of Tibet among Han Chinese. In reference to how Yunnan’s Shangrila is commodified, Shen remarked, “Politically speaking this is incorrect…It cheapens our cultural tradition. This is an internal Orientalism that ingratiates the West” (Shen 2010, 109). In the same vein, Wang stated, “Orientalism is not merely a phantom of the West. It is now becoming a creation of our own” (Wang 2011, 37).

To be noted, the way in which Wang, Shen and other scholars in China employ Said’s perspective is caught in the dichotomy of China and the West, the East and the West, or Tibet and the West as if the two sides were uncompromisingly polarized and mutually unintelligible because of the one-sidedness of the extreme idealization and demonization of the non-Western native. In this regard, Wang and Shen and their adherents could be reasonably alleged to be exercising their nationalism against the West in their critiques.

Chai’s literary creativity, built upon Tibet, is a complex case of realism and fantasy. Before I allege the existence of Orientalist sentiments and expressions in his writings, I make a disclaimer that my post-Orientalist reading of his works is only intended to highlight the internalized, personalized, and individualized but-once-collective perceptions, imaginations, and fantasies of an Other; thus it is not intended to discredit his hard-earned literary achievement. As I elaborated earlier, my post-Orientalist approach acknowledges the historical consciousness of Orientalism as an inherent part of the Western imperial perception of non-Western others; however, this rigid historical dichotomy of “the West and the Rest” disintegrates as the questions of self and the other and of power and representation are found universally across human societies especially in an era of heightened globalization. Thus, I re-emphasize that one could be both the Orientalizing and the Orientalized. In the case of the mirage-makers of Tibet in China, the post-Orientalized Tibet is foremost a geographic place of unfamiliarity and yet it is a field of spiritual enchantment and a state of trance from which one returns home with a series of revelations and self-claimed magic and miracles. What is critical is that the post-Orientalist consciousness transmutes the actually awe-inspiring earth, sky, and water of Tibet into a mirage real in image but illusory in nature when the mirage-maker fills it up with a sequence of his or her soulful realization or spiritual liberation; thus Tibet is displaced and re-placed as a ground of the mirage-maker’s pilgrimage and subsequently felt transcendence.

In the case of Chai, his literary re-creation of himself in Tibet is sequenced from being an escapist from urban China to a schoolteacher, a pilgrim, a spiritually renewed person, an embodiment of Tibet, and an acclaimed fiction writer. It is a story of a hero’s return. Tibet has nurtured him. It is natural that he addresses Tibet as “magical Tibet.” He writes:

This was written during his post-Tibet phase after his books were successfully published in Taiwan and mainland China. Reading through Vagabond and Red Sheepskin Book of Tibet, one cannot help but single out the words and phrases that indicate Chai’s Orientalist sentiments: “natural,” “naked,” “primordial,” “mysterious,” “phantasmic,” “magic,” “wilderness,” “pure soul,” “perfect highland,” and the list goes on. In his narrative the Tibetans around him are not the “magical people” he claims them to be and as a narcissistic protagonist, he is more often the magic-in-the-making. He depicts himself as “a great soul who is being nurtured by the grassland and is suckling from the illumination of the Earth” (2009a, 186), and as “a lone wolf in the grassland who stands on the crest of a hill silently looking over everything” (2009a, 189). Following along with his “magical” perspective and poetic prose the reader can imagine him as “a handsome vagabond” undergoing a spiritual transformation in Tibet that is metaphorized as “the silent Earth in its primordial state…peaceful, mysterious, and phantasmic” (2009a, 252).

While he recognizes the primordiality of the Tibetan landscape, it is worthy of critique to notice that he visualizes the bodies of Tibetans in the same fashion. A simple scene of a teen boy taking a bath in a hot spring reveals a temporal-spatial displacement of Tibetans who are relegated to a primordial time, as Chai writes,

If there were an undercurrent in this passage, it would be the author’s fantastical vision in which his spiritual virginity is restored while considering himself as an equal of Thoreau. From the perspective of post-colonial studies, Chai has revealed his perspective that Tibetans exist outside of time, eternally archetypal, eternally “natural” and “innocent” or conversely, “primitive” and “bestial.”

Continuing to journey with Chai in his writings we find that unlike the virgin boy keeping him company at the hot springs, Tibetans around Chai include a masturbating man, a “slut,” a nomad woman outcast, a wealth-obsessed lama, a drunkard, a mentally-ill man, and a bandit. As hardships of native Tibetans are diluted by his poeticization as though they are the natural course of being since primordial time, his own urban existential disorientation, narcissistic lonesomeness, and felt spiritual euphoria take precedence. What is Tibet in Chai’s recollection then? It is the beautiful but outcast woman Yangchanma who gives birth to a son for him [the author has made no public admittance about having a child with a Tibetan woman; so take it figuratively] (2009a, 255), it is Cosmos flowers blooming on the grassland which make him think of his loved ones, and it is a thing that he loves but cannot touch. So, he leaves Tibet with his conflicting geo-phantasmic psychic terrain:

Chai tells his readers that he adopts the literary genre known as “magical realism” akin to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (2009c, 129). His repeated invocation of the Beat Generation at his magical turning points gives readers an impression that it is not Tibetan saints but the Buddhism-inspired writers and poets like Kerouac and Snyder who transcend his existential disorientation and spiritual confusion. The landscape of Tibet often appears as the externality of his “incurable loneliness,” a simultaneously real and figurative world of desolation from which he re-emerges as a new, whole person.

Chai’s soulful narratives, utilizing the genre of magical realism, resemble the style of the nineteenth century Orientalist writers, as Said characterizes them, “Every one of them kept intact the separateness of the Orient, its eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine malleability…” (Said 1979, 206). Tibet is Chai’s “Orient” in which he caresses the grassland like a goddess’ soft, aromatic shoulder (2009a, 2), relates to the nameless horses, yaks, and wolves (2009a, 119), hears the love-making sounds of his neighbor’s wife (2009a, 113), peeks at a young man’s pubic hair glistening in dim firelight through his unzipped fly (2009a, 157), watches a mentally disabled person streaking through the village (2009b, 270), walks away from the outcast woman when she hollers, “Hurry, I bore you a son” (2009a, 255), and imagines himself as a dead body feasted on by vultures (2009b, 315). This primitive, civilizationless and yet pristinely magnificent place gives him a total rebirth. Chai’s narrative could be read as personally experienced spiritual magic and miracles in Tibet but it also appears remarkably Orientalist.

On the other hand, it would be a mis-accusation to regard Chai only as an Orientalist. In the public arena, with his “conscience as a Han Chinese writer,” he makes atonement for the wrongs of “the Communist imperialist invasion” and “the state chauvinism” (2009c, 123). He points out his peer writers who “do not expose Tibetans’ sufferings, humiliation from being colonized…instead with their false romanticism and layers of lies they fictionalize a Tibet as an idyllic place of snow mountains, grasslands, monasteries, lamas, beautiful women, steeds, yaks and sheep” (2009c, 123). Chai lumps together this type of Han Chinese writer, characterizing their Tibet-related literary works as “a mirage of their adolescent wet dreams” (2009c, 127).

In the post-Orientalist era, Orientalist sentiments stream through one’s mindscape not necessarily as one side of a dichotomy to be noticed, highlighted, defended or tackled. They equally flow in the cultural consciousness of the anti-Orientalist, the justice-worker, the defender of the indigenous modes of being, and the member of an Orientalized culture. In Chai’s creative narratives, public statements, and expressions of his conscience, he carries a complex of a Tibetophile, a Dharma bum, a seeker, a dreamer of the impossible, a creative consumer of Tibet’s landscape and culture, a mirage-maker, an anti-colonialist, anti-Orientalist, and an Orientalist. Post-Orientalism is a latent Orientalism as Said predicted (Said 1979, 206), coming, when it does, in the entwinement of negated forms and affirmed expressions. In spite of Chai’s critical spirit, he is, himself, a mirage maker, relying on the power of the Tibetan landscape.