Portrait of Hago Tenzin Wang Yal

The tale of my Sichuan travels is written as a continuous story and starts on the entry "In Chengdu" on Nov. 5th, 2008. For context and continuity, feel free to start back at that point and read on forward first if you have not already done so.

Meanwhile, Larry had run into Hago Tenzin Wang Yal (啊郭 邓真旺甲), owner of the Snow Land Tibetan Medical Massage Centre (雪城藏式按摩中心), a few doors down from our hostel.



"Well hello! How are you?"
"Larry! It's such a coincidence to run into you again!" We had just met him yesterday, and so he got to chatting with Larry for some time. Eventually, he started telling his life story.

"Years earlier, I had joined the army, and traveled all over China. It was then that I met my wife, a Han Chinese woman from Henan. However, as you know, I am Tibetan, and according to the traditions of my people, the custom was for all the brothers in our family to share one wife and live together, taking care of our family's lands. But I didn't want to follow the old ways anymore, and I loved LiXia (his wife). So against my parents’ wishes, I married her. The problem was, my mother would not acknowledge my marriage, and she tried to chase me and LiXia out of town. At one point, I was going to leave the country and stay with my grandfather in India. But once my wife got pregnant, my mom relented and let us stay, though we're basically shunned by our people."

He was only 28 years old, and had already lived quite an eventful life. The conversation continued, and Hago Tenzin Wang Yal explained why the mountainsides of Songpan were barren:

"We used to have trees at one point, but in recent years, people have been cutting them down without replacing them. So the last 7-8 years, the government has been encouraging locals to plant trees with monetary incentives. Unfortunately, such incentives are not having the desired effect. Instead of actually planting new trees, some of our people (the Tibetans), who don't know a lot about tree-planting, go to the forest and uproot some small trees. They transplant them to the mountainside right before inspection, for the sole purpose of passing the inspection (which allows them to claim the incentives, anywhere from several hundred to a few thousand RMB). The problem is, the trees are not well transplanted, and after the inspections, they soon wither and die. As a result, the very next year, they need to start transplanting new trees, only they go deeper and deeper into the neighboring forests. Not only do no trees grow on the mountainside, but they are destroyed elsewhere."

Larry notes that it is perhaps because of these experiences and family problems, that he often feels rather dejected. He has a broader prespective than most Tibetans here, and a lot of ambitious plans, but no one listens to him.

As Larry observed, what really needs to be done here is the implementation of this "learning classroom" idea. As with many things, the main issue is education; the people here do not have the proper perspective - they are limited to the learnings of local experiences around them, and have nothing to broaden their horizons, tell them of what the rest of the world is like out there, how other people in other places have handled similar issues.