What the Chinese Don't Eat by Xinran

pockets came books and money, and from pockets on the sleeve some little sheepskin pouches. From her right boot she took a knife, and from her left some maps of China. She reached inside the waist of her robe and brought out two large empty leather bags. Then she removed her long silk belt, which was hung with even more little leather bags and tools.
    I watched with astonishment: her robe, it turned out, was also her luggage. It became her bed as well. She spread it over the bedstead as a mattress, placed the silk belt over the books and maps to make a pillow, and then stuffed all her possessions into the sleeves of the robe, with the exception of the knife. This rested on the pillow beside her. Then she lay down, tucked the cuffs of the sleeves under her pillow and covered her legs with the two leather bags. Both her body and herpossessions were perfectly protected. Underneath the robe and all that luggage, she was tiny.
    I don’t think she noticed my amazement as I got into the other bed. I felt as if I had just experienced a tiny piece of Tibetan life, and I would experience more when I went to Qinghai the following year to try to understand what it was that Shu Wen had gone through. There I would witness the incredible ingenuity of the Tibetan people, who manage to live with so few resources. I would see stones piled up to mark directions, food hidden in the frozen ground to be collected later, wood stored under rocks for fuel. I would realise that the leather bags that Shu Wen had spread over her legs were designed to carry dried food such as barley flour and curd when travelling.
    The next day Shu Wen finished her story, and we parted. It wasn’t until two days later that I realised I hadn’t even asked her the words for the clothes and ornaments she was wearing, let alone the names of the protagonists in her story. All I knew was her name, and that she was Chinese, not Tibetan as my friend had originally thought. I had no idea how to find her again.
    I called the listener who had suggested I meet her, but he didn’t know where she was either. ‘We got talking over a bowl of rice soup. Yesterday she sent me a tin of green tea from the fermented rice seller as a thank-you, and she said she hoped Xinran might be able to tell her story and that all women in love might be inspired by it. Xinran, I really don’t know where she has gone.’ And that was why I had to write her story.
    I had been to Tibet once before, on a journalistic assignment in 1984. It was a short, five-day trip to the east of the Qing-Zang highlands, which are populated by a mixture of Tibetans, Mongolians and Chinese. For the first time in my life, I experienced what it was like to live in silence. I heard hardly any conversation. The Tibetans I saw seemed to communicate almostentirely by body language. I had been overwhelmed by the altitude, the empty, awe-inspiring landscape, and the harsh living conditions. What would it have been like for a young Chinese woman travelling there over 30 years before?
    I made the trip to Tibet again in 1995. I wanted to follow in Shu Wen’s footsteps and see the things she had told me about: the mystical connection between humans and nature, colours and silence, yaks and vultures. She had told me stories about Ao-Bao and Mani stones, Buddhist prayers carved into great boulders high in the mountains. She had told me about sewing men and multicoloured wind-chime women. Because traditional clothes were made from leather and metal, and sewing them was physically hard work, clothes-making was, and still is, mostly done by men. Tibetan women, no matter how poor, set great store by their jewellery, and everywhere you go there is the sound of bells and chimes as they move.
    I learned about sky burial and water burial. Only when women die of an illness are they buried in the ground; otherwise the body is cleaned, shaven and cut into a thousand pieces, to be eaten by the birds, sending the soul back to heaven. Children’s