One evening, we were highly recommended by the taxi driver to attend a family style Tibetan feast in one of the villages. It sounded like a great idea to me because I’d like to see some real Tibetan culture and life, not mentioning some authentic cuisines. And it turned out to be one of the most bazaar experiences I've ever had. We were greeted at the gate by a Tibetan girl who presented us Hada, a silk scarf, as a welcome gift as a Tibetan tradition. After told by the house hold owner not to discuss the fees with the other guest (according to him, we paid much much less than the others because they are in tour group), we were ushered into a gaudily decorated dinning room on the second floor. A woman who looked dubiously Tibetan was our hostess. She was there to entertain, but she was neither a good singer nor a decent dancer. Most of her songs are Chinese pop songs and in between she performed an Indian dance, a belly dance and a tap dance. The rest of the time, she cracked vulgar jokes in bad tastes using superficial Tibetan cultural references to please the crowd. She called all men SeLang which means horny wolves, all women Semo, a Tibetan slang roughly means a pretty woman who is horny. She also played with the rare and old tradition of Polyandry and took several guests as her "husbands". I was her number two husband the moment I walked in. For the next one hour, I was tortured to get up to sing and dance, given a Tibetan name something sounds like Yak Diarrhea in Mandarin, and then being dressed in a woman’s robe and cap that were more Mongolia than Tibetan to perform the wedding ceremony with our hostess, together with her first husband, who was in a wig. In the end, we had to exchange gift and because I had nothing small with me, she took my polo belt.
I don’t know what to say about the whole thing. I was amused by the fact that I was amusing other people. It was one of those ridiculous situations that I had no choice but stringing along in order not to spoil the party, while Kevin and everyone else happily snapped the pictures away, yes, with me in drag and a microphone forcefully stuffed into my hand.
While laughing most the time, I was also kind of outrageous and acutely aware that that so called cultural experience was nothing but a tourist entertainment trap that cashed out the Tibetan culture and the curiosity ignorance of the tourists. It was not only pseudo-culture but also a bit anti-culture.
It was a strange, outrageous experience for me, hilarious and also a bit sad. When I looked around, everyone was having a good time. I told Kevin what I thought. He told me nonchalantly that that was what entertained people here. That’s what the tourists wanted to see. That’s what was normal there.
Later the taxi driver told us that these kinds of business brought huge income to many households in this region, the estimated household income exceeded 100,000 USD per year, and that’s why they never wanted to be independent. This confirmed that the operation was purely commercial. It made me think that our host was probably jia de (fake ) as well as everything else in that country, someone who simply works here and draws a salary. Who am I kidding? She didn’t even have an accent speaking mandarin.
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