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South
China Morning Post Magazine, July 28, 2002
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| Photo by Virgile Simon Bertrand of Red Desert Ltd |
Pamela
Logan is president of the Kham Aid Foundation, which she set up in 1997 and
which is based in her native California. Its
aims are to help the people of the eastern Tibetan plateau, in particular those
of Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in western Sichuan Province.
Logan became interested in the Khampas when she travelled in the region
in the early 1990s. She
subsequently wrote a book called Among Warriors: A Woman
Martial Artist In Tibet
and has just written another, Tibetan Rescue - The Extraordinary Quest To
Save The Sacred Art Treasures Of Tibet.
The titles of these two works suggest a Wonder-Woman-ish quality about Logan - the Michelle Yeoh, perhaps, of Sichuan’s dilapidated monasteries. She is, after all, the eponymous martial artist of her first book, and in the second she deals with blizzards, mountain ranges and packs of wild dogs with a certain briskness. There isn’t much room for swooning discourses on sweet little Tibetan folk: Logan, unlike some of her compatriots, doesn’t take the tedious line that all Tibetans hover in some special stratum of holiness veiled from our unworthy eyes. ("I'm a fan of Tibetan culture," she writes at one point, "but Tibetan medicine fills me with misgiving. To my mind, it's just around the comer from voodoo.")
‘I had very conventional opinions in the beginning,' said Logan, when we met for tea in Lane Crawford just before an Asia Society talk on her work. "I believed this place was a wonderful Utopia, a land of snows, a land of peace and compassion ... The longer I'm there, I realise it's not Utopia. It's hard. You’re sorry to go but you’re very glad to come out.' As for the accusation, occasionally levelled, that her work will attract contaminating tourists to the area, she retorts, The Tibetans I know are not children, it's not for me to monitor their exposure to the outside world. They don’t want to be in an ivory tower. The monks are delighted with what we're doing."
Twelve years ago, Logan, 43, had a career, and not
just any old career either. She is
one of the few people in the world actually qualified to use that dismissive
term, "It's not rocket science" with any authority, because she was,
in fact, a rocket scientist. (This explains occasionally vivid sentences in Tibetan
Rescue such as "our plans had been bolluxed up by a major snafu',
surely more the lingo of NASA than lamas.) She earned her doctorate in aerospace
science from Stanford University, and she was a teaching assistant at Cal Tech
when she decided to start looking for warriors.
She'd heard stories about the Khampas when she was
travelling in Nepal in 1986. Logan,
a third-degree black belt in shotokan karate, said: "If you train in
martial arts, the thing you wonder your whole life long is, 'What if I have to
use this?' As a middle-class, urban-dwelling American, there wasn’t much
chance I would. Am I just kidding
myself, this dancing around in white pyjamas?"
Has she ever used it? 'Not in the literal sense, but certainly in the psychological
sense, being aware of potential threats." On the other hand, she has been
robbed in Mexico. "It wasn’t
appropriate to use it then. They
didiyt get a whole lot of stuff. Pakistan’s
a little scary. I find China benign
- partly because I'm as tall as the average Sichuan man."
In 1991, she finally set off on “a quest” to find
her warriors. "I went from being a novice traveller - just like 10,000
backpackers travelling around China - to now, where my life and career is in
China, particularly Sichuan." I liked the words she used - quest and novice
have an obvious resonance - and as she talked about those early days of travel
it was dear something had stirred her. "There
comes a watershed, after two or three months of travelling, when you really
let go." When? “I can
remember getting really sick and thinking this is the stupidest situation.
Really sick, really tired, really homesick.
It must have been when I got through it - getting born as a traveller."
She recounted what had obviously been a seminal
moment in her dry, academic way. She
is not passionate in her presentation of herself, and she knows it.
Later, she observed, in the context of leading various expeditions to
Pewar Monastery to restore its 300-year-old murals, "I haven’t got much
charisma." Is that required? "It
helps. I basically go at this like a scientist - very methodical,
very detail-orientated."
The monastery project arose when Wong How-nian, of
the China Exploration and Research Society in Hong Kong, asked her to become
involved, which she did, from 1994 to 1998; Tibetan Rescue tells
that story.
When I asked if the monastery was beautiful, she
replied, "No. It's very, very
ordinary. But the paintings are
extraordinary." Do they move her? "I'm
not natively an artsy-fartsy person. I'm Buddhist, but I'm not Tibetan Buddhist.
Now they mean a lot more to me. I had to take that part on faith in the
beginning."
Her own faith came with her interest in martial arts.
"All my friends were doing it," she said.
Logan gave what might be called a wry smile and added, "I'm just a slave
to fashion. It's a nice set of
beliefs to hold if you’re a scientist; there's no conflict." I was about
to open my mouth when she added, “It's
not mandatory to believe in reincarnation.
I'm a Zen Buddhist, nevertheless I will quote the Dalai Lama: where
science and Buddhism are in conflict, one should choose science.”
Does she miss it?
"Science? Not a whole
lot. I still like to doink around
with my computer. I've been
doinking around a lot lately." That's because of her Kham Aid work, which
as well as conservation has set up regional health and education projects.
She organises that in California, where she spends about eight months of
the year. “I'm old enough that I
need my little nest somewhere. As I
move into my ... late 20s, the travel aspect gets wearing.
I do have fantasies of living out there, getting a little house,
intemet connections, eating Sichuan food, but my mother wouldn’t be
pleased."
Does her mother, who lives in California, understand
any of it? “Not really. But she
supports me. My brother is immune
to the whole Tibet thing. Doesn’t
see it, doesn’t get it."
Logan paused, intellectually troubled for a moment
and honest enough to admit it. 'Sometimes
I wonder if I get it. The longer
I'm there ... Tibetans get so much attention and yet there are other communities
- Han or Yi - equally poor and deserving. There's
a lot of suffering in the world. But
fate has sent me there. I'll pick
up my shovel and keep on digging.'
For more information on the Kham Aid Foundation,
visit www.khamaid.org or call 1 626 449-7505.
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