Tibet has often occupied a special place within the Western imagination. It’s a symbol of communist colonialism and an idealized image of a people removed from the barbarous forces of consumerism and modernization. “Free Tibet” is a rallying cry for those that oppose the communist regime. The Dalai Lama is revered for his attempt to win more autonomy for his people.

Last week, I had a chance to see the people of Tibet firsthand. My study abroad program sent us on a 10-day trip to Yunnan, a province bordering Tibet, Vietnam, Laos and Burma. We stayed with a Tibetan village in Shangri-La (Tibetans aren’t restricted from living inside Tibet) for three nights and four days. However, I only came away with contradictions and no easy answers.

The vast majority of people in this village of 43 households are illiterate. They can all speak but not write the Tibetan language. A few of them can speak Mandarin but almost none of them can write Mandarin. Each household has up to three kids: the government in China grants ethnic minorities, like the Tibetans, exceptions to the official one child only policy. The middle son in my host family had departed three years ago to go study Buddhism with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. His older brother married at 15, has a three-month-old son, and works 10 hours a day. And by work, I don’t mean cubicles and computers (our likely futures?).

By work, I mean either tilling the fields to plant barley, breaking stones in the mountains to build paved roads in the village and/or felling wood. After interviewing an elderly woman and our group’s Tibetan tour guide, I learned just how dire the economic situation in this village is. Each household makes about 300 RMB from planting barley, 4000-5000 felling lumber and 800 on a good year from study abroad tourists like me. Added together, that comes to about $1,000.   That’s about 1/46th  the U.S. average household income of $46,000.

So what does it all mean? Well, it means, as my tour guide told me, that the village has high hopes for the local government to help them build roads. They’re running out of wood to cut on top of the mountains and they know it. So in the next few years, they’re planning to turn their village into a tourist attraction. Come enjoy an authentic Tibetan experience? Can you have an authentic cultural experience at a tourist destination?

Well, what does this say about the government’s relation to Tibetan culture and the Tibetan people? Our Tibetan tour guide described Tibet before  1960 as a “slave society” with 95 percent of the people with no freedom much less property. My Chinese roommate agrees, but how much of that is a result of propaganda, the one legacy Leninism and Marxism have left for China?

Our Tibetan tour guide credited the communists with investing billions of dollars in Tibet to build hospitals, roads and schools. Yet, he, as a devout Tibetan Buddhist, is well aware of the restrictions on religious freedom. Even worse, there are fears that the Communist Party is encouraging Han Chinese to migrate to Tibet in order to change Tibet’s cultural identity.

To put it starkly, in my Tibetan house there is an enormous shrine to the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama (the second highest religious and political authority in Tibetan culture) on one wall. On the opposite side of the room, there’s an enormous glass plaque picturing Mao, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zeming and Hu Jintao’s smiling faces hovering over the mountains of Tibet with China’s ethnic minorities dressed in their authentic garb in the foreground. At issue is the complicated interaction between modernization and Tibetan cultural history.

In talking to people here regarding Tibet, it’s striking how often they bring up our American history. I didn’t expect them to compare Tibetans to America’s Native Americans. Or what about China’s shaky and hazy historical claim to Tibet with our own claim to the American West?   If colonialism is what China is doing to Tibet, then what did Europe and America do to the Native Americans? It’s obvious that there are no easy answers to this type of historical comparison. What standards do you and I invoke to justify ourselves to another culture? Isn’t that the problem of relativism? Is the only response non-judgment and non-interference?

Well, that’s precisely the Chinese Communist Party’s stance on international affairs: Non-interference with Chinese sovereignty and tolerance. Is that the right stance to adopt? No, but it’s not as simple as dogmatic condemnation. I ended up leaving the village more confused than settled, and so far that’s what China is.