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100 CHAPTER FOUR Reopenings and Restrictions We are good friends / Women shi hao pengyou One of several phrases on a sign encouraging tourists to learn Chinese phrases on the Indian side of the Nathu-la border Border Crossings I begin this chapter with two scenes that take place at border crossings. 1. Nathu-la. For decades, the hills of North Bengal and Sikkim have provided a cool escape for many middle-class tourists (and formerly, British colonists) during the stifling Indian summers. Although currently restricted to Indian citizens with special one-day permits, one common scenic destination is the India-China border post at Nathu-la. Travel agencies in Kalimpong, Darjeeling, and Gangtok advertise the Nathu-la tour package as a high-altitude adventure; according to one Indian travel agency, it is a “wonderful place to behold the nature’s splendor and admire the armed forces that stand without the fear of sun or rain to guard their country” (Bharat Online). Indeed, any search for “Nathu-la” on the YouTube video-sharing website will bring up multiple home video clips of groups of Bengali tourists visiting the border. After watching a few of these videos, I noticed strikingly similar footage in many of the clips. Permit me to merge them into an archetypal scene: At the border post at thirteen thousand feet, two small children in brown wool balaclavas gingerly poke their feet though the barbed-wire fence as their father films their bodies in India and their toes in China. Then, through the ghostly high-altitude mist and fog, the camera pans slowly across the bleak landscape. In a small sentry box in the background, a Chinese guard is dimly visible. The camera continues to pan across the pass and soon we see families on the Indian side standing in line to take photographs and shake hands with the Chinese soldiers on the other side of the wire fence. 2. The Friendship Bridge. Hundreds of miles west of the Nathu-la border post is the Sino-Nepalese Friendship Bridge and its two corresponding passport and Reopenings and Restrictions • 101 customs checkpoints in Tibet and Nepal. For both tourists and traders, this is the most frequented overland route from Lhasa to Kathmandu. Every morning at 8:00 a.m., jeeps line up in Dram/Zhangmu/Khasa (Tibetan, Chinese, and Nepali names for the same town) on the Tibet side of the bridge and in Kodari on the Nepal side, waiting to transport travelers on their journeys across the border. In Dram, I stand in front of the red and white barber pole–like border barrier with a German tour group and a number of western trekkers heading home from their trip to Everest base camp, waiting for the border office to open so that our passports can be marked with a China exit stamp. We wait in line for one hour, watching local women traders duck under the barrier in full view of the Chinese guards and walk across the bridge carrying baskets filled with vegetables. Once we get our passports stamped and begin to walk across the bridge to Nepal, some tourists stop to take photographs with their legs splayed on either side of the red line in the middle of the bridge. One side says “China,” the other, “Nepal.” This chapter examines practices of border-crossing along the Lhasa– Kathmandu–Kalimpong trade route. Although the kinds of practices undertaken by tourists (such as passport checks and photographs with Chinese guards) and those of the women traders (for example, slipping under the barrier to trade vegetables) are both examples of the everyday experiences of crossing national boundaries, they reveal differential relationships with the mechanisms that maintain state power. Barriers are fixed to mark and securitize national territory, yet these state-based fixing processes often go hand-in-hand with the notion of economic prosperity based on “free flows” of global trade. There are frequent tensions between state-based border restrictions and the actual movements of people across the border. Through the material practices of bordercrossers acting with and around these restrictions, alternative trade routes are produced that do not necessarily overlap with state ideas of what the routes should look like. Ultimately, the goal of this chapter is to show that borders, like the routes discussed in chapter 3, are represented by the state in one way, but actually lived in others. Even in the two opening descriptions, the tensions and contradictions between lived experience and state power are...

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