Escape from the Land of Snows (30 page)

After his capture, Soepa, the Norbulingka official who’d
returned to deliver the Dalai Lama’s letter, lay in a hospital, his damaged leg slowly growing infected. He began to dream of a returning army of Khampas and monks and Tibetan soldiers swinging into view through his window, back to smash the PLA and free the prisoners. “I mused that, for the moment, we had lost,” he said. “But since the rest of our forces were on the other side of the river, I hoped they would be supported by international assistance, including India, and come back.” Sometimes he would lift his head and look out his window, which faced the Kyichu River, to see if he could spot the troops arriving en masse. His neck began to cramp from his constant vigil. He wasn’t the only one waiting for a miraculous return. In southern Tibet, a young Tibetan recalls the effect that a plane passing over his village during this period would have on the local people. “We used to bow down at once,” the young man wrote, “and pray that it was His Holiness returning to us.”

The Chinese began to interrogate Soepa. He recognized one of them. Soepa had regarded him as a rare Chinese friend, but now he realized the man had probably been a spy, assigned to report on his activities for the last five years.

Soepa told his interrogators that he hadn’t done anything during the rebellion. He claimed to be a low-level servant in the Norbulingka, “in charge of the tea,” and that he’d stayed at the summer palace only because he’d been unable to escape before the shooting began. The questioners asked about His Holiness’s escape, but Soepa said he knew nothing at all about the matter. “If you don’t cooperate,” his interrogators threatened, “it will be easy to finish you off with a single shot.” One of the officials unholstered his pistol and laid it on the table.

Soepa looked at the gun. He’d lost his fear of death inside the
Norbulingka, when it had eluded him despite a dogged pursuit. He left the gun where it was.

“You can kill me if you want to,” he told them, “but I have nothing to say.”

Soepa was taken to the Jiuquan labor camp. He soon saw a number of his fellow fighters begin to disintegrate under the harsh conditions—forced labor, constant interrogations, and
thamzins
in which prisoners were goaded into beating their fellow convicts. After one grueling session, Soepa found the Dalai Lama’s personal physician on the veranda of the prison. He’d been thrashed so badly that he was unable to remove his bloody shirt, which was now rubbing against his open wounds and causing him fresh pain. Soepa tried to help him, but the man’s torso had swollen so much from the beating that it was impossible. Finally, the younger man simply tore off the shirt. He could now see the doctor’s back, “blue, black and reddish-brown from beating … it looked as if it would burst there and then.”

Food was often scarce or inedible in the camps and prisons. Of the 76 men transported to Jiuquan with Soepa, only 22 lived. “All but one of the others, 53 men, died of starvation,” he says.
A military doctor captured by the Chinese remembers that he and the other Tibetan prisoners would scavenge for dried human excrement to eat, hoping a few nutrients remained. “We ate little balls of excrement as if we were eating those little pastry balls we make for the New Year,” he says. “We chose Chinese shit rather than Tibetan shit because the Chinese were fed better!”

Prisoners began to break down, including one former cabinet minister who’d secretly asked Soepa if he thought escape was possible. When Soepa replied that the Chinese had at least three layers of security around the prison, the minister looked despondent—he’d been hoping to make it as far as the Kyichu River, where he
could drown himself and begin an auspicious reincarnation. The man later cut himself in the head with a broken bottle and was led away by guards, screaming, “The Communist Party is lying!”

Soepa was sent from Lhasa to a Chinese prison. The day of his departure he remembered as the worst in his life. His family, hearing of his transfer, came to see him off. The Chinese warned the prisoners against saying anything remotely controversial to the visitors, so Soepa barely spoke to his loved ones. His mother “could not utter a single word and cried, holding my hand tightly in hers.” The next morning, the prisoners were loaded into a line of idling Japanese-made trucks, painted oddly bright colors against the dun-colored winter hills. Thirty men and two guards went into each vehicle. “We were allowed neither to talk nor to look about,” Soepa remembered. “As we left, my mind turned completely blank.”

At the prison they were taken to, Soepa met a famous Tibetan intellectual, who told him that imprisonment had caused a change in the thinking among many rebels. They were now “openly accepting their roles in the uprising with the hopes of being pardoned.” It was an alluring thought. Soepa gave in, telling the interrogators about his efforts in the battle for the Norbulingka, but withholding any information on his role in the escape. About that, he feigned complete ignorance. The Chinese questioner blew up at him, his face scarlet with anger, but Soepa insisted he didn’t know a single detail. His allegiance to the Dalai Lama remained, stronger even than his sense of self-preservation.

The confession did no good. Soepa was transferred to a tougher prison, Chiu-chon, “a deserted and forlorn place with no other human habitations nearby.” Here he mixed with hard-core Chinese criminals, pimps, thieves, and murderers serving life sentences and was forbidden to talk to his fellow Tibetans. A high-ranking PLA officer, marked by a harelip, would make sudden inspections
carrying a thin metal wire. Without warning, he’d lash out with the homemade whip, slicing it across the faces and backs of the prisoners, cutting flesh to ribbons.

The Chinese ensured that the Tibetans were implicated in their own suffering. Soepa was forced to beat his fellow Tibetans in
thamzins
, and he watched formerly brave resistance fighters do the same. “[They] were so full of fear and suspicion that they lost their principles,” he said. He even came across an official who, decades before, had journeyed through snowstorms and up stony paths to the far-flung province of Amdo as part of the search party for the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. When Soepa saw a prisoner in ragged clothing and with filthy knotted hair, he whispered to the official, “Look, here is a model of socialism.” The man looked at him in terror. “Shut up!” he hissed. Soepa, looking at this Tibetan luminary now “scared beyond his wits,” became despondent. The joy of the Fourteenth’s discovery all those years before now seemed almost ludicrous, with the Dalai Lama driven into exile, unable to offer them even a word of comfort.

Soepa never told his interrogators the part he had played in the escape. But, secretly, he was proud of what he had done. “Before it, nobody knew of Tibet’s existence,” he says. “Now this unique, peaceful culture is felt in the world.”

The total number of deaths in Tibet under Chinese rule is impossible to ascertain. The figure of 1.2 million, which has been commonly accepted by aid organizations and by the Tibetan government-in-exile, is almost certainly too high.
The Tibet scholar Patrick French writes that 500,000 is probably the best available estimate. With a preinvasion population of 2.5 million in Tibet and its border areas, that translates into one death for every five Tibetans.

• • •

As more and more refugees poured into India in the spring of 1959, the world waited to meet the man who would lead them forward. As did Nehru. The last time they had met, the Indian prime minister had overawed the young Tibetan. But when the two leaders met after the escape, it was clear there’d been a change in the Dalai Lama. He was respectful, but firm in his demand that Tibet be free. As he made his case for Tibetan independence, Nehru grew furious, banging the table and yelling, “How can this be?” The Dalai Lama didn’t relent. “
I went on in spite of the growing evidence that he could be a bit of a bully.” His Holiness set out two aims: the violence in Tibet had to stop, and Tibet had to be free. At that, Nehru exploded. “ ‘That is not possible!’ he said in a voice charged with emotion.… His lip quivered with anger as he spoke.”

His Holiness stood fast. Nehru still regarded him—indeed, all the Tibetans—as naïve, and kept him and his ministers confined to their camp at Mussoorie, unable to even contact foreign governments. But when an American journalist remarked he “hadn’t expected much” from the Dalai Lama, Nehru told him he was wrong. The young man, he said, “was extraordinary.” He possessed “a kind of radiance.”

Many observers initially dismissed the Dalai Lama. The man from
Reader’s Digest
“snorted and said belligerently” that His Holiness was “a child.”
Life
magazine thought he looked like a “nice boy.” No one could predict the remarkable figure he was to cut in the world, the unique spiritual influence on modern life he was to become.

The most revealing look at the monk came when a young Indian poet got an assignment from
Harper’s
magazine. Arriving
at the Dalai Lama’s hotel in Hyderabad months after the escape, he found “grim, black-robed elder lamas” guarding the entrance to His Holiness’s rooms. The Dalai Lama’s minders laid out the rules for the audience, in a conversation that could have taken place in 1750 or 1850: “ ‘Now, there are certain other things. Do not touch His Holiness. That is sacrilege. When the audience is terminated, do not turn your back on His Holiness. Leave the room backwards. Also, kindly do not ask His Holiness rude questions.’

“ ‘How do you mean, rude questions?’

“ ‘Do not ask His Holiness if he believes he is a god.’ ”

It was the protocol of the ancient Lhasa court. The poet was ushered into His Holiness’s rooms and found a young man with nice skin and color in his cheeks. The Dalai Lama, immediately upon meeting him, began to disregard all the rules that his minders had laid out. He shook hands before the two sat on a long couch for the interview. He ignored his interpreter’s warning when certain subjects were declared off-limits. In fact, he was so effusive and warm that the horrified poet, convinced he was committing a host of sins, retreated across the couch. The Dalai Lama cheerfully followed, making his points with a gentle tap on the poet’s knee.

The politics of the interview are almost beside the point. His Holiness laid out the Tibetan position in strong, clear language and appealed for international help in regaining his country. But it is in his gestures that we are introduced to the figure the world would come to know. At the end of the interview:

These simple human gestures might seem small things, but for a Dalai Lama they were almost unthinkable, especially because they involved a foreigner, someone who in previous years could have been killed for simply entering Tibet. His Holiness would follow up this change in his personal style with more-profound alterations: a Tibetan constitution in 1961, a suggestion that future Dalai Lamas be religious figures only and their political power be given over to an elected representative, even the idea that the next incarnation could be a woman. He suggested that the Tibetan people could vote the Dalai Lama out of office. It was all, from the standpoint of Tibetan tradition, unimaginable. In exile, the Fourteenth modernized Tibetan culture in ways the Thirteenth could only have dreamt of.

The Dalai Lama today would be unrecognizable to a Tibetan of 1930, or 1850. For generations of Tibetans, Chenrizi was an occult figure, hidden behind bull-shouldered monks, an object of extreme reverence. When he arrived in the West, the Fourteenth shed traditions as one steps out of a suit of clothes. He made himself as ordinary and approachable as possible. He dispelled his own mysteries. Even today, a typical way for him to open a conference is to say, as he did in 2000: “
Given the significance of this event, I would like to encourage everyone, for the space of these few days, to dispense with ostentatious posing and the empty formalities of ceremony. Let us try to get to the heart of the matter.”

That all came later. Hemmed in by Nehru, who didn’t want the
Tibetan issue publicized, the Dalai Lama wouldn’t even be allowed to leave India until 1967. There were years of political intrigue and disappointment ahead. After Mao died in 1976, the new Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping offered to negotiate with the Dalai Lama on all issues except independence, but deep mistrust and political maneuvering spoiled any chance for progress. Politics continued to baffle and elude His Holiness.

But he was on his way to becoming a larger figure in the world. And the persona that the world would come to know was all present in that gesture of taking a flummoxed poet by the shoulders and turning him around.

Today the Dalai Lama lives in a compound atop the hills of Dharamsala, India, a mountain town dotted with the last survivors of the escape. Down the road, Yonten, who as a sixteen-year-old joined the protests in front of the summer palace, sits at a desk in the security department of the Tibetan government-in-exile. He’s now a neatly dressed man of sixty-six, handsome, compact, and quick to smile. Fifty years after the revolt, and forty years after he left a Chinese jail where he’d been held for a decade, 1959 is still as alive to him as the afternoon heat. When he talks of his father, who died in an obscure Chinese labor camp, his head drops suddenly into his hands, and he weeps unreservedly.

One Sera monk who became a gunrunner during the uprising spends his days in a low-roofed hut at the bottom of a hill in Dharamsala, reading scriptures. An old woman shambles into the room and begins to make tea. “
Nowadays, when I recall that time, I realize that the Chinese unified Tibet,” the old monk says. “They brought us awake.”

The Dalai Lama passes by the survivors every so often on his way out into the world, his golden palanquin now replaced by a brown Toyota. Crowds of believers, as well as monks, dreadlocked blond backpackers, and the Kashmiri traders, all wait by the side of the dusty road that will bring him to the airport, there to jet to Copenhagen, or Santa Barbara, or Sydney. The world is quite literally his home now, and he travels it in a never-ending service to the Dharma. As he passes in the Toyota, he smiles, that sudden, beautifully spontaneous smile, and waves. He is, by all appearances, a very happy man indeed. The backpackers, seeking an appropriate gesture of reverence at the last moment, bow their heads awkwardly.