Between two worlds

THIS was the way things were, and always had been. The great mountains reared their heads above Tashi Tsering’s childhood village; his stone house, with animals below and family above, stood among the rocks; his shaven-headed paternal aunts, Buddhist nuns, helped to churn the butter and to weave his thickly padded clothes. In autumn the lentils were crushed from their yellow pods; in summer the yaks trudged up to high pasture. Year-round, prayer-flags fluttered in the thin, clear air. For centuries on the highTibetan plateau, nothing had changed.

Foreigners exalted the place as aShangri-La. It was far from that. This brutal world was divided between the nobility, lay and religious, and the common herd, who bowed when their superiors passed. Or, as one aristocrat put it to him once, the world was divided into “those who’ll eat tsampa [roast barley meal, stirred into salty tea] and those who’ll eat shit”.

Peasant families like his did whatever they were asked to do. They grew the food, dug the roads and paid tribute to the Dalai Lama, their spiritual leader, in silver coins, tea bricks and yak butter, which the other high-ups would rifle as they pleased. When he was ten, his parents gave Tashi himself to the Dalai Lama as a member of his ceremonial boy dance troupe in Lhasa. His mother cried for days, to no avail. This was the way things had always been.

Yet the seed of different thinking had been planted in the boy. Though the rest of the village was illiterate, sometimes his father would mix ink, carefully fill an inkwell, sharpen his bamboo pen and trace signs on paper. In his eagerness to imitate him, young Tashi put up with his daily beatings at the dance school (though at 14 he escaped, crossing the 4,800-metre Gampa La pass before he was dragged back). He tolerated even the monk-official who used him, as the tradition was, as a passive sexual partner, because the monk also encouraged him to read and write.

No other acquaintances saw any point in this. Why should a peasant write or read? At best, his efforts would lead to a lowly desk-job from which he could rise no higher. Even after he had scraped together money in 1957 to go to India to learn English, the Tibetans he met there, aristocrats no more literate than himself, would not admit this witty, wiry young rustic to their circle. They treated him, instead, as their menial and runner of errands.

These Tibetans were now exiles. In 1950 the Chinese had entered eastern Tibet; in 1959 Lhasa rose up against their savage occupation and the Dalai Lama fled to India, taking with him enough silver coins to fill a room which, for weeks, Mr Tsering silently guarded. The exiles longed to fight China, but he was not so sure. Much had impressed him about the Chinese in Lhasa: how quickly they built hospitals, bridges and the first-ever primary school, and how they did not take “as much as a needle” from the people. Even as they mocked and destroyed the culture, they also seemed to offer a route to the modern world.

Not liberty, but equality

Something else impressed him, too. The Chinese invaders talked about egalitarianism and the brotherhood of man. Mere propaganda perhaps, echoing through the megaphone in Lhasa, but he liked the sound of it. In 1960, a chance meeting in India allowed him to study briefly at the University of Washington; there he started to read Marx and Lenin and learned that Europe, too, had once been as feudal as Tibet. Slowly but surely, communism drew him. It was clear that Tibet needed revolution if it was ever to change. Perhaps that revolution had come in Chinese boots.

In his enthusiasm he taught in a remote Chinese school for a while, and even became a Red Guard. When the Cultural Revolution broke out his American sojourn was used against him, and he was immured as a spy for 11 years. This was time enough to wrestle with his dilemma: that he wanted reform, and also wanted his beloved land to survive. Its language, its Buddhism and the better parts of the culture had to be preserved. That included, for him, the practice of polyandry, by which his mother had slept contentedly with two brothers, one upstairs and one down, and he had never cared which man his father was. It included too, the dance rituals that had been beaten into him, which still brought him solace in captivity until, in 1978, he was rehabilitated and released.

Once again, though, reading and writing were the key to wealth, social progress and Tibetan identity. After his return to Lhasa he taught a night class in English, then unique in Tibet, and started to compile his masterwork, a Tibetan-Chinese-English dictionary. Yet he saw himself first of all as the voice of voiceless people. With his owlish specs and winning smile and his “Be Optimystic” cap, he devoted most of his energy to setting up, with Chinese efficiency, rural schools where children could learn written Tibetan, science, painting and commerce. By his death he had opened 77 of these, funded by donations, his own carpet business and his wife’s sales of barley beer. The schools were built willingly by peasant hands, and outside them over the years thousands of wind-tanned and rosy-cheeked pupils—his children, as he thought of them—lined up in the sunshine, smiling, as the great mountains stood sentinel behind.