Though
I know that this story will be a little strange for the average American I want
to tell it because I am a teacher and if my experience can be used to teach
others than it has meaning. I want
the world to know the circumstances of my exile, and I believe my story helps to
demonstrate the common ground that all humanity shares.
Finally, my story must serve as the memory of so many.
Many, too many, of my friends died without being able to tell what they
saw, so my story must serve as theirs as well.
I hope you come to understand me and the kind of challenges that humanity
can overcome.
My
name is Loyang and I am from the eastern part of Tibet. There are three regions
in Tibet: Central, Kham and Amdo. People in each region dress differently and
have different speaking dialects. There
is quite a bit of difference between the three regions.
In Central Tibet, there are only one-season crops. The majority of the
land is very dry. People have difficulty finding enough water to farm. Amdo and
Kham are in the east. The eastern part of Tibet is green and there are many farms
that have two season crops. Water
is much more plentiful. I am from Lingtan County in Kham. Lingtan has many
villages and mine is called Lingru. My village has about 60 families.
Before
1942, the year I was born, my family was very well regarded because we had
thirteen monks in the family. But after I was born, my family faced some
difficulties and we became poor. My
family was very large and it was hard to afford all of our needs.
I am the youngest of fourteen children
(eight brothers and five sisters), and because I was the youngest I was a bit
spoiled and wild as a boy. Though I
joined the Lingru monastery at the age of five, I loved to fight, and got into a
lot of trouble. In fact many of the
neighbors worried when they saw me coming because I fought so much, but I was
well looked after and many people cared for me.
According
to the tradition in my hometown, the oldest brother or sister of the family
would get married and stay home to look after their parents. The younger ones
would get married and live in separate houses. Many boys like me chose to become
monks, but none of my sisters became nuns because there is no nunnery in my
hometown.
When
a child becomes a monk at a very young age, they of course want to go in the
street and run around, play, and get wild. Once they get more interested in
their studies, there are times that they don't even want to play. They just want
to study and study, so it kind of builds up the knowledge and interest at the
same time.
Generally
speaking, males stay home to take care of their parents and run the farm, but
then there are also females that would stay home. Some families don't have any
sons, so in that case the daughter has to stay home, get married, and take care
of the parents. And then others will become monks and nuns or choose to get
married and live separately from the parents.
When
I was about seven, my parents passed away.
My father was harvesting in the field when he got a headache and could
not continue. He came home and
another man went to a nearby monastery to pray for my father’s health, because
we did not have any doctors in our village.
In the late afternoon my father died without much pain. I was away harvesting for the monastery when my father died
so my mother told me of his death that evening and asked me to go to the
monastery to tell my uncle to arrange my father’s funeral.
My
uncle was very sad, and he asked Rinpoche, a spiritual teacher and the head of
the monastery, to come to our house to give a prayer for my father.
As is traditional in Tibet, we kept my father’s body in the house for a
week. Tibetans feel that it is
important to watch the changes a body goes through after death because it
represents the process of moving back up the stupa or order of creation.
At
the end of the week Rinpoche came with many other monks and neighbors to give
their support and prayer. Rinpoche
helped my father’s spirit to let go of his connection to his body so that he
could be reborn by whispering advice and help into my father’s ear.
My father was a great man with a warm heart.
He traveled to many villages to design clothes for people.
Perhaps because he was away so much his death didn’t affect me deeply. However,
it was hard to live in the monastery away from my mother during this time.
I wanted her comfort, but my older brother was also a monk in Lingru, so
he took care of me.
About
twenty days later, my eldest brother died.
He was a carpenter working at a construction site; he fell down some
stairs at night and died. Because
it was so soon after my father’s death, and because my mother was sick, we did
not tell her about my brother’s death. His
funeral was at the construction site where he worked, and we had monks pray for
him.
Four
days later, my mother died from a cancer known as bhagan.
It was very hard losing three of my family members in such a short time.
In fact losing my mother was the hardest thing I ever had to face, aside
from losing my country.
So, at seven, I became an orphan. My oldest sister and my brothers looked after me, and I became very close to my eldest sister. She was a parent to me, though rather than scolding me when I got into fights she would simply look at me and cry. Her tears were a much more effective punishment than spanking.
I recently learned that my eldest sister died in 1999. This news was very sad, because although I hadn’t seen her in nearly forty years, I still thought of her often. Now there are only three of us left. One of my brothers, a monk, died of starvation, but I do not know how the others died. Also, I have learned that many of the people in my village starved to death in the famines.
At the time when my parents died, there were many Chinese trading in our area. They were not occupying Tibet, but as time passed and more of them came into our region they wanted the children to go to Chinese schools. I think that they wanted to teach us about communism, and tell the children that religion was poison. Many children from my village were taken to China, and many of the parents died basically from suffering. The parents worried that their children would be mistreated and miseducated about Buddhism.
My relatives were afraid that I might also be taken to the Chinese schools, so they asked that I move to Central Tibet. Four of my friends and I decided to leave our hometown and walk to Lhasa. I was sixteen and my oldest friend was twenty-four. Just before the time we were ready to leave, the Chinese were crossing the Tibetan border invading our country. They came to my hometown and said they wanted to liberate the Tibetans. They said they wanted to teach us the idea of communism and that it would be a peaceful liberation. The people in the village did not like the idea and they tried to defend themselves from the Chinese. The tension escalated and there was fighting breaking out left and right. I can recall fighting on at least thirteen different occasions and I was involved in two of the battles.
While
the Chinese were heavily armed, Tibetans did not have that many weapons.
A few of my family members had guns, but they were very old muskets and
the bullets had to be loaded one by one. The
Tibetans mostly had knives and shooting arrows, but the Chinese had all kinds of
weapons, including machine guns and grenades.
Also, the Chinese vastly outnumbered the Tibetans so the fighting was the
few versus the many.
Many villages were taken over by the Chinese. The people in my village abandoned their homes so that they could protect Lingru Monastery. People lived in the courtyard of the monastery and in the night we just lay there waiting for the Chinese to come. There were people of all ages staying together, even some as old as sixty or seventy which was considered very old at the time. One night I was trying to go to sleep while staying in the courtyard of the monastery when the Chinese started shooting at us. I saw two Tibetans get shot right next to me. I got angry, picked up a gun, and tried to shoot back at them. Of course, I did not have any sort of military training and was not very good with guns. I did not think I killed anybody because I was always missing my target. The Chinese were coming fast and we were losing ground. The noise of gunshots and panicked children was incredible. People were running around everywhere trying to find a place to hide. I got on a horse to move faster, but the Chinese shot my horse. My horse fell to the ground and I got up and hid in the mountains.
The
Chinese did not destroy the Lingru monastery in my village because the villagers
said they needed the monastery for storage. The Chinese destroyed the statues
and all the teaching texts, but not the house itself. I don't believe that the
Chinese alone could have destroyed all the texts and statues in the monastery,
because they were hidden throughout the monastery but there were some Tibetans
that worked for the Chinese. Tibetans believe that if you try to destroy your
own culture or religion, then at some point the evil spirit of a particular
deity will come back and hunt you down. I saw a few people killed in this
manner. They had deep gashes on their chests. One of the men was my
sister-in-law's brother and I saw that he was dead, and I knew he died because
he was disloyal to Tibetan beliefs.
A
group of people who had run away from the fighting at Lingru set up a camp near
a small river, hidden from the Chinese. I
found my way there. We waited,
expecting the Chinese to come, but they did not cross the river to get to us,
but they knew where we were. People
ran a few hundred yards away to set up a new location where they prepared to
fight. When we lost to the Chinese,
we moved to a new location. This
pattern of hiding until found then fighting as long as possible before running
to hide again continued
One
night while we were staying by the Yalong Jiang River, we were able to see
Chinese on the other side of the river. We
saw that the Chinese were having a meeting and one of the Chinese military
leaders was giving a lecture to the group. My friend Bobola told me he wanted to kill that military
leader. At first, I thought he was
joking, but he raised his gun and shot that Chinese leader.
I thought the Chinese would get angry and come after us.
But, for whatever reasons, they didn’t come.
Some of my friends wanted to continue our journey to Lhasa, but we agreed
to wait until the situation was completely settled.
For about three years we waited.
One
day we looked outside and the mountain had turned yellow with the uniformed
soldiers of the Chinese army. They
were everywhere and they took over the entire village in one day.
They destroyed two of the large monasteries.
One was called Lingthang that had about three thousand monks and the
other was called Jero that had about six hundred monks.
The majority of the monks was hiding outside of the monastery and
survived, but the few that were inside were killed.
The Chinese were throwing bombs from planes and shooting guns everywhere.
The Chinese targeted these monasteries because the monks were young,
strong, and well respected.
A
group of monks and I escaped from Jero monastery and hid in my hometown.
All the monastic treasures like old teaching texts and statues were
transported to China after the monastery was destroyed.
The Chinese considered our religion a poison and they told us the poison
should not spread throughout the villages.
After the destruction of Jero and Lingthang the village was barren.
Those who survived were happy to be alive but had very little else to
celebrate. Most had lost relatives
and friends and the center of village life, the monastery, was gone. I felt
there was no reason to stay any longer in Lingru so five of my friends and I
decided we would go to Lhasa. I got
chance to see some of my relatives and they encouraged me to leave.
I wished my relatives could come with me because it was hard to leave
everything I had ever known.
As
we set out on our journey to Lhasa we saw many people wounded and dead. We saw
people who were still alive half buried in shallow graves.
We tried to dig some of them out but there were so many that it was not
possible to help every single one. We
thought the Chinese were hiding in the forest and killing people walking by.
We grew afraid and stopped digging the bodies out from the ground.
However, as I passed by so many suffering people I could not just leave
without helping them. Therefore, I continued to dig out as many people as I could.
Perhaps the Chinese found out that we had been saving people because when
I went back, no one was alive.
Sample drawing of live burial
A
few days later, we saw two people who were alive and half-buried in the ground.
We thought we could dig them out from ground, but all of sudden we heard
a Chinese voices and had to run into the forest. We saw Chinese guards surround
the bodies and stay there for a long while.
My friends and I waited there for six days to see if we could help the
people who were buried alive, but those Chinese guards never left. We determined
that the Chinese were holding those two Tibetans as hostages to catch us so we
did not have any choice but to continue on our journey. A few days later we were
told that those two people had died, and the Chinese had notified the family and
asked that the family remove the bodies. One of the people buried alive had been
my relative. He was thirty-five years old and he was one of the organizers of
Tibetan resistance against Chinese and was considered a leader of a village. He
went to a Chinese military camp and killed several Chinese officers.
Those
were some of the most painful memories I have. Even today when I think about
those times, it makes me cry. However, despite the pain of those memories, I do
feel happy for the freedom and opportunity that I have gained after I left
Tibet.
So
we continued our journey towards Lhasa. After few days walking, we reached a
bridge that many Chinese were guarding. My friends and I tried crossing it at
night, but our attempts failed. So we walked around the river, mostly at night.
It was difficult because we did not walk on a path. We just basically walked
hill after hill, hill after hill, and there was no road. One night when we were
walking along a hillside, three people fell down about twenty feet. Fortunately,
there were no rocks and the ground was soft. That night we had to stay there,
because my friends couldn’t walk back up such a steep hill after being so
exhausted from the day. Finally,
four months and fifteen days after we set out from Lingru, we arrived at Chamdo.
About the same time as we arrived at Chamdo we ran out of tsampa.
Tsampa is a good traveling food because it’s roasted barley, and
doesn't need to be cooked. It is mixed with water to form a kind of dough.
It's not that tasty, but it's very sturdy and hard to digest, so it lasts
a long time. It's a Tibetan staple that is unlike any in the United States.
Although
I was sad about the people I left behind, I felt a sense of relief once we
crossed the river. The river marked the boundary of the Chinese invasion. The
Chinese came from the East and were not able to cross the Chamdo Bridge. In
Chamdo there were many Tibetans and Tibetan army camps. Their presence brought a
sense of relief and an end to my constant worry of being arrested or killed by
the Chinese. From Chamdo, our only
challenge was only walking through the desert and the valley to Lhasa. The next
part of our journey was easier because we had plenty of food and directions.
Walking
from the Chamdo Bridge to Lhasa took us about two months and fifteen days.
We spent three days in Lhasa touring monasteries like Jokang Temple.
Lhasa is capital of Tibet and one of the most sacred and holy places in
the country. People try to come
from all parts of Tibet just to see Jokang Temple. We also went to one of the
oldest monasteries in Tibet called the Ganden where I became a monk. I was
already connected to Ganden because Lingru, my village monastery was a branch of
Ganden. Also, because one of the
main Buddhist teachers, Tsongkhapa, founded this monastery, I had deep spiritual
connection to it. In order to join
Ganden I had to find a mentor. A
friend of mine knew one of the monks, named Gen, and he agreed to help me.
The boy who had journeyed with me also joined Ganden.
Ganden
is one of the “great three” monasteries in Tibet. Tsongkhapa, the founder, is well known for his genius and
spirituality. The monastery housed
over five thousand monks in its prime. Because
Ganden is some distance away from Lhasa its destruction was nearly complete.
For years only rubble remained from what was once over seventy buildings. Now rebuilding has begun, but this effort has received scant
government support. Again, the
monastery’s distance from Lhasa and therefore tourist traffic may have to do
with the lack of funding for the rebuilding effort.
Becoming
a monk is a long process. On
average you begin your training at the age of five, and then at thirteen you
take a vow and are considered a true monk.
Then you study for twelve or thirteen years to take the Geshi exam, which
ties you to the monastic life until death.
To break your vows by getting married is very bad and sinful, which is
why most people wait to take the Geshi until they are in their late twenties,
and fully mature.
Despite
the difficulties of life as a monk, I felt like the three years I spent being a
monk at the Ganden monastery were probably the best in my life. The reason that
living in the monastery was so great was that the study and practice of Tibetan
Buddhism helped me to understand and come to terms with the suffering I had seen
before. I felt like prayer and
meditation were the only things left for me to do.
An average day at the monastery began at five am. We had a prayer session and breakfast in the great hall for an hour and half, and then we would return to our rooms to study for the historical/philosophical debate that began at nine thirty. During the debates we would discuss the reasons for certain traditions and beliefs. Next was lunch and another group prayer session. The monastery would provide tea, but I was responsible for the tsampa I ate. After lunch there was another period of individual study. Then there was another debate which lasted about two hours, but some days the debate got intense and then it could last for three or four hours. Finally, at six the special teaching called Tara would begin. After the general lesson we were split up into sixteen groups by our level of study and then we would further discuss the Tara to our level of understanding. This would last until about midnight when we would go to sleep.
When I was in the Ganden monastery we used to have two great prayer sessions a year in Lhasa. Monks from every monastery, including three big monasteries, Ganden, Sera, and Drepung, would come together to pray in Lhasa, and I enjoyed these sessions very much. At my last attendance to the great prayer, there were about a hundred thousand monks gathered to do the prayer. His Holiness spoke to the group and I felt honored to be in the crowd as he spoke.
I
believed that I was safe from the Chinese in Lhasa, but I was wrong. The Chinese
forced the Tibetans to leave Lhasa, including His Holiness in 1959.
We lost the land where we were able to practice our religion, speak
freely, and enjoy our life. The land which was covered with snow, flowers, and
crops where we were enjoying our life was gone all of the sudden because of the
communist Chinese. Because of them,
we had to leave.
The
Tibetans declared that we had lost the war with China. So I left from Ganden
monastery on March 14, 1959. I think about three hundred monks stayed at the
monastery, including the oldest and youngest monks, and about 3,700 monks left.
Of those that stayed very few are still free in Tibet.
Most were killed or put into Chinese prisons.
In
my apartments there was an abbot who did not want to leave, so we had to talk
him into it and sort of push him along. As was traditional, I carried many of my
textbooks, expecting that the people in the towns we passed through would feed
me. All monks traveled this way. As we walked toward Lhoka everyone, including
the head lamas, cried for all that we had lost and our tears didn’t stop until
we reached Assam.
We
learned that the Chinese took over Lhasa in the afternoon, that day in 1959. We
walked all night and by morning we reached Vone, which is a village in Lhoka.
Our first meal was shortly after we reached the village, and then we ran to a
monastery branch called Shika. We arrived there and they gave us food to eat and
carry. Next, we were trying to go straight to Tsethang, which was the nearest
town. But then we learned that there were Chinese in that area, so we had to
walk around the river to get there. We walked with many farmers and ordinary
people. Everybody was leaving.
After
a few days, we crossed a big hill and went down to Tsething village. The next
day we walked through the Yarloung valley, and finally we went into a Tibetan
military camp called Chushigangdung. Chushigangdung held a fighting group from
the eastern part of Tibet. Although it started in the eastern part of Tibet,
"Chushigangdung" literally means biggest rivers and valleys
"Chushi" means the four biggest rivers, and "gang" refers to
the four biggest valleys. People combined from all these different regions to
form this army. It's Tibet's oldest army.
So, at the Chushigangdung military camp we
were able to eat and get some more food to carry. We walked about three or four
hours from there, and then we went into another monastery where we stayed for
the night. When we were staying in the monastery, we found out that the Chinese
had already come to the Yarloung valley area, and the war was going on there. I
was the youngest monk, so I was sent to give the message to another military
camp to tell them that the Chinese had already come to the Yarloung valley.
When I was coming back to the monastery from the military camp, the
Chinese had already come by, and I could see them. They were about two hundred
feet away, and they started shooting. The
Chinese were targeting the monks because the monks were defending themselves.
Right before I arrived at the monastery, there was another monk who was riding a
horse, and he was shot and killed. I grabbed his horse and rode it toward the
monastery. But the horse was just too tired and scared, and it wouldn't go, so I
walked along the river. Right before I arrived at the monastery, there was
another Rinpoche walking along. I didn't know what to do, but I gave him the
horse, and then I walked to the monastery.
As soon as I got to the monastery, everybody
was leaving. They thought that I had already been killed. It was in the late
evening. We left the monastery and walked all night long. We hoped that we were
headed towards India, but we didn't really know what direction we were going. We
were just trying to get away. We were able to escape because the Chushigangdung
were fighting the Chinese. They were blocking the road so the Chinese couldn't
follow us. We walked all night and then came to another village. We were resting
in the village, and somebody accidentally fired a gun.
Everybody thought the Chinese were coming, and they started running away.
Once this was settled, we walked all day
long and came to another village called Lhundzong. This is a very historic place
because after everyone left their homes, including His Holiness, the Tibetan
government leaders in exile had a general meeting and declared that the exiled
Tibetan government was a democratic system.
We did not know where we were going next,
but we had heard that His Holiness left a few days before we arrived. We moved
in the direction of Assam, India. We walked all day and all night. The next
morning we came to another village called Chudo. We were still within Tibetan
territory. That night, as I was making soup with four of my relatives the
Chinese started shooting. Rocks were falling all around me and it sounded like a
thunderstorm. We had to leave our soup and run. While I was running I lost track
of my relatives, because we ran down different valleys.
It turned out that I took the wrong path,
and I didn't find out until I arrived at a place called Tson. Then I knew that I
was heading back into Tibet instead of going towards India. While I was going
back towards Tson, I saw sixteen people who had been killed, including the
secretary of the monastery. Lying amongst the dead bodies was a monk who came
from the Sera monastery who told me, "Don't go toward that village. There
are a lot of Chinese and many people getting killed. Instead, go toward this
other village. Go up and cross this big mountain and walk towards that
side."
The next day I walked all the way up that
mountain and started coming down to the bottom. Fortunately, all my relatives
and another group of people were also crossing from the other side of the
mountain and moving in the same direction, so I met up with my family again.
The
journey to Assam was through mountainous country that is covered by forests and
grasslands. It was an area heavily
utilized in WWII, so often when I was digging for water I would uncover burnt
bits of wood and metal. I later
learned that I was digging through bomb debris.
We walked in the early spring just as it began to get unbearably hot.
We
were finally able to reach Mon, which is traditional Tibetan territory, but it
is controlled by the Indian government. All of the Darjeeling area had been
taken by India long before the Chinese came. I heard a story that this region
was basically traded for weapons and guns when the British controlled India.
Tibetans bought guns from the British with their land, but the British were only
selling the oldest weapons, so the trade was very unfair.
When
we arrived at Mon, we were able to see Indians, and we were able to discuss
problems openly because the majority of Indians don’t speak Tibetan. It was a
great relief to enter Indian territory because I feared for my life constantly
while in Tibet. Many of the Tibetans had guns, so when we entered into Indian
Territory, we piled the guns and bullets in separate piles and everyone was a
little bit more relaxed.
It took approximately twenty-eight days from
when I left the monastery to reach India. On the way, we saw numerous women and
children who were wounded and couldn't walk. It was very difficult to leave
them, and we were trying to help as much as we could, but we were running for
our lives.
At the Indian territory there were a lot of
different groups. For example, there were grandparents with their children, or
children who were alone. Many groups lost track of one another, because in the
chaos of getting across the border there were times when it was impossible to
stay together.
There was a five year old boy who had no
family so for about twenty days he stayed with me and the monks of my monastery.
He didn't want to sleep alone, so each of we would take turns sleeping
with him. Finally, we found out that his grandfather was there, because the
child said, "This is my grandfather. I want to go with him." The
grandfather didn’t recognize the little boy because he was a nomad and lived
in a different village than the boy, but once they talked the grandfather
realized the boy was right, and so the little boy got to go with his
grandfather.
I
was in Mon with about fifty or sixty orphaned children. Some of the children
were able to reunite with their parents or families, just as I was reunited with
my grandfather. But there were others whose families had died.
All in all it took about six months to find families for all the
children. During this time the
children were fed and clothed by the Indian Government, United Nations funds and
the Red Cross.
Once
all the families were reunited we stayed another 3 months at a place called
Taoong and another village in the area called Montera. Soon after that we walked
towards Assam and all the escaped Tibetans reunited. There were about 80,000
escaped Tibetans, and approximately 20,000 died trying to escape.
Among other things, one of the great
difficulties that the Tibetans faced in India was the weather. Because Tibetans
come from very high altitudes, we were used to dry and cold weather. When we
were brought to Assam, at least 50 or 60 people were dying from the weather
because it was so hot and humid. Over
5,000 or 6,000 people died over a 3-month period. Assam was the common place where the three most common routes
out of Tibet
would meet (to
prepare for the Indian government). One route was called Dangum Montalong.
Although Dangum was under the Indian rule, locals asserted their control by
making it easy to enter Indian Territory there.
Dangum welcomed Tibetans when they were crossing the border.
We stayed in Dangum because the Tibetan and the Indian governments were
trying to work out what to do with us. Life in Dangum was very simple.
I slept in a bamboo hut with many other monks.
About half the monks came with me from Ganden, and the rest came from
Sera. There was a common room where
our meals were served, and most of the morning would be spent in the river to
stay cool. At about eleven o’clock in the morning we would begin our
daily prayer sessions. These
sessions were held around the tents, because there was no common prayer room.
Then we would go to lunch. The
food there was much more plentiful than during the journey, but since we did not
know how to cook we had many of the same foods again and again.
In India they eat much spicier food than in Tibet, and we had difficulty
adjusting. Many people grew ill and
died due to the food and heat. After
lunch, we would often nap, and then hold another prayer session. We wished that we were able to pray more, but the heat made
this impossible. Some may think
it’s odd that we were praying for the well being of the world while we were
suffering, but that seemed like the best thing we could do.
After about a year, I began to be sick. I
was twenty years old at the time and I was sick for about 5 or 6 months. Some
people told me that my sickness was tuberculosis and some people told me it was
because of the hot weather. I was treated in an Indian hospital. When I arrived
in the room there were about a total of 16 patients that were lying in the bed.
As time went on, more people died. By the end of my time at the hospital only
two people survived: another person and me. The other person shortly became ill
again and died in the hospital.
While I was in the hospital, one day I felt like I had to go to the
bathroom. All of a sudden I fell
down, lost consciousness, and didn’t wake up for another hour. I felt like I
had died. When I was waking up, people were saying, “We lost Loyang!” and
calling out my name, but I didn’t know where I was.
I was found by one of our interpreters who was coming to the bathroom
when she found me unconscious. Someone called a nurse saying that I was in the
bathroom. The nurse came and there was a big mixture of blood and human waste
and this is the reason I was unconscious and lost my memory. After that I was
taken back to the hospital and the doctor and nurse took my case more seriously
and as a result a nurse watched over me 24 hours a day.
After about 3 days, I felt better and I was able to walk through the
kitchen to get food. After about a week, I became more independent and I was
able to walk from the hospital to my cottage.
After a week or two, I was sick again and I
thought that I was going to die. I
made a pact with my group of five friends, who were also from my hometown, that
if one of us was to die it would be the responsibility of the rest of the group
to inform the family of the deceased. I wanted to let my family know that I had
gained freedom before my death. Although
I was weak and thought I was about to die, I wasn’t scared because I felt like
I did everything I could in Tibet. Also,
death didn’t seem so bad because things seemed to be getting worse in terms of
the heat, food, language and sickness in the camp.
Everyday there were people dying form the heat or from the change in
altitude. Assam is a very wet area
and disease spread through the camp like wildfire.
This time, the doctors took my illness more
seriously and they decided to send me to a better hospital in by Bombay. It took
me 12 days and nights by train to get there. I was taken to the hospital that
specialized in tuberculosis. There were about 20 Tibetan patients that came from
the same area. About 6 or 7 doctors came through and examined every patient one
by one. After the doctors finished examining me, I was taken to a separate room.
This worried me because I thought that I must have a terrible disease that they
have to isolate me. In fact I was isolated because the doctors were concerned
that I would get tuberculosis from the other patients.
At the hospital we began to learn English
words and our ABC’s. We were there about 6 months trying to heal and learn new
words. There was this nurse who was black that taught me the English words for
objects in my room like “glass”, and told me to go back and forth and say,
“walk”. She helped me by lifting each object and repeating name after name.
With her help, I was able to communicate in English in six months.
I tested my English skills in some of the villages surrounding Bombay.
After about six months I was informed that I
was being released from the hospital. I was hoping to go to Seganeria with the
other monks. But instead I was taken to Dalhousie in northern India. It took
about 6 days and 6 nights in an express rail to get there. The train ride was
very long because they had to make stops every half an hour. So when I arrived
at the train station, there were interpreters, Tibetans and policemen all
waiting there to welcome me. While I was in the hospital the Tibetan and Indian
government negotiated the terms of refugee placement. I surprised everyone at
the train station with my ability to speak English. I was taken to room number
eighty-eight which was room for all the new refugees and there were about sixty
people there. The building as a whole contained nearly 20,000 Tibetans.
There were different schools set up for
different age groups. I went to one of the adult classrooms. I studied there for
about 1 year. All the people were
all sorted into different categories. Some people were sent to factories to make
blankets and other people were sent to farms. My group was in our twenties and
didn’t have any kind of work, because we were classified as patients. Since I
didn’t have to work, I spent a lot of time just getting used to the new place.
I studied Indian and Tibetan. People were wondering where they were going to
send us. After a while, sixty-four of us were sent to Mendi, which is near
Dharamsala. Some people wanted to do carpentry, some wanted to do shipmail work,
and some wanted to do blacksmith work. While I was studying there I got an
opportunity to see His Holiness for the first time after he left Tibet.
After I finished school on Monday, I went to
Dharamsala to see His Holiness. The Tibetan government welcomed all the students
and we were given bread and tea for lunch. Seeing His Holiness was very
important to me because I hadn’t seen him since my last mass prayer session in
Lhasa. As we were waiting in line
to see His Holiness everyone was crying. Even the Indian guide who had brought
us to Dharmasala was in tears. When
we saw His Holiness we were all happy. It was incredible to be so close to him.
In India having a private audience with the Dalai Lama was very rare but
in Dharmsala we were talking with him face to face.
However, his living conditions were not worthy of His Holiness. He sat on an ordinary wooden chair and his home very small
and plain. One of the greatest
indignities of the Chinese invasion was that the Dalai Lama had to flee and live
like a refugee. I felt that the
Indian government should have provided more for Tibet’s leader.
I felt better though, when I saw Indian leaders sitting in similar
chairs.
Many of the Tibetans in Mendi School sent
the best of their work to the Dalai Lama. In particular, the porcelain makers sent him a set of
beautiful cups and when we saw him he said, “Thank you for these cups.” He
also said he appreciated all the hard work we did in the school and suggested
that we could go back to Dalhousie where we might get jobs.
He promised to, “Try my best to follow up on your jobs.”
Following the Dalai Lama’s advice a group
of us went to Dalhousie. Unfortunately, when we arrived at Dalhousie, there
weren’t any jobs that needed the skills that we had learned. So we did any
work we could find for one year. After one year, we were called to a place in
the Punjab to get a job in a factory working as shipmen. It turned out that the
army owned the factories. We made all sort of military equipment including
bullets. After about a month a doctor examined us all and everyone passed the
exam, except one person, so we could all work at the factory. Then all the group
members were sent to different job locations. I was assigned to Jalandhar.
Right before I left for Jalandhar, one of the Indian and Tibetan military
chiefs arrived and asked a small group if we wanted to join the military. We all
were all very happy to hear this and thought, “Oh what a great opportunity to
learn things that will help us to turn the fight back to the Chinese!”
So, we all decided to give up our jobs and join the military.
In general, monks don’t join the military.
However, the three things that Buddhism teaches is that a good Buddhist
monk must protect places, people and the Buddhist teachings.
I felt that the Chinese were desecrating all three of those things, and
that the best way to protect them was to give back my vows and train as a
soldier. Also, all of your actions
as a monk are multiplied. So if you
help one person karmicly you are helping thirty-six, and when you kill one
person you are killing thirty-six people. For
these reasons, I gave my vows back to my teacher.
This made it possible for me to learn how to handle weapons and point a
gun with the intent to kill.
The first group of recruited Tibetans joined the army November 13th
1962. I arrived at camp a couple of
weeks later, around November 26th.
At the camp, most of the new recruits couldn’t speak Hindi, but since I
knew a little I became a kind of interpreter for the camp.
I officially joined the army on December 12th, 1962.
I became a part of Unit Seven. Each
unit had 125 members. Our unit had
three Indian leaders. My initial
training was a period of intensive study. For
a month and a half I learned how to make and read maps every day.
One day twenty-two of us were asked to join special training.
We joined a new unit with about one hundred members.
Then we were split into sub-units with thirty people each.
I was appointed leader of my sub-unit.
Then an Indian official announced that we had to take a test.
The test included target work, drills, and assembly of weapons.
I learned that the test results would determine who would be appointed
high leader. Since I didn’t want
to be any higher leader I purposely failed the test.
Later there was another test to choose leader of a ten-man group, and I
had the same examiner. He told me,
“Okay, I know you didn’t do well on your last exam, and I know why.
This time you have no excuse. Take
this as a real exam or face the consequences.”
So I tried my best and as a result I became a sergeant with three stars.
I was fortunate, because the men under me
were so responsible that I never needed to tell them what to do.
They were always good at their routines.
The oldest man in my group was Tsewang Norbu; he was seventy and still
devoted to freeing Tibet. He gave
wonderful advice. Though he spent
most of his time in the tent we didn’t mind doing his work.
We were sent into the forests of Uria where
one of our first assignments was to make a runway for airplanes.
The training was intensely physical and was conducted mostly in the
remote forest. The food was always
bad and there was never enough, though I learned later that the food situation
was intentional because we were being trained as guerilla fighters rather than
regular army fighters. We
only came back to base camp on Saturday afternoons, and only then for about half
an hour to get food and supplies.
Once the basic guerilla training was over we
were trained in the more advanced maneuvers. We learned how to parachute out of an airplane, throw bombs,
and do more technically advanced maneuvers.
Our teachers were two Americans named Mr. Bill and Mr. Ken.
I learned that all of our training and weapons were provided by America.
The Americans provided a C-46 helicopter, six or seven other helicopters,
more than twenty C-47’s (which are a type of fighter jet), several thousand
military tents, and basic weapons such as bombs and machine guns. We trained
under Mr. Bill and Mr. Ken for almost two years doing not only intensive
physical training, but also learning basic things like how to set up camp in a
given period of time. Then
the U.S. soldiers were asked leave. I
think that the Indian military was embarrassed to need the American help.
Once the Americans left we had to use Indian
parachutes and other supplies. Theses
supplies were not good quality so a few people were killed by their faulty
parachutes. We also received
supplies from Russia including twenty helicopters, but then all the equipment
came from India so the Indian government had to work hard to improve the quality
of their supplies.
In April of 1964 I became very ill and was
taken to the hospital. The doctors
told me I had tuberculosis. I
wasn’t able to continue training because I spent the next year in the hospital
receiving medication. There was one
Indian doctor who was especially kind and I think that it was due to him that I
got well again.
Once I was well I was assigned to go to the
border as a border guard. I
didn’t want to go, but we were chosen by lottery and my number was called.
We traveled by truck for two days and after that we walked.
We had pack animals, but we had to carry our guns out and ready at all
times. We walked for six or seven
days to reach the border between Tibet and India.
We stopped at an old trade center between Tibet and India.
This was the first time I had seen the
Tibetan border in six or seven years. Seeing
it was both joyous and painful. There
was only one other Tibetan in my group and since he left Tibet when he was quite
young he didn’t remember Tibet at all. So
I went by myself to see the border. I
walked for three hours and when I came to the far edge of the Indian territory I
sat and looked toward home and cried for three hours.
I felt that if I just closed my eyes I could be back in Tibet and I could
see the places and people I had left behind.
The land around me, with its mountains, was so like Tibet that I could
have stayed there much longer, but my Indian Sergeant General came to me and
gave me encouragement. He said,
“I know how you feel about losing your country because we had to go through
the same thing when the British took India.
But you shouldn’t be discouraged.
We will fight back, and I’m sure someday you will be able to go
home.” Then he took me back to
the army camp, and I was grateful for his support.
For several days after I didn’t want to
eat. I refused all food offered to
me. All I could think of was home.
We kept moving, going from place to place along the border.
We came to a valley and discussed whether we wanted to stay there for the
next few months as border guards. I
was asked how I felt about staying in that area.
The area we stopped in was very dry, cold, and rocky, but I said that I
thought that we could live there for several months.
I didn’t mind the climate because it reminded me of my home in Tibet,
and it was close to the Tibetan border.
When discussing our choices for base camp
with the Tibetans under me I told them that we were lucky to be able to see
Tibet and that while the climate was unpleasant the psychological closeness to
Tibet would help us to survive. I
explained the pros and cons of the area we were in, including that it wasn’t
near any other camp or village. I
explained all the circumstances that we might have to face if we settled there.
Nearby was an area called Komo, which used
to be Tibetan territory, but was now under Indian rule.
Many Tibetans had settled there, and most of the business was conducted
in Tibetan, which made it a good place to set up our camp.
After some discussion our group decided to put our base camp there.
After about eight months, we were on the
move toward the borders again. There
were about three hundred armies in the area.
We moved supplies and began building homes.
As a part of the Indian settlement project many Tibetans moved to Assam
area and built homes. Assam was
also attractive because of its proximity to the Tibet.
After the initial plans where to settle all the military camps were made,
people had trouble deciding where to go. I
had to stay in Assam rather than someplace cooler, which I would have preferred. My group spent the next five years in the Assam area.
While there I met a man who became my good friend, and who introduced me
to his sister Choedon. Choedon and I married in 1970.
Then my group was transferred to Dehra Dun.
Many of our group, including myself had colds.
We were told that we needed to go to the hospital, even though we did not
feel very sick. The officers at
Dehra Dun argued about whether my group should be allowed to join with the main
army. Finally it was decided that
we couldn’t be in the Dehra Dun area because of the threat of disease
spreading.
In 1971, my entire group was discharged from the army due to our illness.
Many of our friends were sent off to fight the Bangladesh, but we were
sent home. I returned to Dalhousie
to live with my wife in the Bantra Tibet camp.
We lived in tents in a refugee camp receiving help from the Indian
government, and the heat was incredible, so many people died, including my
wife’s father. We spent six
months gathering material to build a home.
Because of the heat, only two camps were settled in the area, rather than
the planned eight.
In 1974, we were able to build a Tibetan
Community center in our camp. The
center included a stage for Tibetan Opera.
As a boy I had been very interested in dance and often mimicked the
performances I saw. In Dalhousie I
began dancing and gained the attention of the community, and was appointed as a
performer and dance teacher. I
spent 24 years there and became a teacher of the Tibetan opera dances, and a
master of Opera dance.
One of the most exciting performances that
my group ever did was in 1993 for the Dalai Lama.
We were able to take part in a dance festival in Dharamsala, thanks to
the help of the camp governor who provided our round trip fare.
We were rated the best dancers there, but because our costumes were too
plain so we got second overall. The
public at the dance festival was very supportive and the group that got first
told us our dancing was better than theirs.
When we returned home the entire camp was very proud of our accomplishment and helped us to earn the money for better dance costumes. Also, in 1993 my wife Choedon was one of the twenty-three Tibetans who came to Boulder, Colorado as part of Tibetan Resettlement Project. In 1990 the Congress of the United States passed a law (the Comprehensive Immigration Act of 1990, Sec. 134) authorizing 1000 visas for immigrants from Tibet. The goal was to "establish self-supporting affiliated cluster sites" in a few communities that would be able to "develop the social cohesiveness and distinctive character of the Tibetan way of life as a viable cultural entity. My wife often sent money to support me, but what she doesn't know is that I often spent it on dance costumes for my group.
Unfortunately, the next dance festival in 1998 was canceled due to the death of a Tibetan activist. The activist burned himself on the steps of the UN building to draw attention to the human rights violations in Tibet. As an act of mourning the festival was cancelled. However, my group was invited to do a private performance for the Dalai Lama. He praised us for preserving the Tibetan culture and for our preparation. He said that while it was not the right time for a festival he would like to see us perform again and invited us to come the following year.
My group did a great performance in 1999 though I was not there to see it. I was able to come to the US to live with my wife shortly after our audience with the Dalai Lama. Choedon was able to file a petition to bring me to the United States.
I left Tibet in 1959. I came to the United States in 1998. I have learned bits and pieces about my family through visitors from my hometown. One of my nephews came to India before I left, and he told me all he knew. Because he was young he didn't know how his uncles and aunts died. He's a monk at the Ganden monastery in south India built by Tibetan refugees. After my nephew came to India, I was able to send letters to home. I recorded a conversation in a tape and sent it to my brother. So my brother knows I'm here. He is the only family I have left in Tibet.
Now I live in the United States. I am fifty-nine by the international calendar. I am a housekeeper and dance instructor and I’m trying to preserve the Tibetan culture and share it with the US. I have hopes to bring my twenty-one year old nephew, Tsering Paljor, here if US immigration will allow it. When I look back at my life I see that I have been many things: farmer, monk, soldier, blacksmith, dance instructor, and husband. There’s not much left for me to do but get ready to leave this life and prepare for the next one.