In Exile From the Land of Snows (49 page)

At the beginning of 1961, Tenzin Choedrak was released from the hospital and resumed work. His recovery was due not only to rest but also to his own form of cure. He had noticed one symptom shared by all those who died: severe diarrhea. In most, a thin watery stool was constantly emitted; to absorb this flow, a rag had to be kept in the pants. In Tibetan medical theory, Dr. Choedrak knew, the digestive power or heat of the stomach is the key to health, the level of digestive heat determining not only metabolism but, through it, the harmonic function of the three humors. In Jiuzhen, however, this heat had been subjected to a twofold attack: from the severe cold and the consumption of coarse, indigestible material with no grease or fat. To increase his digestive heat, Dr. Choedrak
quietly practiced, for half an hour each night, an advanced form of meditation—called Tum-mo Bar Zar, literally meaning “Rising and Falling Heat.” After his cellmates had gone to sleep, Dr. Choedrak visualized purifying energy—in the form of white light—suffusing him, drawn in with each inhalation to a point just below his navel. Picturing a triangular flame the size of a rose thorn, he imagined it extending up the central channel of his body, through the tantric energy centers at the navel, stomach, heart, throat and crown of his head where, burning away the layers of mental impurity, it released a fountain of clear, nectar-filled light which returned, blissfully, down his body. He would then conceive all of the sufferings experienced in prison to be washed away, replaced by the ineffable joy embodied in the light. “In the beginning, one just imagines all this,” he recalled. “But after five or six months there was an unmistakable improvement, a slight rise in body heat. I was very weak, but I never had any more diarrhea or other digestive problems. Also, despite all the suffering we experienced, the meditation gave me more courage. I had no more fear, I just accepted my fate.”

Dr. Choedrak returned to work at the worst possible time. The death toll had soared since early autumn. There was now more room on the
kang
—one could turn in one’s sleep—but lacking a fire, the prisoners still had to huddle together. The winter weather made work almost impossible. Their hands and feet wrapped in whatever scraps of cloth they could find, the men trudged to the fields under guard, where, in a frozen wasteland, they were expected to break the same amount of ground as they had in summer. The sores on their hands never seemed to heal, making it agonizing even to hold a shovel. Paradoxically though, the weather provided an occasional respite in the form of the so-called Mongolian wind. Rushing down from the Tengger Desert, the wind collected the
gobi
or rocky sand beneath it into a whirl of stone and dust which, resembling a needle from a distance, struck down from the sky, scouring the land. The first warning of its onslaught came from the village of Jiuzhen, five miles away. Over the intervening fields the prisoners heard the town’s loudspeakers faintly call for the inhabitants to take cover, at which time their own guards would send up a cry to retreat to the ditches they had dug for refuge around the work site. Here the prisoners could rest for up to three hours, battered from above by pebbles and debris, but otherwise undisturbed, until the all-clear command was given and work resumed.

By the spring of 1961, forty of the original seventy-six Tibetans had died. The worst, though, was still to come. Even beyond the camp, no place in the countryside could hope to break loose from the tide of starvation. The prison itself was now sought out as a source of hope by the
people of Jiuzhen village. The first sign that the local population was suffering as well came with the admittance of two new prisoners, both Chinese, from the town. One, a little man with a slightly hunched back, was so hungry that he had killed and eaten an eight-year-old boy. Although cannibalism was unknown within the prison walls, the prisoners had, on occasion, joked about it. Now the surviving Tibetans nicknamed the man “the Vulture”—after the vultures who were given corpses to eat in Tibet. The second arrival, an eighteen-year-old boy, had killed his own mother for nine pounds of flour which she had refused to part with.

More direct evidence of life in the village of Jiuzhen was witnessed by the prisoners later that summer while laboring in the fields. Looking up from his work one day, Dr. Choedrak saw a large group of children, carrying small bamboo baskets, heading toward one of the fields. They were of all ages and all uniformly destitute—barefoot, emaciated and naked save for ragged shirts. Dr. Choedrak did not notice them again until some time later, when he heard a nearby officer detailing a detachment of guards to round up the children and bring them to the prison. At the end of the day, passing the field where the children had been, the Tibetans saw that the beans planted for that year’s crop had all been dug up. Later they heard that when prison guards asked the children which adults had sent them to steal the beans, they replied that none had; they were so hungry they had come on their own. Unwilling to arrest them, the authorities sent the group home. The guards, however, remained extremely sensitive about this clear evidence of famine. Their ire was such that one prisoner, overheard referring to the children as “human birds,” received
thamzing
for this single comment.

A second incident, soon after, could not be denied. Dr. Choedrak’s group was now working on a field some distance from the prison. To get to it, they had to use the main road. As in many places in China, the road was lined on either side with trees. Beneath one of these, the inmates, on their way to work one day, came across a young mother in her late teens. She was plainly starving, her face and body badly swollen. Clinging in tears to her was a child of six and another four years old. The group leader stopped the procession and asked if she would like some vegetable to eat. The woman replied, “There’s no point in living any longer under such a government as this. I’d rather die. I don’t want this vegetable you’re offering me.” The prisoners left her and went on. The next day, they passed again and saw the family still hanging listlessly about the road. On the third morning, the prisoners found them lying across one another, still at the foot of the trees, all dead.

Finally, the starvation in town was brought home to the prison itself.
It began with an act Dr. Choedrak himself participated in. On the way to the toilets one afternoon, Dr. Choedrak and a companion named Champa Thondup encountered a young Chinese girl who had managed to slip into the prison. She was extremely thin, but swollen, her hair light brown and matted. On seeing them, she begged for something to eat. They managed to get her a small portion of vegetables and water and then watched as she started to consume them. The moment she ate, however, fluid poured from her nostrils and she began to cry out in pain—a common symptom of extreme famine. Hearing the commotion, the staff took her to the kitchen, where they gave the girl one egg-sized bun and then sent her back to the village. The result of their charity became apparent the next day. As the prisoners passed through the gate on their way to work, they witnessed a mass assault on the prison walls by scores of men and women from Jiuzhen demanding food. A full-scale melee ensued until, beaten back with rifle butts by the guards, the townspeople retreated across the fields.

Despite the breakdown of conditions within their domain and the chaos without, the Chinese prison officials never deviated from their policies. With hundreds of prisoners already dead, executions—a constant feature of the camp—continued to be carried out. Charges were never specified. The names of those to be shot would simply appear on small posters periodically glued to the prison walls, beside such observations as “stubborn” or “suffers from old brains.” When the executions had been carried out—they were not, as in other prisons, held publicly—a red check would appear next to the names of the executed, and the poster would be left up for some time as a warning. Then in the nightly meeting the officers would repeat a well-worn observation: “If one reactionary is destroyed, that is one satisfaction. If two are destroyed, that is two satisfactions. If all the reactionaries are destroyed, then you are fully satisfied.”

Propaganda plays, performed on three holidays a year, also continued. One play depicted the defeat of the Japanese occupation of China, another celebrated the virtues of hard labor, the third—always received with the greatest interest—portrayed the evils of capitalism. With a translator for the Tibetans standing beside them, the action would begin on the high platform framed by the backdrop of the dead monks’ robes. A figure representing Uncle Sam emerged. Wearing a beige suit and black top hat, he sported a long red nose, sharp birdlike claws and a tail, hung from which was a sign in Chinese characters identifying him and noting that he was “a nuclear power.” Holding his hands before his chest like a cat about to pounce, Uncle Sam went about exploiting Africans, played by prisoners in blackface. After suffering much brutal oppression, the Africans, with the
help of the Chinese people, ultimately overcame their oppressor in a glorious revolt and subjected him to the all too familiar
thamzing
.

The third year of the Tibetans’ stay at Jiuzhen brought sudden, unexpected relief to all the prisoners in the PRCs northwestern gulag. According to one survivor who spent twenty-one years in five separate camps, roughly 70,000 Tibetans were imprisoned north of Langzhou, 35,000 of whom perished from starvation in 1959–61. The death rate throughout Qinghai and Gansu was so high during the early sixties that prisoners had to be continually shifted around in order to keep the prisons functioning as labor camps. One system located ten hours west of Xining and called Vebou housed 30,000 inmates in thirty camps, the larger ones holding 9,000 men, the smaller, 7,000, 5,000 and 1,000. Ten percent of the inmates were Tibetans and members of other minority groups, the rest Chinese. By the time the famine lifted there, Chinese officials sent from the mainland to take a census reported that 14,000 had died. Another prison, named Bhun-cha tsa Shen-shu, contained six camps within a three-mile stretch, housing 12,000 men, more than half of whom also died. In Jiuzhen, twenty-one Tibetans were still alive, enough to fill only one of three cells the group had originally occupied. Early in the year, the four security officers who had accompanied them returned from their main office in Lhasa. With fifty-five dossiers closed, and the remaining ones as complete as could reasonably be expected, it was determined that nothing more was to be had from the Tibetans. Interrogation stopped, the “reeducation” classes lost their zealous fervor and the number of
thamzing
declined dramatically. The survivors were transferred to three adjoining rooms in a corner of the prison. A front door opened on a small entranceway, to the right and left of which were cells designed to accommodate ten men. At night the door was left unlocked, making it possible to go to the toilet unattended; this minor relaxation, in turn, afforded the first opportunity since the men’s arrival for unobserved contact. As the interpersonal barriers melted, so did mutual suspicion, and in consoling one another over the loss of their comrades, the prisoners began once more to speak hopefully about the Dalai Lama and the thousands of Tibetans they knew had escaped with him to India.

The new leniency was soon complemented by an increase in rations. As China’s famine eased, sixteen and a half pounds of grain a month—borderline rations under normal conditions, but a feast for the inmates—were issued. New Year’s Day 1962 featured a meal of pork soup, with actual bits of pork in each prisoner’s portion—their first taste of fat in two and a half years. The new cells, as well, afforded unexpected benefits. Permitted
to keep some of the wheat chaff and small kindling from the autumn harvest, the men made fires at night beneath their sleeping platforms. Sometimes they were lucky enough to corner a rat on the floor, which they cooked and ate. Rats also ran in the hollow space between the wooden beams of the ceiling and the old newspapers which covered them. Open hunting for them soon got underway. Each night, the rats scurried over the papers, while the men waited below, armed with long sticks, following the sound of their feet. With good aim and a fierce upward thrust, it was possible to stun a rat long enough to capture and kill it. As infrequent as these meals were, they nonetheless provided meat.

With the worst of the famine over, the death rate quickly dropped. In two years Jiuzhen had lost over 1,000 prisoners—more than half its population. Most of the Chinese survivors were now transferred to prisons in other areas of Qinghai and Xinjiang, where their labor could be of more use to the state. As they embarked, the remaining Tibetans gained access to a far greater supply of food.

The newly empty cells throughout the camp were used by the kitchen staff to store cabbages, turnips and carrots. Aware of this, the remaining prisoners began to make nocturnal raids. One night a man named Thubten Tsundu shook Dr. Choedrak’s feet and whispered, “Now’s our chance to steal some cabbages.” The two men snuck from their cell with a pillowcase and pair of pants, its legs tied. Breaking into a nearby storeroom, they waited for a Chinese prisoner to pass on his way to and from the toilet, filled their bags with cabbages and hurried back to their cell, where they hid the load under their bedding. On their return from work the following day, a prison guard singled out Dr. Choedrak. “Tell me yourself what you have done,” he said threateningly. Knowing that execution was the punishment for stealing, Dr. Choedrak replied that he had done nothing. The guard then ordered him inside, where Tenzin Choedrak saw that not only his bedding but all the bedding in the cell had been turned upside down. The cabbages that he and Thubten Tsundu had stolen were surrounded by a vast quantity of other cabbages, carrots and turnips. Everyone was stealing, it turned out—making punishment impossible. In the new plenitude, any item at all could buy at least a few extra dumplings on the black market, resulting, ironically, in a rather odd form of crime wave. During the day, those who had been detailed—with Chinese approval—to guard their mates’ cells often took the opportunity to raid neighboring rooms. Even the patients in the hospital would drag themselves out of bed in the hope of finding something to bargain with. After dark, prisoners slipped from their cells and broke into others. There were fights, ambushes were laid by one
cell against another and even group forays occurred. To steal grain directly from the prison store, Tibetans concealed handfuls in their socks and shoes, fashioned pouches in their undershirts and made long, narrow bags which, hanging inside their pants tied back to front between their legs, could be discreetly filled while bending over to sow seed.