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MEMORIES OF LIFE IN LHASA UNDER CHINESE RULEby Tubten Khetsun, trans. and intro. by Matthew AkesterThis is the first unmediated, single-authored autobiography to appear in English by a Tibetan who lived through Lhasa's gulag era of the 1960s and 1970s. Tubten Khetsun, an officer in the former Tibetan government, is an assiduous and unflinching chronicler of events and their details. He has produced a book that has little trace of the rhetoric or emotion of nationalist loss. Instead, he offers an unvarnished account of the everyday mechanics of socialist transformation as he experienced it in Tibet. The result, in this meticulous translation, is a new and important source for understanding modern Tibeto-Chinese history as seen by inhabitants of the Tibetan capital."--Robert Barnett, director, Modern Tibetan Studies Program, Columbia University Born in 1941, Tubten Khetsun is a nephew of the Gyatso Tashi Khendrung, one of the senior government officials taken prisoner after the Tibetan peoples' uprising of March 10, 1959. Khétsun himself was arrested while defending the Dalai Lama's summer palace, and after four years in prisons and labor camps, he spent close to two decades in Lhasa as a requisitioned laborer and "class enemy." In this eloquent autobiography, Khétsun describes what life was like during those troubled years. His account is one of the most dispassionate, detailed, and readable firsthand descriptions yet published of Tibet under the Communist occupation. Khétsun talks of his prison experiences as well as the state of civil society following his release, and he offers keenly observed accounts of well-known events, such as the launch of the Cultural Revolution, as well as lesser-known aspects of everyday life in occupied Lhasa. Matthew Akester is an independent researcher and translator working in the field of Tibetan History. He is the author of a history of central Tibet based on a nineteenth-century guidebook. | |
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