By Karen Shead
WEARING thin-soled plimsolls on their feet and dressed in little more than linen trousers and T-shirts, 17-year-old Pasang Rinchen and his younger brother Tenzin battled against the freezing wind as they made their way up the mountain pass.
With no food or water, they were in danger of succumbing to the hypothermia slowly enveloping their bodies. Their escape from Tibet to Nepal, a journey of 1600 miles, during the Himalayan winter looked likely to be more permanent than they had ever imagined.
To make matters worse, they suddenly came to an abrupt halt, terrified by what lay before them. Instinctively they held their arms aloft, waiting for the bullets to riddle their bodies, believing they were facing a machine gun of the type they’d seen used all too often by the Chinese army.
But as documentary maker Nick Gray stepped from behind his camera tripod they lowered their arms, and almost fell into his, realising that their journey was almost over.
The chance encounter with Gray changed the course of the boys’ lives. Now the boys live in Britain – a country they had never heard of before meeting Gray – and just two weeks ago Pasang was granted leave by the Home Office to stay here indefinitely.
And to celebrate the Government’s decision, Gray’s documentary has been given a special screening in Edinburgh, thanks to the Scotland Tibet Association and the Edinburgh University Tibet Society.
Pasang is one of thousands of Tibetans who have desperately tried to escape the Chinese oppression in their country. After years of Chinese occupation, many Tibetans feel their culture is slowly disappearing while their compatriots are being subjected to discrimination, torture and even the death penalty.
Since 1959, when the Dalai Lama – Tibet’s spiritual and political leader – fled to India, taking more than 80,000 Tibetans with him, the number of refugees from Tibet has not decreased. And every year, Tibetans between the ages of six and 60 make the arduous 1600-mile journey across the Himalayas in an attempt to escape.
And there is no guarantee of freedom when the walkers reach Nepal. In Kathmandu, the United Nation’s High Commission assesses their status, and many are rejected and sent back to Tibet. Those who are allowed through go on to Dharamsala in northern India – the home of the Tibetan government-in-exile.
It was this particular journey that Gray was attempting to film when Pasang and Tenzin stumbled across him. He was trying to put together a documentary to raise awareness of the situation and show that people are so desperate to escape Tibet that they will risk their lives to do so.
For Pasang, who is now 25, that escape bid wasn’t his first. He had been trying to flee his homeland since he was 12.
In Edinburgh for the documentary screening, he says: “I was sent to a monastery when I was 11. After my father died, I started to walk in my sleep. I was walking in the direction of the monastery, and my mother said my father’s spirit wanted me to go there. So they sent me there to become a monk. No-one in my family had been a monk before, but my mother believed it would be bad luck for me if I didn’t go there.”
After spending an unhappy year at the monastery, Pasang decided to leave. “I went to the capital, Lhasa, where I spent a year and a half begging. People were awful to me – they’d punch me or throw tea in my face. And I was arrested because I was found begging in a restaurant.
“When I got out of the prison I met a group of people who were going to India to see the Dalai Lama, and they asked me if I wanted to join them, so I went with them. But when I got to the border, an officer asked me where I was going and then he sent me to a monastery.”
Pasang spent three years in the Drepung Monastery in Karnataka in southern India – a place where many Tibetan refugees are sent – before returning to Tibet to take his younger brother back to India.
His mother and three younger brothers live in part of the Qinghai province, what used to be eastern Tibet before the Chinese invasion in 1950. It is 750 miles from the capital.
“It was six years since I had last seen my mother and she didn’t recognise me at first. I couldn’t call her mother, as I was too shy. But when she knew it was me, she was very happy,” Pasang says. “I told her I wanted to go back to India again and take my little brother with me.”
Pasang believed his 11-year-old brother Tenzin would get a better education in India – it is the only place he could learn Tibetan, a language he couldn’t speak. “But she didn’t want my brother to go, and said he would get me into trouble. So I said if I couldn’t go with him, I would stay and work. I worked for a year and a half and then finally my mother let us go.”
At first the brothers hitched a lift to Lhasa, where they begged on the streets to pay for food and extra clothing. But they were taken to prison for begging. Pasang says: “There were about 200 people in the prison. Many people had been begging because the Chinese authorities had confiscated their belongings. They treated us really badly. They put my arms behind my back and beat me.”
But after a month they were released, and again ended up begging for money in Lhasa. Scared of being re-arrested, they moved on to a town on the Nepalese border called Dram, where they were jailed again for begging. After five days they were thrown out of prison and told to go home.
Instead they saw it as their chance to escape Tibet. They found a route up the mountains, and it was at this point they met Nick Gray and his camera crew.
“When I saw the video camera on the tripod I thought it was a machine gun,” says Pasang. “We were scared. We had not seen a camera before. Then the first person we met was the cameraman.
“They helped us out and they asked if we would be in the film and they had a letter from the Dalai Lama, so I thought it must be OK.”
The documentary, called Escape from Tibet, was not easy to make. Gray says: “If we showed people inside Tibet criticising the occupying power, they would be put in danger, as would their families. They would be imprisoned, tortured or forced into exile. For their protection we made sure people we filmed intended to stay outside Tibet for at least five years, that their names and family backgrounds were changed and that we’d seek the approval of His Holiness The Dalai Lama for the project.”
It was also a risk for the team who were making the film. If Gray had been discovered, the film would have been confiscated and he would have been deported or thrown into jail.
“We didn’t even know at what point people would be coming over the mountain,” Gray adds. “But we met Pasang and he kindly agreed to be filmed. We were filming for five weeks. It was an extraordinary experience and it was very touching.”
Gray also went on to film the brothers in the Drepung Monastery, where Pasang and Tenzin spent the next couple of years.
“There are about 20,000 Tibetans there,” Gray explains. “There are three or four monasteries and a nunnery. It’s a way of looking after people, but it’s not an easy life. They had to get up at 5am every morning to pray.
“You are not allowed radios, no watching television, no going to the cinema, and if any of the monks were caught going to the cinema they had to pay 500 rupees, which is about £7.”
“And you are not allowed outside after 8pm,” adds Pasang.
The documentary has now been shown in the Foreign Office, the White House, before the United Nations Special Committee for the Child in Geneva and at London’s National Film Theatre. The Tibetan government-in-exile in India has arranged for copies to be translated back into Tibetan and smuggled back over the mountains into Tibet.
“Thanks to Nick, two people started to sponsor us while we were at the monastery,” Pasang says. “A man from Bournemouth and a lady from Switzerland. They wrote to us. They aren’t rich people, they just wanted to help.”
Gray explains that the brothers were offered a scholarship to come to England four years ago after the film was shown at the Tibet Foundation in London. “One of the teachers said that if they came over here they would get free tuition to learn English for a year at the School of English at King’s College, London.”
So that’s what the brothers did. “I spent one year studying, but didn’t pass the exam,” Pasang says. “I just wanted to speak English, I didn’t want to write it. But then I was allowed to study for another year.”
Pasang eventually passed his English exams and is now working in Safeway to pay for rent. However, he says he would like to study maths and computers. His younger brother – who he doesn’t see very often – is studying for his A-levels and hopes to go to university.
“When I came over to England, there were things that were strange at first. When I saw girls walking around in winter with skirts on, I thought they must be crazy. And when I saw people standing by a cash machine, I wondered what they were doing. There was no window or a person to speak to, but now I understand,” he says.
Now Pasang has been told he can stay in the UK. “When I got the result from the lawyer I just wanted to go out and shout. It’s quite unusual to get indefinite leave and I was shocked.”
The drawback is that Pasang hasn’t seen his mother in almost ten years. He says he would love to see her again. “I spoke to my mother on the telephone for the first time in April last year, and now I phone her about three times a year.
“The first time I phoned her I spoke non-stop for 11 hours,” he says. “I really want to go and see her, and in a couple of years’ time I can apply for a British passport and then I will be able to go. I want to stay there for a year and then come back here. That’s one of the best things – that I have the freedom to be able to do that.
“The funny thing is that now I know Britain exists, but my mother doesn’t believe it. She thinks I’m still in India.”
The Edinburgh University Tibet Society meets every second Thursday at 7pm in the Forest Cafe, Grassmarket. Contact them on tibet_society@yahoo.co.uk.
