J. T. Nubkhang
The idea of writing this article occurred to me five months ago, but I couldn’t find the time to organize thoughts and put them into words due to a series of assignments. Then time went by and I forgot the idea completely, till a few days ago I found myself having a few days of respite and reading two Chinese books. One by Beijing based Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser, Hellish Emptiness (无间空白) and another by Chinese Canadian Zhurui (朱瑞), The Secrets and Pains of Tibet (图波特的秘密与疼痛). In Woeser’s book there is an interview she did to a Chinese German artist Menghuang (蒙煌), who had presented a large painting of stupas to His Holiness the Dalai Lama and expressed regret for all the pain Chinese had inflicted on Tibetans since 1959. Zhurui’s book is a collection of essays on Tibet; while reading them an indescribable guilt surged in my heart. She is more Tibetan than I am and her love for Tibet is unconditional and untainted!
Then I remembered another Chinese writer who had passed away five months earlier and in whose memory I had the idea of writing an obituary sort of article. Her name is Li Jianglin (李江琳). I can search her name on google and write a comprehensive introduction of her, but I won’t do it. I want to write about her the way I know her from reading her books and from my observation of her from a distance a few times I saw her at Dharamshala. My assessment of everything about her will not be up to the expectation of her relatives and close friends because I cannot even be considered her acquaintance. I am at best a reader of her books and an admirer of her person and scholarship.
Anyways, her parents are members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and she grew up in China listening to the CCP’s propaganda, believing Tibet was an inalienable part of China and the Dalai Lama, a splittist. After completing schooling, she travelled to the USA in the 1980s to pursue higher education. There she had a moment of epiphany about Tibet and realized she had all the time been fooled by her government. This realization set her on the path to find the truth about Tibet’s recent history, particularly since the 1950s. Her steadfast determination and eye for detail scholarship resulted in two highly acclaimed books: Tibet in Agony (拉萨：1959) and When the Iron Bird Flies (当铁鸟在天空飞翔). She wrote the books in her mother tongue, and their English translations hit the market a few years later one after the other and caused a great deal of excitement among Tibet observers.
Tibet in Agony is a reconstruction of the circumstances that led to the fourteenth Dalai Lama’s escape to India in 1959, and the events described in it are mostly those that happened in U-Tsang. But the foreword and the chapters 1 and 3 are on the situation of eastern Tibet, Kham and Amdo, in the early 1950s when the CCP started implementing many draconian policies, which ultimately compelled Tibetans to rise up in armed revolt and establish the Voluntary Dharma Protection Army, aka Chushi Gangdruk. Her findings may not be very surprising to Tibetans, but the sources she had referenced – mainly CCP-published documents, memoirs and interviews – have set them in stone. Her conclusions not only have debunked the CCP’s lies, but also added substance to what Tibetans have always been claiming. The book is a joy to read and the conclusions drawn in it are convincing because of her smooth and eloquent writing; the chapters follow different events and people, yet they are so closely interlinked that readers never lose the flow of the narrative.
When the Iron Bird Flies is a one-of-a-kind book on recent Tibetan history. No scholar has ever studied the events covered in the book as comprehensively as Madam Li has done, though one may hear general tidings of individual events from some elders and find passing references to them in some books. The events relate to armed resistance put up by the people of Kham and Amdo against Chinese occupation between 1956 and 1962, and the CCP’s bloody, brutal crackdown on Tibetans on the pretext of “suppressing rebellion.” The Chinese government hasn’t disclosed much information about what happened during the period, but the truth is that thousands of Tibetans had suffered brutal death as well as torture at the hands of Chinese. And many ancient monasteries were destroyed. In the process of writing the book Madam Li has painstakingly gone through many rarely accessed Chinese sources and interviewed many Tibetan refugees, the result is that the book presents the most comprehensive and compelling picture of the devastation wreaked by China upon Tibet in those years.
Tibet in Agony and When the Iron Bird Flies are two of the greatest and most reliable records of recent Tibetan history. The books draw reliability and authenticity not only from the meticulous research work Madam Li has put in them, but also from her person – a Chinese whose parents are members of the CCP. The normal dismissal of Tibetan narratives as “self-serving distortion of facts” doesn’t apply to her books.
The above two are not her only books. There is a book titled Three Births in One Life Time (一生三世). It is a biography of Kirti Rinpoche and it seems it’s already been translated into English and Tibetan. Then there is another book of hers titled Reincarnation of Avalokiteshvara (重生的观音), a copy of which she personally came to donate to the section of the LTWA I am working in. Despite my rudimentary knowledge of Chinese, I read the book from cover to cover with the help of Pleco, a Chinese language mobile App. The book is a pleasant read. It is a travelogue of Dharamshala – a collection of essays on places she visited and Tibetans she made friends with at Dharamshala. It even has an essay on one of the LTWA’s senior most staff, Ani Norzom la.
The first time I saw her, I was a new recruit in the Research and Analysis Section of the Department of Security, which some years later was renamed as the Tibet Policy Institute. In the office we had a small library with a decent, maybe the best in exile Tibetan community, collection of Chinese documents. She would come there with a friend, carrying a heavy backpack. After settling down on a small table, she would take out a small portable scanner from her backpack and spend many hours scanning documents. Senior colleagues told me she was a researcher and she was collecting materials for her research work. A few years later, I joined the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives (LTWA) and read Tibet in Agony, the English translation of her book拉萨：1959. Almost at the same time I happened to notice among office files a Donation Certificate from Madam Li wherein she had donated the Tibetan translation copyright of her books Tibet in Agony (拉萨：1959) and When the Iron Bird Flies (当铁鸟在天空飞翔) to the LTWA. Thereafter, I jumped into translating Tibet in Agony into Tibetan and the LTWA published it in 2020 under the title 1959 Lhasa. During the translation and publication of the book I had a couple of email correspondence with her as well as the English translator Susan Wilf; I was pleasantly surprised the two ladies were very gracious, down to earth. One or two years later Susan Wilf even made her first ever visit to Dharamshala and came to my library to see me!
I came to know the sad news of Madam Li’s death in Georgia, USA on 24th December 2024 at the age of 68 from a Taiwanese friend’s Facebook post; she had shared an obituary written by a Taiwanese Publishing house. Alone in the office, I was overcome by a strong sense of loss and sadness. We never know what other people are going through in life, but I couldn’t help but lament why good people always die early. It is rare for Chinese people to empathize with Tibet and it is rarer for Chinese people to speak for Tibetans. Yet there are still a few Chinese like Madam Li who stand by Tibet at the cost of offending her own people and attracting the wrath of her powerful government. They are Chinese with conscience, moved by His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s charisma and leadership and the just nature of Tibetan cause. When they die, it is natural we feel a greater sense of loss and regret. My article is five months late. By now, she should have taken rebirth somewhere, but I still want to THANK her for supporting Tibet and painstakingly highlighting how the People’s Republic of China occupied my country and brutally repressed Tibetan people. OM MANI PADME HUM!
(Views expressed are his own)
The author is an Assistant Librarian at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, Dharamshala.
