Tibetan princess’s life a string of losses
Barbara Demick Los Angeles Times October 4, 2015
Born to riches, reduced to rags
DHARAMSALA, India -- Gonpo Tso was born a princess.
As a young woman, she dressed in fur-trimmed robes with fat ropes of coral beads strung around her neck. She lived in an adobe castle on the edge of the Tibetan plateau with a reception room large enough to accommodate the thousand Buddhist monks who once paid tribute to her father.
Then, one night in 1958, when she was 7, Gonpo returned from an outing to find the People's Liberation Army encamped in front of her house. Chinese soldiers were taping over windows and doors. Women were rushing from room to room in tears packing up the family's possessions.
While her father was summoned to a party meeting, Chinese Communist officials ordered Gonpo, her mother and sister into a Russian-made jeep and drove them away from lands ruled by her family for generations.
Her expulsion began a decadeslong odyssey to some of the most Godforsaken stretches of China. Along the way, she worked in the most menial of jobs, almost losing her feet from frostbite as she milked cows on a farm near the Soviet border. She has endured the wrenching loss of almost everyone she ever loved.
"When people hear I am the daughter of a king, they imagine I must be really spoiled, but they don't know what I have experienced," Gonpo says in the mountaintop town that the Dalai Lama has transformed into the capital of a Tibetan exile government.
Now in her early 60s, Gonpo is a broad-hipped woman with a gap-toothed, girlish smile. She is shy and at first demurs when asked about her past.
"I try not to talk about it because it makes me sad," she apologizes.
Nevertheless, she serves tea and unshelled peanuts to visitors who drop in unannounced at the tiny walk-up apartment where she has lived alone for two decades, thousands of miles from her husband and daughter.
When she finally agrees to a rare interview, she doesn't allow herself to cry. But her eyes remain moist as she tells her story, as though she lives in a perpetuity of grief.
It is a story filled with many reversals of fortune, a one-woman window on the tortured history between China and Tibet.
Ruler of yak and men
Gonpo is the heir to a now-defunct kingdom known as the Mei that until the mid-20th century was centered in Aba, a predominantly Tibetan city in China's Sichuan province.
Until the 1950s, the area was ruled by Gonpo's family. Although the Chinese referred to her father as a tribal chieftain, Tibetans used the word gyalpo, or king, and referred to his holdings as the Mei kingdom.
By whatever name, the king reported neither to the Tibetan government in Lhasa nor to Chinese authorities. His constituents maintained a fierce independence, often fighting with other Tibetan rulers who coveted their land and the yak and sheep that were their livelihood.
Her father, Rapten Tinley, a tall, slim man with high cheekbones and furrowed brows, appears in photos seeming to carry the weight of the world.
A few years ago, neighbors erected a small shrine to the king over a stream next door.
"The people were very loyal to the king," says Amdo Gelek, an amateur historian from Aba who now lives in exile in Dharamsala. He says his own father was a general in the king's militia. "He tried to protect his people from the Chinese until the very end."
In 1949, Mao Zedong's Communists established the People's Republic of China, and the next year his People's Liberation Army invaded central Tibet. Having seen the ease with which the Chinese rolled into Lhasa, Gonpo's father instructed his people to not resist the Chinese.
He was a progressive thinker, Gonpo says, not as attached to the perquisites of power as other Tibetan elites. ("He used to tell me to be humble and had me do chores at home with the servants," she says). He initially thought the Chinese Communists could provide much-needed change in Tibet. He attended a series of meetings in 1954 in Beijing, where he also met the young Dalai Lama, who was being wooed by Mao.
The honeymoon crashed to an end in 1958, when the Communist Party enacted what it called its "democratic reforms." Gonpo's father was forced to abdicate.
Sego, a neighbor in his 70s who was one of Gonpo's childhood friends, remembers young Gonpo as a girl who never behaved like a princess.
"Sometimes she could be naughty, but she was very kind. She wanted to help clean and help with the elderly. She would give away her clothes."
"Everybody in the village was in tears the night they left," he remembers.
'Your parents are no more'
Exile took them to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. While Tibetans back in Aba starved as a result of forced collectivization of their farmlands and animals, Gonpo initially lived in comfort. She and her older sister attended an elite Chinese elementary school and then a high school in Beijing for ethnic minorities. Her father was appointed to China's People's Consultative Congress, held up as a model minority, but the family's situation rapidly deteriorated.
In 1966, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to shake up the power structure. Gonpo was on summer holiday, visiting her parents and sister in Chengdu, when she was instructed to return immediately to Beijing. Her father and mother saw her off at the train station, thrusting a large bag of candy in her hands and instructing her to share with her seatmates.
She would never see her parents again.
Back at school, 15-year-old Gonpo became a target of the zealous student revolutionaries known as Red Guards.
They called her into the school's courtyard, where classmates pounded her with their fists and kicked her, screaming abuse.
She was a class enemy, they yelled. Her father was an oppressor who used to eat from the skulls of vanquished enemies. Her family, they said, had a telegraph that they used to send secret messages to the Dalai Lama, who had fled to exile in India seven years earlier.
In October 1966, two months after Gonpo returned to school, her mother was traveling to visit relatives north of Chengdu and disappeared during an overnight stop. Her hotel room door was found ajar, and the sash to her chuba, a Tibetan robe, was found lying on the floor, but no body was ever located.
A few days later, her father, searching for his wife, jumped into a river and drowned in an apparent suicide.
"Your parents are no more," a classmate informed Gonpo. "You are not allowed to cry because your father was a counterrevolutionary and a reactionary."
Exile, love and change
It was almost a relief in 1968 when Gonpo learned that she would be exiled more than 2,000 miles away to work on a military-run farming compound in Xinjiang, a few hours from the Soviet border.
She got up before dawn to milk the cows, then walked more than 10 miles to the fields, part of the way through marshland. There, she learned that her only remaining family member, a sister who had become a doctor, had died of smallpox.
The one bright spot on the farm was a handsome young Han Chinese man who had also been exiled as a class enemy, although his background wasn't deemed as bad as hers. When Gonpo was given a quota of milk to sell, he would get his friends to buy from her.
It took a few years to realize that it was love, not pity.
Ethnically mixed marriages were unusual in the era, and authorities disapproved of the relationship. The two were not given permission to marry until 1976, the year Mao died. By then, the Cultural Revolution was over, and a period of relative liberalization had begun.
Gonpo and her husband were allowed to move to his hometown, Nanjing, in eastern China. Gonpo went to teachers college and afterward got a job teaching music and Chinese in an elementary school. She had two daughters and settled into a quiet life, with her colleagues unaware of her background.
One day, she says, a large chauffeur-driven car that belonged to the provincial leader pulled up in front of the school. As teachers and students watched agape, Gonpo was ordered to hop in and report to the Communist Party offices. A Tibetan member of the Chinese Cabinet had discovered her identity and instructed Communist Party officials to give her special treatment.
Within days, Gonpo and her family were assigned a new apartment in an elite building.
"You better take it because the political winds around here change faster than the summer weather," her father-in-law advised. She was given half a dozen official positions.
It was the 1980s, and the Communist Party was making efforts to co-opt Tibetans. Gonpo was allowed to visit Aba in 1984, for the first time since her expulsion, and she was stunned by the level of destruction. At the main crossroad, where Kirti Monastery was once the centerpiece of town, there was only rubble.
Gonpo says she leaned against the ruins of a gate and wept.
Seeing her cry, people nearby became curious. Who was this stranger?
Gonpo was initially reluctant to answer, but eventually mustered the courage. "I am the daughter of the king," she said.
The Tibetans rushed toward her, hugging her.
"It was like we were long-lost relatives," she says. "All we could do was hold each other and cry."
A call to duty
Gonpo was not unhappy in China. She loved her husband. But she felt her heritage slipping away beneath the trappings of an increasingly cushy life. She had forgotten so much Tibetan that she needed an interpreter in 1987 when she met in Beijing with the Panchen Lama, the highest-ranking figure after the Dalai Lama.
"What kind of Tibetan girl are you?" she remembers the Panchen Lama asking her. He suggested that she go on a pilgrimage to India, the birthplace of Buddhism and the home of the Dalai Lama in exile.
When Gonpo left for India in 1989, she took the older of her two daughters, then 10, but left her husband and 9-year-old in Nanjing with promises to return after a few months. Once in Dharamsala, she started Tibetan lessons with Kirti Rinpoche, the head of the Kirti Monastery who was also in exile. The Dalai Lama nominated her to serve in the parliament-in-exile.
The months stretched into years and then decades. Her older daughter would grow up and move to New Delhi. Gonpo would not see her husband and younger daughter again until 2005, when they visited her in India.
"I was the only living child of the Mei king. I felt duty-bound to stay here," Gonpo says.
"Personally my husband and I were sad. But he understood too that in the larger scheme of things, the issue of Tibet was bigger than family things," she says. "On the rare occasions that our family can get together, we cry a lot."
The past few years have brought more pain. Of 135 people who have died through self-immolation protesting Chinese domination in Tibetan communities, more than 30 were current or past Kirti monks. At least eight were from Meruma, a cluster of tiny villages within Aba county where her father's key officers and retinue had been based. According to a local historian, several of the self-immolators were grandchildren of those officers.
Gonpo reports to work daily as a translator of documents from Chinese to Tibetan at the Central Tibetan Administration, the exile government. Trudging up and down the hill ever so slowly on her frostbite-damaged feet, she is a familiar figure in Dharamsala, where everybody now addresses her by her title: princess.
Now Tibet and Mongolia is geographically located next to China and India. If you try to understand the history that came forth from Central Asia, you are in trouble. Most recently in the 20th century before Dalai Lama made the headlines, Adolf Hitler was waving an Aryan flag i.e. the swastika that all Vedic religions use. Adolf was trying to propagate the dharma - not just Buddhist dharma, but Vedic dharma - in Europe. Vedic dharma has got a common trait, they eat chicken and goats at times, yet they abstain from beef, because cows are sacred. However they drink milk, as Vimalakirti the lay householder taught Venerable Ananda one fine day. Now, while there are many gurus coming forth from Tibet these days due to Chinese treachery, majority of it has to do with their lifestyles.
In an earlier sutta study I mentioned about Cunda, and how the Gautama Buddha died after He accepted Cunda's offering of pork delicacy. Now, the tibetan lineages or what is often known as the vajrayana, has got a lame excuse of sorts where austerity and ascetism is concerned. They eat after lunch and they eat meat, their explanation is because in the mountains vegetables are rare and the climate is cold, so the necessity arises. Well, this is similar with the modern-day Japanese problem with porngraphy. Because it's part of their culture you see. Unlike the Himalayan weather of areas that lie north of India, Japan has got freak seafood abundances, so they eat lots of vegetables and lots of seafood perhaps, yet because they are so adament about their elitist culture since the Qing Emperor of China, they swing the other direction where their girls gotta have the biggest of boobs and the fairest of skin so that they can make the best of videos with American technologies. However, the Japanese are very good at dieting, even their householders can survive incredible fasting and diets because it has something to do with their fascist imperial legacy of slaughtering fractions of mankind in Asia and Pacific to keep an emperor.
The countries nearest to Japan include US. The countries nearest to Tibet include China. Like Japan, small countries like Koreas and Taiwan have got strange excuses for their lifestyles and the sufferings - often karmic - that spawn forth. Similarly, small countries near Tibet such as Bhutan and Nepal also have all kinds of strange excuses too. Now Tibet is a country different from Japan perhaps, in Japan people die from work stress and because of low fertility rates.
Tibetans die because you tell them to shut up while in exile.
We don't stop them from talking because they won't want to live if you stop the press from interviewing them, yet if gravity is 9.81m/s2 all over this planet even high up in the mountains, their suffering including their princesses' is not really different from your average Johor princess's when she don't want to wear a custom tudung.
I may actually side with the Johor princess if it encourages her to put on nicer costumes, after all before the British got us autonomous in Singapore, Singapore was part of the Johor Sultanate, I was supposed to have a princess as well and she is not Tibetan, ironically, the Tibetan princess is also not Chinese, if you'd asked me the Tibetan princess deserves death, the Communists should have just killed her and saved me the trouble of typing, and I won't need to go into details about what happened to Adolf Hitler's mistress.