Until about forty years ago, Tibet was an independent nation with its own language and culture. Buddhism figured prominently in Tibetan life, monasteries flourished, and parents considered it an honor to send at least one son to become a monk. The Dalai Lama was both the spiritual and temporal ruler, appointed for life and widely regarded as an incarnation of the Buddha.

Then the Communists came. In 1950 they invaded and quickly conquered the country. A treaty was signed that nominally guaranteed Tibet its autonomy and religion. But after an anti-Chinese uprising broke out in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, the Chinese responded with savage force, declaring a military dictatorship, confiscating all private property, and suppressing religious practices. Their lives in danger, the Dalai Lama and many followers fled across the Himalayas to India.

By the mid-sixties, the Cultural Revolution launched by Communist party chairman Mao Tse-tung had reached Lhasa. Chinese youths, recruited into Mao’s revolutionary Red Guard, tortured and imprisoned anyone they suspected of being anti-Communist, bourgeois, or intellectual. Though Tibetans were forbidden to travel, many more refugees eventually managed to escape. Today, thirty years later, they live in exile, unable to return to their families and homeland for fear of persecution.

The experiences of Tibetan refugee women have been of special interest to Charlotte Painter, a writer who has collected women’s narratives in Gifts of Age and, with Mary Jane Moffat, in Revelations: Diaries of Women, which has become a classic in women’s studies. She has talked with refugees living in Nepal, Canada, and the United States and recorded their stories. “What they told me,” she says, “strengthened my dissatisfaction with many indulgences of modern life. I was writing of people forcibly detached, cut off, coerced into homelessness and into great inner resourcefulness. I thought their experience had some bearing on my own spiritual drought.”

In May of 1989, she traveled to Tibet on a mission for a lama and meditation master who had fled after the Chinese invasion. Though now a U.S. citizen, the lama had raised money to support several Tibetan villages. He explained to Painter that the only way to get money to his people was to deliver it personally, and so he’d planned to return to his homeland after a long exile. But then he learned that even after so much time the Communists considered him an enemy of the state and intended to kill him if he returned. Instead, he sent his nephew to deliver the money and asked Painter to accompany him.

China denied them a Tibetan travel permit as part of an effort to prevent foreigners from witnessing demonstrations and police violence. They went anyway, driving through eastern Tibet by jeep. “Chinese vigilance at checkpoints is erratic,” she explains. “Fortunately, we were not stopped.”

When they met the sister of the lama they were helping, Painter recorded her stories as well. “Her people called her the Khandro and regarded her as a seer,” writes Painter. “Khandro in Sanskrit is dakini, which means sky dancer, one whose powers of mind extend to the skies. The first time I heard the word Khandro it sounded like conjure, and so that was how I thought of her — a conjure woman.” It was an apt association, for in her stories the Khandro possesses magical powers, which she wields against the occupying Chinese soldiers.

Following are excerpts from Painter’s Conjuring Tibet, for which she seeks a publisher. These stories show, as did the Tiananmen Square massacre, that the Chinese government has been caught up for too long in a cycle of violence.

— Pamela Tarr Penick

 

The Tibetan woman stopped struggling when they reached the narrow suspension bridge over the swiftly moving river. The two Chinese soldiers turned her away from them as they bound her hands behind her. They didn’t want to look at her face. They had stripped her and could see chill bumps rising on her flesh as she stood naked on the riverbank. It was a bitterly cold, cloudy day. One of the men bent down to bind the woman’s slender ankles. The rope slapped against the sand where her feet dug in. They had beaten her legs earlier, but they had stopped bleeding. In fact, the men felt edgy because they could no longer see any trace of the whip on her calves. They lifted her. One seized her shoulders, the other her ankles, and they ran with her onto the shaky bridge.

She was a young woman, but her face was not young. It was too terrible to look at, ferocious, crazed, and her hair rose above it in a tangled, black corona. Ever since the soldiers were stationed there eight years ago, she had jeered at them and spat in their eyes. She had hexed them into strange suicides and sent tigers to attack them. She had even called up ghosts of ancestors the Chinese had exorcised from their minds. She was insane, the commanding officer had decided, though her people called her the Khandro, wise woman. The two soldiers wouldn’t look at her face, and so they did not see its fiery concentration. They flung her face down into the agitated water, then turned and walked back to the horses they had taken from her ranch.

As they were mounting, they heard shouts from a settlement across the river. A number of Tibetans were hurrying down to the riverbank. The soldiers smirked, for they knew the woman could never be rescued. The current would already have taken her half a mile downstream. Anyone trying to get to her would drown in that surging water. It was over for the witch.

The soldiers rode their horses toward the bank to enjoy the futile effort of the villagers. The Tibetans had waded waist-deep into the water and were crying, reaching out their hands. All at once their voices rose in something like a cheer. Then the soldiers saw the woman. She was not drowned but floated face up, her arms and feet still tied. Chill bumps formed now on their own flesh under their khaki uniforms. Even at that distance they could see her eyes, as brilliantly lit as if a shaft of sunlight had parted the clouds to illumine them. She rode the wild river, her hair spread out behind her head like spikes of cast iron. She lay calmly, floating toward her people. She was floating upstream.

In the fifties the wife of the Communist general stationed in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa created the Patriotic Women’s Association, an organization meant to promote understanding of the New Order. In the early years of the occupation, it offered constant training sessions in Chinese Mind. But as a party mechanism, the PWA eventually backfired. Never before had the women of Tibet been organized for anything except picnics and mah-jongg. Suddenly they had a political focus of their own.

Chimey Norbu remembers, “The women started the demonstrations in Lhasa against the Chinese. I was still a child, but my oldest sister was with them.” One day, she says, her aunts were in the house, their voices murmuring in the dining room with none of their usual mirth. Their fear sank into her, became hers. Her sister, Pema, nineteen years old, was speaking. What had come over her sister, always so shy, so quiet? Now her voice rose above her aunts’ whispers.

The next day, Chimey’s mother dressed her quickly, pulling on her felt shoes, an embroidered blouse, and a sleeveless, brown pinafore. Where was Ani-la, who usually dressed her? Why were her mother’s hands trembling, her face strangely clouded?

They walked around the Barkor marketplace with one of Chimey’s aunts. Chimey’s mother seemed to be looking for something. Sandbags lined the streets, barbed wire was strung from roof to roof. Chimey stared. She had been to the Barkor only to shop with Ani-la, walking past the butcher stalls of hanging meat (corpses, Ani-la called them), the steaming mo-mo stand where they would eat warm dumplings, the juices running down Chimey’s round cheeks. Today none of the mo-mo places were open. Her mother grasped her hand, walking briskly beside Chimey’s aunt.

Crowds of women, maybe hundreds of women, were headed up toward the Potala, another half-mile away. Many Chinese soldiers were following them, carrying sticks and rifles. A crowd gathered on the Potala steps, more and more women massing there. The soldiers lined up around the steps. Chimey saw other children she knew and old women there too.

Suddenly her mother cried out, pointing toward the steps. Chimey’s sister stood there, calling to the other women, her hand raised in a fist against the blue sky. Her mother called out to Pema, “No, no!” But Pema didn’t hear. Women were chanting, “Tibet is independent. China out! Free Tibet!” Her mother ran toward the steps, and before Chimey could follow, her aunt held her back, clasping her to her paneled apron, pressing her face against the colored silk stripes. Chimey turned her head to see a soldier striding past her mother.

Her aunt tried to cover her eyes, but through her fingers Chimey saw the soldier raising a stick, hitting Pema on the face. Her sister fell, but the soldier continued to strike her. Her mother’s scream reached her next. She had never heard her mother scream before, but she knew the sound came from her mother. The soldiers grabbed her mother and tied her hands behind her back. Even her aunt, as she picked Chimey up, was shouting now as the women rushed up the Potala steps toward her sister. Screams filled the air; several women fell under blows from the soldiers. Looking up, Chimey saw the sky, bright blue, the steps, the women between sky and steps falling, hands stretched out, their long skirts, their striped aprons crumpling. Her aunt’s hands pressed Chimey’s head against her breast, but she saw them, the women of Lhasa, falling on the Potala steps.

No shots were fired. That would come later. The Chinese released Chimey’s mother but took her sister to prison. It was weeks before her mother was allowed to see her. By then many Tibetans, including the young Dalai Lama, had become refugees. Altogether one hundred thousand fugitives escaped across the borders of Nepal and India.

Later, Chimey walked in on her mother and aunt as they were talking about the visit to the prison. “That filthy bandage over half of her face,” her mother said. “When I pulled it off, it was hanging out.” Her mother ground her fists against her eyes, crying.

“What was hanging out?” Chimey asked. She could hear her own voice go small with fear.

Chimey’s sister, blinded, has never been released and may no longer be alive.

Nyima and her younger brother, Tashi, had been raised in the country by a beloved stepmother, Damcho, in a complicated polyandrous marriage common in Tibet. Then, in 1960, the Chinese came. Their father was taken to prison, and they were forced by the Chinese soldiers to move into the sheep stable. The sheep were bumped outside. In the cold early morning, Nyima and Tashi saw them huddling together, the knobs of their knees shaking. Upstairs in their house, a Chinese man moved in. Later his family came, a noisy, angry woman with three children who taunted them. Then the Chinese made them leave Damcho and go to the school.

On the way to Lhasa, where the school was, Nyima saw ragged people sleeping in the streets alongside hundreds of wild dogs. An old woman, shaking with a chill, grasped one of the dogs and held it against her body — trying to keep warm with a wild dog.

The Chinese had turned a monastery into a school for forty Tibetan children. After several months, Damcho was allowed to visit them. She made the two-day hike to the school to bring the children a basket filled with fruit and barley bread. There were so many things Nyima wanted to tell her. Tashi went easily to her, sat on her ample lap, fingered the silk of her striped apron. But Nyima held back, gazing up at Damcho’s center-parted hair. She wore no ornaments in it today. “Why no coral in your hair?” Nyima asked. Damcho laughed. “So many things Nyima must have to tell me, and she asks about my hair. How are they treating you, Nyima-la?”

Badly! she wanted to blurt out. Where could she start? How she and her brother were sent to the fields to cut the tea and tie it into bundles? How Tashi began to cry because the bundle on his back was so heavy, how she tried to help him when nobody was looking but got caught and beaten for it? How she was punished, while weeding, for not knowing the difference between barley and grass? So much had happened to them at the school. Just the sight of Damcho made her choke with desire to tell and tell — how their only food was barley broth, how they were punished every day for reasons they did not understand.

His whip came down on their hands, flicked their cheeks, slashed their shoulders. He turned to the peasant children, told them they could avenge their ancestors now for the evil done to them for centuries by punishing these terrible rich children.

But something made her want to keep Damcho from hearing how hard it was. She was silent, but thought about the peasant children who also came to the school. They fared better than the rest and were allowed to go home at day’s end to their families. They were called upon for the object lesson about barley and grass.

“These rich children can’t tell barley from grass. Do you know why?” asked the school’s Chinese administrator. Nyima and Tashi lowered their faces. “Put your hands out,” he demanded. “You didn’t know barley because you were pampered, taught only to enjoy the fruit of the labor of others, to live off their backs. Look how dainty your hands are!” And his whip came down on their hands, flicked their cheeks, slashed their shoulders. He turned to the peasant children, told them they could avenge their ancestors now for the evil done to them for centuries by punishing these terrible rich children. “You peasants know the difference between a weed and barley, don’t you?”

The peasant children drew back, afraid themselves of being hit. But the administrator was patient. Education took patience. Eventually, one by one, all the poor children took the whips into their hands as they were told, drawn in a spell to the lashes as if they were strings of licorice candy. Every child screamed then, as if they were caught in a sudden sandstorm and were struggling for shelter. They began pushing, shoving, trying to squeeze closer and closer to Nyima and Tashi. The whips tore through the air, and red worms grew on Nyima’s and Tashi’s legs. “Now you will learn the difference,” the administrator shouted in her ear, “between poison and food. You will not be so stupid again.” But Nyima still didn’t know the difference. She felt she would never know the difference, as new pain sprouted in her heart like weeds, with other hurts so dense she couldn’t tell one from another. She knew that if she said nothing, there would be less punishment. This is how she learned to put up with abuse. She fell silent, like an animal. And so she was dumb now; to speak to Damcho of the pain would only make it worse.

On Damcho’s lap, Tashi began to cry. His tears fell down upon the cloth that covered the fruit and barley bread. “Have some food,” Damcho told them, folding back the cloth, handing Tashi an orange. He held it on his lap but made no attempt to peel it. He gazed at the orange. “Stones like this,” he said.

His words released a flood of images in Nyima’s mind. The two Chinese women at the school, Lin and Fae, sent the children to gather rocks “the size of oranges” and to pile them in the courtyard. “Good exercise! You Tibetans do not get enough exercise. Holy walks around idols are not exercise!” Then they made the children smash the Buddha statue with the rocks.

Damcho took the orange and broke into its rind with her thumbnail, carving a single, tangy-smelling coil of peel. “I know about the statue,” she said. “Never mind.”

That made Nyima’s eyes sting. “It was only to avoid beatings,” she said.

“Do what they tell you to do. They can’t take your mind away,” Damcho said.

But that was what they meant to do, Nyima knew. When the whips broke on her legs she felt something break inside herself as well. The lamas had taught her that thinking came from the heart. No wonder she felt dumb — it was because she could no longer think, because her heart was broken. “You thought you would become like your mother,” Fae taunted her. “Wear turquoise and coral and jasper from your crown to your navel!” They wanted her mind more than anything. They wanted to twist all her truths into superstition.

“I sleep with the thousand buddhas,” Tashi muttered soberly.

“Do you now?” smiled Damcho, pressing her forehead to his, caressing him, trying to coax a smile. But did she really understand? Did she know about the sacred cloth scrolls folded on their pallets for them to use as sheets? Before the Chinese had come, their father had sent a great artist to the monastery to paint the thousand buddhas on a piece of cloth, but Fae made Tashi use it for a sheet, knowing that he still wet the bed at night. All the children had to sleep on the scrolls painted with images of the revered deities — of Tara, of Chenrezi, of the peaceful and wrathful deities, of all the bodhisattvas. “Idols and superstitious nonsense,” said Lin. “Many Chinese children have no sheets at all,” said Fae, who also made them use the fine paper of the holy texts for toilet paper. She heaped scorn on Tashi: “Were you planning to become a lama, little boy? To tax the poor of all they earn, to sit holding these idolatrous texts in your delicate hands and drinking chang until the Buddha took you to the Pureland?” Stinging taunts were always followed by stinging slaps on the hands.

Tashi slowly chewed the orange wedge, juice sliding down his chin. He seldom smiled these days, although Nyima tried to make him laugh. Like when they had to kill flies. The Chinese had brought many horses with them, and the horses were followed by many flies. They made the children kill them. The administrator handed out small, round cardboard boxes, empty shoe-polish boxes, which smelled sharply of bootblack. “Be good little children. Kill the Buddha!” He told them to fill the boxes with the corpses of dead flies. The children had never killed a fly before, or anything else intentionally, for they knew that compassion was indivisible, could not be given one creature and withheld from another. However much a pest any creature might be, it valued its own life as much as a human did.

Behind his back, Nyima said to the children, “The Chinese brought a whole army of their ancestors for us to kill!” Everyone laughed, except for Tashi.

At the end of the day the administrator inspected the boxes, made sure each one was packed with corpses, then led the children to the courtyard, to a hole in the ground where the broken Buddha statue had been before it was taken away. He had the children upend their boxes there, one by one, piling the corpses on top of one another in a mass grave. This they did day after day, trying to diminish the number of flies around the steamy horses. But somehow there were always more flies.

A fly’s wings are very delicate, lacy and translucent. In a certain slant of light they reflect the colors of the rainbow. A fly can lift its forelegs to close the tips together, as if in a namaste greeting. Nyima noticed these things, looking closely and speaking respectfully to each insect before taking its life. Perhaps the administrator didn’t realize he was giving the flies a sacred burial ground, thought Nyima.

When Damcho was ready to leave, the teacher Lin came out and thanked her for bringing the fruit and barley bread. She took it inside, and that was the last the children saw of it.

One day Nyima ran away. She ran several desert miles to the prison where her father was being held. The guards let her see him, and when they were together she explained that she had come to tell him about a quarrel she’d had with another child, how she had pulled her hair. “For such a thing you came all this way?” he asked, smiling. He told his guards about it, and, amused, they agreed to let her stay overnight on the grounds outside the prison. Then her father saw the welts on her legs, the scars. He asked her about them, but she could only cry.

When she came again a few weeks later, the guards remembered her and humored her. This time her mother had sent her, she told them. She said that a dying relative was begging to see her father. This was almost the truth: the family was greatly disturbed over the suicide of a brother, who, having been tortured, had flung himself in despair into the river. The guards finally agreed to let Nyima’s father go home for one night. Nyima’s uncle, a prison trustee, was allowed to go as his guard. They were even given horses. Nyima rode before her father, touching the horse’s coarse mane. As soon as darkness fell, the father and the uncle gathered the family together. That night, mindful of the fate of their brother, the entire family escaped.

Except for Nyima’s brother. The school would not allow Tashi to go home to see his father; he was being punished for some misdeed.

Damcho, several other children, and Nyima’s grandmother all traveled along a mountain trail above a river. The grandmother, guiding the horse as she walked along the ledge, let go of the rein for a moment and the horse fell into the abyss. They lost the animal and most of their supplies, and they were without food for days. Knowing they were being chased by Chinese soldiers, they gave them the slip one night at a bridge on the Indian border. Nyima’s father cut the rope of the bridge after they had safely crossed. She remembers the flash of his knife, the rope going slack, the bridge sliding into the water below, the subdued cheers of the family. She remembers the reflection of the moon as it shattered when the bridge struck the water.

Damcho got a job as a dishwasher; Nyima’s father did coolie labor on the roads. Nyima became a trader of Tibetan art in Katmandu. She hasn’t seen Tashi since she became a refugee. “He goes in Chinese Mind,” she said.

The Chinese officer newly assigned to a remote village during the Cultural Revolution examined the records about the Khandro. She was a problem, without a doubt. She had been in charge of the nearby monastery since its head lama, her brother, had failed to return from a pilgrimage to Lhasa and fled across the border into Nepal after someone had divulged the army’s intent to execute him. The officer thought he would probably have to execute his sister as well. The common lore about her powers of mind was cause enough.

The records showed that a former commander had ordered the statues of Buddha and other idols in her monastery destroyed. One of the soldiers stationed there had set to work, meaning to break up the main statue with a hammer. The occupants of the monastery went inside and gazed down upon him from the upstairs windows, the Khandro among them. The soldier was left quite alone with the statue.

This village was located in the high desert, some distance from the forest, where tigers were common; the wildlife here was confined mostly to foxes, yaks, and goats. But suddenly the soldier caught sight of two tigers streaking intently across the sand as if after prey — he was the prey. He mounted a horse that belonged to the monastery and retreated hastily. The tigers stayed there for days guarding the statue.

As soon as she had dressed, the Khandro turned her back on the soldiers, lifted her skirt in their faces, and gave a loud fart. Then she leaped on a horse they had stolen from her and rode away, laughing wildly.

That was only the beginning. There was another sacred statue that soldiers had made an effort to destroy. Monks had stored it in a small wooden box in order to hide it. The soldiers found the box but were unable to move it, though they knew the statue was small and light. Yet the box was like a dead weight and stuck stubbornly to the ground. One soldier who tried to move it came to grief. In the weeks that followed, his son was drowned and he himself went mad.

Next, there was the issue of the soldiers who had thrown the Khandro bound hand and foot into the river, where she was saved by a lucky upstream current. The then-commanding officer had relieved those men of duty in embarrassment over the incident.

All of this made the Khandro very popular with the locals, of course, and something more than a nuisance. The new officer was full of zeal for Chairman Mao’s cause. The order of the Cultural Revolution must be put into effect. He sent for the Khandro.

He also sent word out to the peasants for miles around to come bear witness to her “self-criticism.” And so under the bright sunlight the gathering took place. The officer placed her upon a platform surrounded by soldiers on one side, villagers and peasants on the other. The woman stood in a skirt and jacket of skins, her black hair tangled. The officer found it difficult to meet her eyes: red coals seemed to burn behind them. He held before her a picture of Chairman Mao. “Do you know who this is?” he asked.

She gave a shrug as if to say, Who doesn’t? She stared at the officer silently.

“It is your duty to make a tribute to our great chairman,” said the officer. “Do you understand? This is an opportunity for you. To correct your past errors.”

Her face took on a more ferocious aspect, and her eyebrows rose and fell above the red glints of her eyes, but still she said nothing.

“This you must do. You may as well make up your mind to it. Everyone is here to witness this. Your people understand, you know, that we all live by our glorious chairman’s grace. You must strengthen that understanding for them.”

She blew air through her lips in a loud raspberry. The peasants broke into laughter but stopped at the crack of the officer’s whip on the platform floor. The Khandro stood stony-faced. The officer was furious. He shouted a command to two of his junior officers, and they grasped the woman by the arms. The people fell silent. Would they execute her? They watched, humiliated for her, as two men stripped her naked and bound her hands.

The officer took from his chest pocket a marker and drew on her belly a red circle, turning her navel into a target. At that, several of the monks from the monastery rushed up to the officer and pleaded with him not to shoot her on the spot. If she had to die, they wanted to say certain rites to prepare her. They pleaded for time.

“Ah, Tibetan funeral rites! Let’s prepare her, by all means.” He whispered orders to his men, who went into his headquarters and returned with some paper flowers. Mockingly, he ordered the men to drape the flowers about her shoulders. “There. Now she is prepared to die.”

He shouted another order. A Chinese soldier raised his rifle, aimed at her, and pulled the trigger. His gun misfired. He reloaded, aimed — and it misfired again. The commanding officer became infuriated. He wrenched the rifle away and reloaded it himself. This time he aimed it at a post of the platform, and the bullet shattered the wood. Reloading again, he aimed at the Khandro and pulled the trigger, but to his surprise the rifle pulled sharply to the left as it fired. He heard an apprehensive murmur of satisfaction among the people.

Afraid, the officer ordered her release. As soon as she had dressed, the Khandro turned her back on the soldiers, lifted her skirt in their faces, and gave a loud fart. Then she leaped on a horse they had stolen from her and rode away, laughing wildly.

The Chinese officer sent out word that she would not be punished further because she was totally insane.

A stocky woman who looks old for her years, Serong is embarrassed by her broken English. In Lhasa, the Chinese used her as a Mandarin-Tibetan translator. Today, in Sonoma County, California, there’s no call for a Tibetan-Mandarin-English translator. “English not good enough anyway,” she says. She cleans bedpans in a retirement home.

She glances about the restaurant furtively, as if afraid of being seen there, then she laughs and explains, “At home we never took guest to restaurant. That was thought too low. As if you had no home to entertain.” That is the case for Serong; she rents a room in someone else’s home.

As children, Serong and her cousin lived in a convent near Lhasa with nuns who taught the children to pray and to sit long hours in the meditation hall, their maroon, woolen robes gathered about them. The nuns practiced secret rites forbidden to children, who would, the nuns warned, be struck blind if they ever saw them. No child risked spying, but when the nuns had closeted themselves, the girls crept close to the wall to eavesdrop. Serong and her cousin listened to curious thumping noises for a long while before they realized the nuns were attempting to levitate, and failing. The girls suspected that the heaviest thump was caused by their great-aunt, who was very fat.

Having internalized the rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution, they were empowered to indulge in any form of torture, from breast amputation to castration, secure in the righteousness of their cause.

The nuns may have been practicing lung-gom, levitation that enables rapid trance-walking: the practitioner appears to skim just above the ground at an inhuman rate. The skill, it is said, takes profound concentration and can be fatal to the practitioner if interrupted. Some people who believe Jesus spent his adolescence in India suggest that lung-gom adepts may have taught him to walk on water.

“The nuns also practiced tumo reziang,” Serong says. “They would go outside in the coldest weather, wearing only white gauze over their bodies and a red band from shoulder to waist, and they would meditate in the snow.” In this practice, she explains, the body heat rises along the spine and melts the snow. “They had to prove their skill by wringing the sweat from their white gauze three times.”

 

Serong’s discomfort at being with me isn’t really caused by our dining in a restaurant. Rather, she doesn’t want to tell me the worst that happened to her in Tibet. Perhaps it’s too hard to speak of, I suggest, for I can see that she still carries the pain of what she went through. No, she says, it’s not that. She doesn’t want to call attention to herself. “Not Buddhist way.”

I order lunch and talk to her about the Jewish Holocaust and the decision of some survivors to tell their stories so that it may never happen again. I tell her of some graffito I read on the Venice ghetto wall: “Nothing shall purge your deaths from our memories, for our memories are your only graves.” I say that burying the truth can sometimes turn it into a lie, can make the wrong version of what happened sound like the truth. She mulls it over, then agrees to tell me her story.

“If they send for you, you go,” Serong begins. In a large, crowded meeting hall in Lhasa, she stands before a table, where Chinese cadres have set up an improvised judgment seat. These children of Mao, none much over twenty, are offering to help the people correct their error-stained lives. To this effect, they have bound Serong’s hands behind her. “You must examine your failure to serve the people,” commands the lean, young interrogator. A crook in his right wrist suggests it has been broken, perhaps in just such a session as this. “Try to remember who you really are. Understand your deception. Take your time.” He is patient; he knows that to help others correct themselves takes forbearance, a willingness to repeat yourself, as well as ferocity. Over and over he repeats the charges against her. He is utterly dedicated to the Cultural Revolution and is so earnest he appears ridiculous. But she knows he is very dangerous. He will do anything to make her confess, anything.

His gaze burns into her. “You have deceived us. We know that you are the queen of Bhutan.” She is amused, but she dares not laugh. Her cousin, not she, is the queen, but she has had no news of her since the fall of Lhasa. “Tell us about the fortune you have sent to Bhutan,” says the cadre. He will repeat the lie, she knows, until she is confused and begins to believe it. He turns to the witnesses, all of them Tibetans. His crooked wrist gestures toward Serong. “You must help her remember. Come, let’s help her.”

Quite a few of them are willing to strike her, having had their own lessons in the class struggle. Serong recognizes an elderly couple, but they will not meet her eyes. They were once devoted servants to her family. The young cadre and his assistants call the servants by name and hand them sticks; they are the ones who must strike first. Others close in, and as Serong feels their blows raining on her head she mercifully blacks out.

Turning youths loose on actual or possible dissidents was probably the shrewdest and cruelest of Maoist strategies. Here were True Believers, lacking life experience to complicate their thoughts, still endowed with the primal cruelty of children. Having internalized the rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution, they were empowered to indulge in any form of torture, from breast amputation to castration, secure in the righteousness of their cause. They forced people to eat salt, then denied them water or gave them only their own urine to drink. They raped, maimed, tormented by any means — cattle prods, electric shock, starvation. They might dangle a child from a window until his mother confessed to any crime, and then let go of the child anyway.

They tortured Serong by tying her feet together, bending her body at the waist, pinning her arms behind her back, and securing them above her shoulders, like the wings of a plane. She was left in that position for weeks. She saw many men and women locked that way in what the torturers called “the airplane room.” Such a term allowed them to objectify their victims. Here is the magic of the cadres — dehumanization.

Agnes Smedley has described this same torture as practiced by the secret service of Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese nationalist party. During the late 1920s, Chiang Kai-shek’s police taught it to the Communists firsthand by submitting them to it. Perhaps today the Chinese have forgotten how they learned it.