The weather-beaten woman took a contemplative step, raised her arms high above her head, clasped her hands together, and swept them forward like a diver entering the sea. The full expanse of her small frame embraced the dusty pavement, from her head and shoulders to her toes. After holding the submissive position for an extended moment, she picked herself up, took a second step, and repeated the process again and again, slowly inching her way around the perimeter of the sprawling Jokhang Temple. Hundreds of other pilgrims rippled like waves beside her.
She called to mind the women I’d seen at the Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City crossing the holy grounds on their knees. Their devoutness had similarly transfixed me: hundreds of women wrapped in shawls with rosaries wound between their fingers, sobbing as blood seeped through their skirts. But while this Tibetan woman threw herself upon the pavement time and again, she didn’t wince and she didn’t bleed.
Tibetans are no strangers to pain. Violence has marred most of their past half century. When the Red Army invaded their land a year after seizing power in China, their ill-equipped troops hardly stood a chance—they were outnumbered more than eight to one. Their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, was forced into exile in 1959 and by 1970, an estimated 100,000 Tibetans had joined him. Of those who stayed, hundreds of thousands more perished under the stringent Chinese rule.
Yet I refused to jump to the simple conclusion that the Tibetans were the oppressed and the Chinese were the oppressors. A year of working as a journalist in Beijing taught me there were no such clear-cut answers. As I explored Tibet’s river valleys and rugged rural villages, I tried to keep the passionate perspectives of my Chinese friends in mind:
“They were living in the Dark Ages before we got here.”
“Under the Dalai Lama, the Tibetans were serfs in their own land. Just look at that palace he lived in!”
“We liberated the Tibetans from the Dalai Lama just like Mao liberated us from the emperor.”
