Article Edition August 2020

rule; the most recent was in
November. About a third of the
self-immolations have taken
place in Ngaba & the
surrounding villages.
I was living in Beijing when
the wave of self-immolations
began, and, like many
journalists there, I became
obsessed with Ngaba. There
was the undeniable challenge:
Ngaba was simply one of the
most difficult places in China for
journalists to visit. Unlike with
Lhasa and the other parts of the
Tibet Autonomous Region, you
were not required to obtain a
special permit, but fortified
checkpoints kept outsiders
away. I was keen to know what
it was that the Chinese
government didn’t want us to
see. And how had this little town
become the engine of Tibetan
resistance? Around the same
time that I was reporting on the
Tibetan unrest, I
read OrhanPamuk’s novel
“Snow,” a fictionalized account
of a Turkish city where a string
of young women had killed
themselves. Ngaba was the real
thing.
Travelling discreetly, I made
several trips into Ngaba. I also
met many people from Ngaba
living in Dharamsala, India, the
headquarters of the Dalai Lama
and his exiled government. In
Dharamsala, being from Ngabaa
conferred a certain cachet: it
meant that you almost certainly
knew someone, if only a third
cousin or a neighbor, who had
self-immolated. But nobody knew
more self-immolators than
Dongtuk, which made him a minor
celebrity in the exile community. I
heard about him almost as soon
as I arrived, in 2014, and asked a
friend from Ngaba for an
introduction. If anyone could
explain what had driven so many
Tibetans to self-immolation,
perhaps it was him. We have
stayed in touch since. Like many
others, he felt ambivalent about
the suicides, but recognized that
they had been a tremendous loss
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of face for China. “It put pressure
on the Chinese government. It
got the world’s attention,” he
said.
Dongtuk was born in 1994, in
a village called Meruma, about
fifteen miles from the center of
Ngaba. He and his mother, his
younger sister, and his maternal
grandmother lived in a mud-brick
house enclosed inside a walled
courtyard strung with prayer
flags. As a girl, Dongtuk’smother,
Sonam (I’ve changed her name),
had been the village beauty, with
high, chiselled cheekbones and a
dazzling smile. But, at age thirteen,
she came down with a fever that
left her paralyzed in her left hand
and left foot. The village had no
doctor and there was nobody to
diagnose the illness. “Evil spirits,”
Sonam’s mother concluded.
Tibetan wives are responsible
for cooking, cleaning, milking the
animals, churning the butter, and
collecting yak dung for fuel.
Sonam’s limp and paralyzed left
hand made her an undesirable
bride, despite her good looks.
Moreover, she needed to take
care of her mother. Being single,
however, was not synonymous
with being celibate. Although
Tibetan women are modest in their
clothing, they are not prudish
about sex. Polygamy and
polyandry are acceptable among
rural Tibetans, and unmarried
women frequently have children
of their own.
Unlike Chinese women in
similar situations, unmarried
Tibetan women aren’t scorned as
mistresses or concubines;
instead, they are treated as
heads of households. This was
the case for Sonam, who had
inherited her parents’ house
after a ne’er-do-well older
brother absconded with the
family’s savings. She herded
yak, collected and sold herbs,
and did odd jobs for neighbors,
but it supplied the family only a
meagre income. They ate a basic
diet of tsampa, a Tibetan staple
ground barley that is usually
cooked into a porridge, and
sometimes mixed with cheese
and butter. The children never
had more than one pair of shoes,
which they stuffed with grass
for insulation. The family didn’t
have a television or radio, so at
night they played a cassette tape
of Buddhist prayer music.
The family’s house had a
chapel off the courtyard, which
was dedicated to Sonam’s
uncle, Alok Lama, who had been
honored as a reincarnate lama.
It was the only room
constructed with timber, which
is precious on the plateau. An
elaborate gilt-edged frame held
a black-and-white photograph
of a thin, pockmarked man with
a goatee. Next to it was a portrait
of the Dalai Lama, which, as in
other Tibetan homes in the area,
was hung loosely from a nail,
so that it could be hastily
removed in case of an inspection
by police or Communist Party
officials. The room had a bed
with a wooden frame, reserved
for any distinguished monk who
might come to pay respects. It
was kept locked with a padlock,
but Dongtuk would sometimes
take the key from the kitchen and
let himself in, to rest on the bed.
Dongtuk didn’t know much
about Tibet’s history; his mother
was apolitical and wanted to
keep her children that way, so that
they wouldn’t get into trouble.
What little he learned was from
his grandmother. When his
mother was out in the
pasturelands with the animals,
Dongtuk and his sister would lie
with their grandmother on a
mattress of twigs and straw, with
a felt covering made of yak wool.
Snuggled up next to her, they
would beg to hear heroic stories
of Tibetan warriors fighting the
Red Army in the thirties, and
then sadder stories, about the
many Tibetans who were herded
into communes by the Chinese
Communist Party, in 1958, and
who perished of hunger. He
heard about Tibetan collaborators,
who were bribed by
the Chinese to torture and
humiliate monks, and about one
in particular, a woman who
forced a monk to drink her urine.
“Did you do that, Grandma?”
Dongtuk asked.
“Of course not!” she said.
Dongtuk’s father, a herder,
had a wife and another family.
Relations were amicable, and he
often visited them. The
youngest child in that family
was a boy, RinzenDorjee, who
was about the same age as
Dongtuk. It was assumed that
they would be playmates,
although they shared few
interests. Dongtuk was a
chatterbox; RinzenDorjee
preferred the company of
animals to people. He spent
hours crouched by the edge of
a stream, collecting frogs and
tadpoles. Dongtuk thought that
it was a stupid pastime, but he
appreciated RinzenDorjee’s
presence. Dongtuk was slight of
build and had poor eyesight,
but RinzenDorjee was sturdy,
so it was handy to have his
brother around for protection.
Every June, Dongtuk’s
father’s family would bring their
herds of yak to the mountains,
living in a tent and moving
every few weeks, to fresh
grasslands. One summer, when
Dongtuk was nearly seven, his
father brought him along, to
teach him to ride a horse, a skill
that, surprisingly for a Tibetan
boy, he had not yet acquired.
Although Dongtuk’s father
mounted him on the smallest,
most gentle mare, Dongtuk lost
control. The horse galloped far
ahead of the others, and
Dongtuk, in panic, tumbled off.
One of the large dogs that the
family kept, to protect the herds
from wolves, caught him by the
shin. The other children burst
into laughter. His stepmother
dusted him off and cleaned the
injuries. Dongtuk’s father never
spoke to him about the incident.
It was clear that this boy who
couldn’t ride a horse wasn’t cut
out for life as a herder.
(Cont. on Next Edition)
Sikh Virsa, Calgary 44. August, 2020