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.