From 'Secrets of Tibet'
Tuesday, May 6, 2008; A10
An excerpt from "Secrets of Tibet," one of the few poems by Woeser that have been translated into English:
Once in a while, the masked demon reveals its true face,
frightening even the ancient deities.
Yet, the challenges have emboldened the ordinary birth;
who turn prayers in the deep nights into cries under the sun,
who convert whines behind the high walls into songs spread wide.
They are arrested! Punishments increased! Life sentences!
Executions postponed! Shot dead!
I usually keep quiet because I barely know anything.
Having been born and raised under the bugles of the PLA,
I am a suitable inheritor of Communism.
Egg under the red flag, suddenly cracked and broken.
Nearing middle age, belated anger is about to blurt from my throat.
I cannot stop my tears for the suffering Tibetans younger than me.
******************************************
A Lone Tibetan Voice, Intent on Speaking Out
Writer Seeks to Chronicle Events in Areas Hit by Crackdown
By Jill Drew
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 6, 2008; A10
BEIJING -- Each morning, it is the same. She rises and heads to her computer to write, to pierce the silence that otherwise shrouds events these days in Tibet, her homeland.
Woeser, a 41-year-old writer who uses only one name in the Tibetan tradition, knows she risks arrest. Hers is one of the only Tibetan voices within China that still reaches the outside world, now that the Chinese government has arrested hundreds and essentially blacked out most communication from Tibetan-inhabited areas.
Though she lives in Beijing, Woeser still has contacts across the Tibetan plateau, and she has been using them to funnel information onto her blog since the deadly March 14 riots in the region's capital, Lhasa. The government has said that the riots and the unrest that followed were caused by violent separatists. Woeser is constructing an alternative narrative -- one of protest sparked by long-festering resentments against Chinese repression of Tibetan culture and the Buddhist religion.
It has not been easy. Late last month, hackers attacked Woeser's site and locked her out. Previously, security officials had put her under house arrest. A policeman had warned her to stop writing about Tibet.
"I told him, 'Apart from Tibet, I have no interest in writing,' " said Woeser, the world's best-known contemporary Tibetan writer. "I want to record all of the history and be a witness to what is happening now."
Government Control
As Olympic torchbearers prepare to scale the Tibetan side of Mount Everest and envoys of the Dalai Lama have begun informal talks with their Chinese counterparts over the current crisis in Tibet, a global battle rages over how to interpret what is happening in the remote Himalayan region. But almost entirely absent from the discussion are voices of Tibetans living within Tibet, the people who can describe everyday life and let others judge whether they are being wronged.
"The main voice is hers," said Robbie Barnett, director of modern Tibetan studies at Columbia University in New York. "She is one of the very, very few Tibetans who have been able to put their name to the discussion and have managed to stay afloat."
Woeser's writing finds no favor in the Chinese government. Her books are banned here and three different blogs she maintained on Chinese servers have been shut down in the past two years -- on government orders, a friend at one of the Internet companies told her. Her current blog, http://woeser.middle-way.net, is hosted on a computer server in the United States, but even that one temporarily succumbed to an attack April 26.
"It's not only me. Many scholars do not have freedom of speech. Their blogs and Web sites are also blocked," Woeser said in a telephone interview from her 20th-floor apartment in China's capital. Although her house arrest has been lifted, officials from the local security bureau keep watch at her building, and she says she is often followed.
"This reflects the Chinese government's strict control over speech," she said. "They don't want me to leave this kind of record, to talk about what happened in Tibet in a real way. This voice is what the government does not want to hear."
Another Tibetan writer and researcher, Jamyang Kyi, was arrested April 1 at her office in the state-owned television station in Xining, capital of Qinghai province. A well-known singer and television presenter, Jamyang Kyi wrote about women's rights. She once wrote a poem to Woeser, praising her for her work.
With the living words spread forth from your heart
I see the footprint of our ancestors in the mountains of the Plateau.
An Unlikely Dissident
In many ways, Woeser is an unlikely dissident. She was born in Lhasa to members of the Communist Party. Her father was a deputy commander of a local unit of the People's Liberation Army, making his family well-positioned to benefit from China's control of the region.
"I used to believe the army came to Tibet to set Tibetans free," Woeser said.
When she was 4 years old, her family moved to a Tibetan area of Sichuan province. After the worst ravages of China's Cultural Revolution had passed and schools reopened, Woeser and her friends were educated in Chinese. No studies were offered in the Tibetan language. Although she can speak Tibetan, Woeser, like many of her generation, never learned to read or write her native tongue.
She returned to Lhasa after getting her college degree in Chinese literature. "My way of thinking was not based on reality," she said. "All I wanted to do was write poems."
She had not thought much about Buddhism before returning to Lhasa; as party members, her parents practiced no religion. But once she was back in Tibet, Woeser said, she was drawn to the teachings of Buddhism and began to cherish its culture.
Her politics, too, began to change. After a friend returned from Hong Kong with an autobiography of the Dalai Lama, Woeser devoured it. When China intervened in the selection of the 11th Panchen Lama and named its own candidate as the second-highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism, Woeser felt the same insult as her Tibetan friends. "China controlled the monks so strictly," she explained. "When you live in Tibet and you hear and see these things every day, you will change."
In 1999, Woeser published her first poetry collection, which explored Tibetan identity and dealt with sensitive issues indirectly, using lyricism and metaphor. Her next book, a compilation of prose essays, was direct, and it did not take long for authorities to ban it. Woeser was told to leave her job at a state-supported literary journal, unless she repented for her political mistakes. She lost her income, her pension, her security.
"My writing became very obvious," she said. "My father always taught me that I have to listen to the Communist Party when it talks, and that when I write, I have to balance between what I feel and what the party says. But I've found that that's impossible to do."
She moved to Beijing and, the following year, married dissident writer Wang Lixiong, who supported her through what she sees as the turning point in her life. She would not admit political mistakes, but rather would give voice to truths about Tibet. If she couldn't publish in China, she would publish in Hong Kong or Taiwan. If China would not listen, maybe the outside world would.
By the time Woeser left Lhasa, she was already well into another sensitive topic -- an account of the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet, based on interviews with 70 participants. The work, which became the topic of two books she published in Taiwan, was actually inspired by photographs her father had taken of temples being smashed and people targeted as class enemies being beaten and humiliated in public struggle sessions. Little has been recorded about the experiences of Tibetans during that time, and scholars are eager to translate her books into English. One volume has already been translated into French.
Woeser has applied many times for a passport, but has always been denied the right to travel overseas. Until now, it has not really mattered, she said. Her small apartment in Beijing is a warm place, decorated in Tibetan style, and she feels comfortable there, spending her days in front of her computer except when she travels to Tibetan areas on reporting trips.
But since March 14, she said, life in Beijing has become very hard. "There are so many extreme nationalists who know so little about Tibet, who are so shallow about a lot of things," she said. "I really resent it."
When she's inspired, she writes a little poetry. But mostly she is documenting as best she can the situation inside Tibet. According to her reporting, at least 150 Tibetans were killed in the Lhasa riot, not just the 22 mostly Han Chinese deaths the government has acknowledged.
"Sometimes I'm scared, especially when I hear my friends have been beaten up," she said. "But I feel I have a responsibility to do this. Some things are really hard to know now, but if I know something, I will write it."
Researcher Liu Liu contributed to this report.
- posted on 05/06/2008
Thanks for posting...
But for western media, my trust of their fair and balanced reporting is seriously dwindling down... I wonder why they do not cite any articles from many non-"lone" voices in China...
From latest Time Magazine - 100 influential people, they put Hu JinTao's PLA style picture down at left hand corner with all other six top leaders (politicians) pictures on the top. This metaphor-type of hint it implies just makes me sad...
In addition, in Ma Yingjo's illustrative writing, they wrote "two countries" a few times...
All of these display enough wesetrn media's arrogance (if not ignorance) and prejudice...
- RE: A Lone Tibetan Voiceposted on 10/20/2011
Reply toucheHer beauty is sublime¡..
- posted on 11/01/2011
Media Rights Group Condemns Chinese Torture of Writers in Tibet
Paris: Reporters Without Borders Thursday condemns two new serious cases of detention and use of violence against Tibetan journalists and writers in the past few days.
Two magazine editors were arrested by police in Chengdu on 5 June and were mistreated all night before being released, while a writer and monk was arrested without a warrant for the second time in 13 months on 24 May in Ngaba, in eastern Tibet, and has been held ever since without being able to see his family.
"The Chinese authorities are offering an idealised vision of a peaceful Tibet in the 2010 Shanghai World Expo but the information coming from the Tibetan areas is very different," Reporters Without Borders said. "Arrests, violence and surveillance are the common lot of those who defend Tibetan identity. We urge Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to give clear orders for the release of all imprisoned Tibetan intellectuals."
Goyon and Thupten Gedun, the editors of the magazines Tibet and Purgyal Kyi Namshey (Soul of Ancient Kings), were circulating on foot in Chengdu on the evening of 5 June when around 15 policemen descended from two vehicles, used tear-gas on them, and then took them to a police station. After confiscating their mobile phones, cameras, ID cards and wallets, they tied them to chairs and interrogated them.
"The police officers used violence to interrogate us," the journalists said. "They asked us about our work and our political activities, all the while hitting us. They also threatened us by putting guns against our heads. When we asked what we had done wrong, they hit us even harder." One of them was tortured with electrical equipment to make him confess.
"The next day, the police checked our police records and discovered they were empty. So they let us go, but not without threatening to arrest us again."
In Ngaba, writer Dokru Tsultrim was arrested on 24 May in Gomang monastery, where he has been staying for the past five years. A relative living in exile in the Indian city of Dharamsala said he was arrested because of two articles by him that have been published.
"Dokru Tsultrim refused to give his laptop to the police but they confiscated documents they found in his room," the relative said. "Until now our family has been denied the right to see him." Tsultrim is very involved in promoting literature among young Tibetans but is not a member of in any political movement, the source added.
Information about Tsultrim's previous arrest in 2009: http://en.rsf.org/china-concern-that-detained-tibetan-24-04-2009,32608.html
Reporters Without Borders has also learned that the authorities plan to make the inhabitants of Lhasa show their ID in order to be able to photocopy any document. And only permanent residents will be able to make photocopies. This new restriction appears to be aimed at preventing the circulation of "separatist" documents.
At least 50 Tibetans have been arrested since March 2008 for sending information abroad: http://en.rsf.org/china-at-least-50-tibetans-convicted-for-22-03-2010,36801.html
The Garden of Freedoms at the Shanghai expo: http://en.rsf.org/china-expo-shanghai-freedom-garden-26-04-2010,37120.html
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