In Exile From the Land of Snows

by John Avedon

  Despite such harsh reprisals, the prisoners had nothing to lose and were little dissuaded. On one occasion a group of Chinese inmates attacked the kitchen staff—all of whom were fed to the point of being portly—as they were leaving the kitchen carrying baskets of dumplings. Grabbing all they could, the men ate as they ran away; yet by that night each had been identified and punished. Unprovoked cruelty was common as well. While Dr. Choedrak was in the toilet one day, a Chinese prisoner came in to relieve himself. The man was so weak that when he squatted down, he fell on the floor, foaming from his mouth, unable to move. A guard entered. He began kicking the prisoner, berating him for lying in the toilet until, in a minute’s time, he died on the spot. Taunting was a favored means of abuse. Dr. Choedrak witnessed a Chinese inmate being dragged helplessly to the fields, the guards reproaching him for being “too lazy to work.” After moving about listlessly for a few minutes, he simply collapsed and died. On another occasion Chinese inmates were discovered eating a donkey’s head which they had retrieved from the same pile of feces and garbage that Lobsang Thonden’s pig had been in. Handcuffed and severely beaten, they were brought in front of 900 prisoners for thamzing. The prison staff railed at them, “You Kuomintang officials have badly abused the poor people under you, and now you’re even abusing the Communist Party by eating a donkey’s head. This is why you’re dying, because you don’t know how to look after yourselves.” Twice Dr. Choedrak himself received thamzing for “insulting behavior” concerning food. In one instance he was caught eating cabbage leaves from the manure pile. The other involved his training as a physician. With the traditional Tibetan doctor’s vast knowledge of plants, he quietly advised prisoners what to eat and what not to eat in the fields, despite the risk of such unapproved communication. Discovered, he was brought to trial once more on the grounds that his actions were premeditated provocation of the authorities, who maintained throughout that the entire camp was receiving “ample sustenance.”

  Dr. Choedrak’s advice, though, was badly needed. Prisoners ate anything they came across. Some items were not so dangerous. One cellmate managed to find the knee joint of a small sheep. There was no meat on the bone, but for an entire month he kept it hidden under his bedding, taking it out each night for a few precious gnawings. On New Year’s Day, to demonstrate magnanimity, a single mule was boiled for the entire prison. A friend of Dr. Choedrak, a steward for a noble family in Tibet, noticed that the water the animal was cooked in had been thrown by a staff member onto a refuse pile not far from the kitchen. Though not the toilet proper, this was a place where prisoners also went to relieve themselves, and the whole area was covered with pools of urine. Regardless, Dr. Choedrak’s friend ran to the mound with his mug and collected all the surface dirt he could, in the hope that some of the boiled water could be strained out of it. He showed Dr. Choedrak the soaked mud and asked if he thought this would benefit him. Like every prisoner, the steward had been suffering from an inability to sleep, difficulty with his vision and a constant loud rushing noise in the ear—all caused, according to Tibetan medicine, by the rising of “lung” or wind, which was produced by starvation. Dr. Choedrak agreed that if he could succeed in getting some of the soup water separated from the mud and urine, it would help to repress the “lung.” The man did so and actually felt better for a short while. But other cases were not so salutary. People were dying in the most horrible manner from abrupt dysfunctions in their digestive tracts. A prisoner named Gyaltsen Dagpa, whom Tenzin Choedrak was unable to assist, perished when his intestines burst. For weeks he had been indiscriminately picking and eating whatever wild grass he could find. Soon he had a bad case of diarrhea and after a few days a viscous, jelly-like substance emerged with his stools. Then, only water was ejected. At this point, whenever the man ate or drank he would scream from the excruciating pain. Soon the pain became constant, and he could no longer consume either liquids or solids. For two days he lay on the kang clutching his stomach, screaming, and then he died. Dr. Choedrak deduced that the interior lining of the man’s intestine had been scraped away by the roughage, accounting for the viscous substance. Once worn through, the intestine then burst—at which stage, when the man drank water, it passed into his abdomen, causing intense pain. At the very end, when nothing at all emerged, the internal wound had disrupted the digestive tract entirely and become fatal. Another man, named Teykhang Chopel, succumbed when his sphincter cracked apart due to the hard indigestible objects lodged in his intestine.

  Though he knew what not to eat, Dr. Choedrak could not endure such conditions long. As the anniversary of the Tibetan’s first year at Jiuzhen arrived, he too collapsed and was taken to the hospital—a place visited at one time or another by all the prisoners. It was here, during an intermittent stay lasting three months, that he gained a view of camp life outside the isolation of his own group’s daily existence. The hospital itself—no more than a barren room—existed as such in name only. There was virtually no medical equipment or supplies except for a few ointments for applying to wounds and some Chinese herbs said to help digestion. On occasion, when a patient was in the most dire condition, a shot of glucose would be administered or a mug of carrot juice given. The main function of the hospital staff was to dispose of the dead, many of whom had perished on its premises. Staff members were mostly prisoners who had received the jobs as a reward for being “progressive.” It was, in fact, a substantial dividend. Not only did the assignment replace grueling field labor; it also provided a veritable cornucopia of extra food, the staff routinely disguising deaths and thus continuing to receive the dead men’s rations.

  The hospital was run by three so-called doctors, all prisoners, but only one of whom was actually a physician. There was little he could do. The other two were the only women in Jiuzhen. Both were rather remarkable. They belonged to the work brigade of semi-released prisoners who lived beyond the camp’s walls. They too had once served terms within the prison, but, via a policy applied throughout the Chinese penal system, they were not released following completion of their sentences. Instead, their status was merely upgraded to that of “permanent laborer” and freedom forever postponed. Such laborers no longer received food, but had to toil, as did the population at large, for “work points,” which enabled them to purchase rationed grain. In Jiuzhen, the 800 to 900 additional people so classified were mainly allotted the light labor of planting fields the prisoners had already broken.

  Of the two women doctors, one was compassionate and selfless, the other driven and businesslike. The kind woman was a Christian, and fearlessly so: she openly wore a cross around her neck even after receiving repeated thamzing. An energetic and skilled worker, the guards had come to depend on her despite her attempts to thwart their practice of forcing patients back to field work. Her care was the sole sign of humanity in the prison. In one case witnessed by Dr. Choedrak, a Chinese inmate, bedridden for months, developed severe bedsores over his entire body. Once infected, the sores filled with maggots. Each morning the woman arrived from outside the prison walls and sat by his side to pick the maggots from the sores one at a time. Going to the kitchen, she obtained ashes from the stoves which she carefully strained so that only a fine powder remained. Spreading this on a large cloth, she placed it beneath the man. Whereupon great numbers of maggots fell off. The patient eventually died, but until the end, she continued to relieve him in this way.

  The second woman, named Wangchen, was, with the male physician, at the hub of a thriving black market. At night carrot juice was brought to the hospital by the kitchen staff—one carrot’s worth for each patient who had been put on a list by the doctors. Coming into the room, the staff would announce, “Carrot juice is ready,” at which point, Dr. Choedrak noticed, the same three Tibetans always received portions though they were far from the worst cases. At the time, he could only guess the reasons. Suspicious themselves, the authorities called in the doctors and the patients concerned, and soon had it out that the latter had bribed the former wi
th such articles as shoes and even a German fountain pen brought from Lhasa. But long before this news was made public, Tenzin Choedrak himself was deeply involved in this new avenue for survival.

  Wangchen’s activities went far beyond small bribes taken from those under her care. The bulk of her business involved serving as go-between for transactions amongst the prisoners and the labor brigade. Whatever goods were dealt, she always took a large commission in kind. While the prisoners procured bits of clothing to trade, the laborers had worked out a technique for obtaining extra dumplings. To discourage theft of the grain given out for planting, Jiuzhen’s guards coated it with poison before distribution to the laborers. Despite this precaution, because they were never searched, the laborers stole handfuls at a time, which they later washed. This they cooked for their own fare, reserving the dumplings they received from the prison kitchen, on the basis of their work points, to trade through Wangchen. Dr. Choedrak offered Wangchen an old chuba, the wool of which had been rubbed off. In exchange he received thirty dumplings: unfortunately, the kind tinged red from rotten bark. Of these, Wangchen took five as commission, and he obtained the rest two or three at a time over a month. But whatever the black market offered, it was still far less than that required for subsistance. Hence, the prisoners continued to eat whatever they could. One day Dr. Choedrak saw a Chinese inmate holding a long red worm in his cup. Through a fellow Tibetan who spoke Chinese he asked where he had found it. The man replied that he had defecated the worm in his stool. Careful not to be caught by the guards, he had picked it out, washed it and brought it back from the toilet to eat—which he did that day mixed in with his other food.

  The hospital also served as an additional place for interrogation. Shortly after a Tibetan was admitted, he would be visited by the security cadres, whose ongoing task was to question the prisoners. Their purpose was dual. While it was clear that the authorities considered a man’s borderline state to be fertile ground for extracting a confession—hunger accomplishing what struggle sessions and beatings had, as yet, failed to achieve—interrogations also discouraged inmates from entering the hospital and thus kept them at work filling the labor quotas.

  At the beginning of 1961, Tenzin Choedrak was released from the hospital and resumed work. His recovery was due not only to rest but also to his own form of cure. He had noticed one symptom shared by all those who died: severe diarrhea. In most, a thin watery stool was constantly emitted; to absorb this flow, a rag had to be kept in the pants. In Tibetan medical theory, Dr. Choedrak knew, the digestive power or heat of the stomach is the key to health, the level of digestive heat determining not only metabolism but, through it, the harmonic function of the three humors. In Jiuzhen, however, this heat had been subjected to a twofold attack: from the severe cold and the consumption of coarse, indigestible material with no grease or fat. To increase his digestive heat, Dr. Choedrak quietly practiced, for half an hour each night, an advanced form of meditation—called Tum-mo Bar Zar, literally meaning “Rising and Falling Heat.” After his cellmates had gone to sleep, Dr. Choedrak visualized purifying energy—in the form of white light—suffusing him, drawn in with each inhalation to a point just below his navel. Picturing a triangular flame the size of a rose thorn, he imagined it extending up the central channel of his body, through the tantric energy centers at the navel, stomach, heart, throat and crown of his head where, burning away the layers of mental impurity, it released a fountain of clear, nectar-filled light which returned, blissfully, down his body. He would then conceive all of the sufferings experienced in prison to be washed away, replaced by the ineffable joy embodied in the light. “In the beginning, one just imagines all this,” he recalled. “But after five or six months there was an unmistakable improvement, a slight rise in body heat. I was very weak, but I never had any more diarrhea or other digestive problems. Also, despite all the suffering we experienced, the meditation gave me more courage. I had no more fear, I just accepted my fate.”

  Dr. Choedrak returned to work at the worst possible time. The death toll had soared since early autumn. There was now more room on the kang—one could turn in one’s sleep—but lacking a fire, the prisoners still had to huddle together. The winter weather made work almost impossible. Their hands and feet wrapped in whatever scraps of cloth they could find, the men trudged to the fields under guard, where, in a frozen wasteland, they were expected to break the same amount of ground as they had in summer. The sores on their hands never seemed to heal, making it agonizing even to hold a shovel. Paradoxically though, the weather provided an occasional respite in the form of the so-called Mongolian wind. Rushing down from the Tengger Desert, the wind collected the gobi or rocky sand beneath it into a whirl of stone and dust which, resembling a needle from a distance, struck down from the sky, scouring the land. The first warning of its onslaught came from the village of Jiuzhen, five miles away. Over the intervening fields the prisoners heard the town’s loudspeakers faintly call for the inhabitants to take cover, at which time their own guards would send up a cry to retreat to the ditches they had dug for refuge around the work site. Here the prisoners could rest for up to three hours, battered from above by pebbles and debris, but otherwise undisturbed, until the all-clear command was given and work resumed.

  By the spring of 1961, forty of the original seventy-six Tibetans had died. The worst, though, was still to come. Even beyond the camp, no place in the countryside could hope to break loose from the tide of starvation. The prison itself was now sought out as a source of hope by the people of Jiuzhen village. The first sign that the local population was suffering as well came with the admittance of two new prisoners, both Chinese, from the town. One, a little man with a slightly hunched back, was so hungry that he had killed and eaten an eight-year-old boy. Although cannibalism was unknown within the prison walls, the prisoners had, on occasion, joked about it. Now the surviving Tibetans nicknamed the man “the Vulture”—after the vultures who were given corpses to eat in Tibet. The second arrival, an eighteen-year-old boy, had killed his own mother for nine pounds of flour which she had refused to part with.

  More direct evidence of life in the village of Jiuzhen was witnessed by the prisoners later that summer while laboring in the fields. Looking up from his work one day, Dr. Choedrak saw a large group of children, carrying small bamboo baskets, heading toward one of the fields. They were of all ages and all uniformly destitute—barefoot, emaciated and naked save for ragged shirts. Dr. Choedrak did not notice them again until some time later, when he heard a nearby officer detailing a detachment of guards to round up the children and bring them to the prison. At the end of the day, passing the field where the children had been, the Tibetans saw that the beans planted for that year’s crop had all been dug up. Later they heard that when prison guards asked the children which adults had sent them to steal the beans, they replied that none had; they were so hungry they had come on their own. Unwilling to arrest them, the authorities sent the group home. The guards, however, remained extremely sensitive about this clear evidence of famine. Their ire was such that one prisoner, overheard referring to the children as “human birds,” received thamzing for this single comment.

  A second incident, soon after, could not be denied. Dr. Choedrak’s group was now working on a field some distance from the prison. To get to it, they had to use the main road. As in many places in China, the road was lined on either side with trees. Beneath one of these, the inmates, on their way to work one day, came across a young mother in her late teens. She was plainly starving, her face and body badly swollen. Clinging in tears to her was a child of six and another four years old. The group leader stopped the procession and asked if she would like some vegetable to eat. The woman replied, “There’s no point in living any longer under such a government as this. I’d rather die. I don’t want this vegetable you’re offering me.” The prisoners left her and went on. The next day, they passed again and saw the family still hanging listlessly about the road. On the third morning, the pr
isoners found them lying across one another, still at the foot of the trees, all dead.

  Finally, the starvation in town was brought home to the prison itself. It began with an act Dr. Choedrak himself participated in. On the way to the toilets one afternoon, Dr. Choedrak and a companion named Champa Thondup encountered a young Chinese girl who had managed to slip into the prison. She was extremely thin, but swollen, her hair light brown and matted. On seeing them, she begged for something to eat. They managed to get her a small portion of vegetables and water and then watched as she started to consume them. The moment she ate, however, fluid poured from her nostrils and she began to cry out in pain—a common symptom of extreme famine. Hearing the commotion, the staff took her to the kitchen, where they gave the girl one egg-sized bun and then sent her back to the village. The result of their charity became apparent the next day. As the prisoners passed through the gate on their way to work, they witnessed a mass assault on the prison walls by scores of men and women from Jiuzhen demanding food. A full-scale melee ensued until, beaten back with rifle butts by the guards, the townspeople retreated across the fields.

  Despite the breakdown of conditions within their domain and the chaos without, the Chinese prison officials never deviated from their policies. With hundreds of prisoners already dead, executions—a constant feature of the camp—continued to be carried out. Charges were never specified. The names of those to be shot would simply appear on small posters periodically glued to the prison walls, beside such observations as “stubborn” or “suffers from old brains.” When the executions had been carried out—they were not, as in other prisons, held publicly—a red check would appear next to the names of the executed, and the poster would be left up for some time as a warning. Then in the nightly meeting the officers would repeat a well-worn observation: “If one reactionary is destroyed, that is one satisfaction. If two are destroyed, that is two satisfactions. If all the reactionaries are destroyed, then you are fully satisfied.”