CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Return to Tibet

John spent five weeks in Tibet in the summer of 1991 interviewing Chinese officials and Tibetans in eastern Kham (western Yunnan and Sichuan provinces) and Amdo (western Gansu and Qinghai provinces). Three weeks later he submitted a report on religious freedom, education, and population transfer to the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights. I had finished my report on China’s family-planning policy in Tibet, entitled “Tibetans Under the Knife,” but the refugees’ accounts of coerced abortions and sterilizations that it contained lacked the veracity of John’s on-site investigations. It was as though John and I were climbing. He had completed a new lead; I had to follow. John loaned me his hand-held video camcorder to use on my second trip to Tibet, this time in the winter of 1991.

I funded the trip with my savings from eight months of full-time work as a general practitioner, and hired another physician to staff the clinic during my absence. I planned to first travel overland for two months in Kham and Amdo before heading to Lhasa. Irony permeated my planning of the trip. I knew that all of the money I spent in Tibet would essentially subsidize the Chinese occupation. Also, four decades of Chinese colonization in Kham and Amdo, and the profusion of different Tibetan dialects, made it more practical for me to have a translator who spoke Chinese rather than Tibetan.

A friend at the International Lawyers Committee for Tibet recommended that I hire Jan, an American woman who had lived in China for seven years, written her graduate thesis at Berkeley on China’s “minorities,” and currently worked as a Chinese translator in San Francisco. During a brief phone conversation I told Jan about my previous experience in Tibet, and promised her that we would not get arrested. She agreed to join me.

In Hong Kong, an extra $10 paid to a discount Kowloon travel agent expedited our receiving a three-month Chinese visa the next day. The hundreds of soldiers directing travelers around Chengdu Airport in western China set the tone for our first contact with the mainland. Most were young and unarmed and laughed often among themselves. One woman soldier stopped giggling long enough to check our visas, and then we were whisked to a cab. This gave me a false sense of confidence until the manager at the luxury hotel we had selected saw the two of us coming through the marble lobby with our backpacks. I asked in English for a room. Predictably, none were available. Jan asked again, this time in the most polite form of Mandarin, and we miraculously had a suite on an empty wing, where two hall-monitor types kept up a twenty-four-hour watch.

At the hotel bar, Chinese men in gray suits whispered into obvious wires on the lapels of their coats as they surveyed the prostitutes, American military contractors and businessmen who filled the room. We had a drink with a French travel agent named Pierre. Within minutes of introducing himself, and after learning that Jan and I were “cousins,” and not a couple, he was offering to fly us illegally into Tibet.

“I am going to fly five Italians to Garze Monastery by helicopter,” Pierre said. “It is a fantastic place. I would like to stay there for months. The Italians are arriving from Hong Kong tomorrow. I have arranged a deal with a general to let us rent a military helicopter that has just arrived from the United States. When the general heard that they were paying $5,000 each, he agreed to take a cut. This is our test flight. You are welcome to come with us for free, he added, smiling lasciviously at Jan.

I would have gone on the helicopter, but Pierre’s assurances turned out to be less than reliable. The hotel’s three travel agents all said they could arrange a jeep to drive us through Kham, but this was tai gui (too expensive), and every town I wanted to visit was a “minority area,” which meant that it was closed to travelers.

It took me another day to learn that the hotel’s Golden Dragon travel company was really run for profit by the military. In a back room I inadvertently glimpsed a man putting a two-inch stack of hundred-dollar bills into a wooden drawer. He wore a gray business suit. Seeing us, he introduced himself as the general in charge. He did not seem to realize that I had seen the money. Jan asked in Chinese if he had been stationed in Chengdu long. She listened with interest when he said that he had been the first Chinese man to cross the Karakoram Highway. We also learned from him that Golden Dragon could issue us any permit we wanted—for a price.

The general led us to an adjacent room and introduced us to the manager, who insisted that we use her English name of Lois. “Several months ago,” Lois said, “an American couple caused trouble for us.” Lois described at length how the Americans had brought “shame” on Golden Dragon for interviewing Tibetans and writing “untrue” things in the press. I presumed that the Americans she was referring to must have been John and his translator. I promised to not cause trouble and started bargaining. Lois wanted $200 for every day we rented a new Toyota jeep, which came with an obligatory driver and guide. “Tai gui,“ Jan said.

After an hour of negotiation, I signed a contract agreeing to pay $1,080 for ten days in a military jeep. Lois called at seven the next morning. She had gotten our travel permits, but informed me that I would have to pay an extra 100 FEC (thirty U.S. dollars) for three non-driving days that we would have the jeep. Jan and I immediately headed to the Golden Dragon office, where we started arguing with Lois. “I did not calculate exactly,” Lois said. “There is no profit in it for me.”

“That’s your problem,” I said, and then reminded her of our contract.

“I have not actually gotten your permits,” Lois said.

Jan tried to intervene, but then I unleashed the ultimate insult: “By being dishonest, you are losing face,” I shot at Lois.

Lois screamed at me in Chinese. I did not need a translation to know that she had canceled our trip. I explained to her contritely that I didn’t care about the extra money, but the principle. I took a perverse pleasure in repeatedly taking Lois to the limit, apologizing, and then resuming my attack. Later that afternoon we finally signed another contract.

Our Chinese driver, Mr. Chu, had an untamed mop of thick, dark hair that seemed permanently windblown. He had learned Tibetan as a child when he had accompanied his father, who was also a driver, on trips all over Tibet. He told us that he had many Tibetan friends, and that Americans gave the best tips. Neither Mr. Chu nor our guide, Zhou, minded Jan’s request that they not smoke in the vehicle. I felt an immediate affection for both of them, despite the obstacles they might represent for my work.

Zhou was twenty-two years old and had never been to any of the towns where we would be traveling. He also spoke fluent English, which made me suspect that he was a policeman. A few minutes into the trip we struck a bond when he said that his mother, father, and older sister were all obstetricians. He had decided to become a guide, he told us, because doctors had to work too much.

I was surprised to see so many construction projects on the fertile plains, with thousands of people shoveling sand and gravel along the river as we wound into the barren mountains. I counted the trucks that came barreling down the steep, winding road carrying what appeared to be old-growth logs. There were 200 of them before I stopped counting. When Jan asked where all the logs were coming from, Zhou said, “From the West.”

“You mean Tibet,” I said.

“Tibet is part of China,” Zhou corrected.

We drove through hundreds of kilometers of Kham’s denuded valleys. Dust choked the air, a product of fallow fields stripped of their root systems. Scarce stands of mature pine were the only reminder of the region’s once-great forests. The lone trees on the ridges stood out like fossilized dinosaur spines. Again I started counting trucks carrying timber to the mainland, and again I lost track after reaching 200.

After a few days Jan got bronchitis from the dust. The prospect of Jan being ill made me realize how dependent I was on her language skills to find and interview Tibetans, as well as to negotiate for food and places to stay. Unfortunately, none of the local Police Security Bureau (PSB) officials knew we were coming, as Lois had promised, so we had to deal with prolonged bouts of intrusive questioning. Because we were traveling in “closed” towns, Jan had to put up with a lot of mei you (don’t have) before finding any hotels that would take foreigners. Invariably, our rooms looked out over construction sites where stone-crushing equipment clanked until 4:00 A.M. When the cacophony finally stopped, the roosters would start crowing. This pattern primed us for our first fight with Zhou.

“I have to be with you at all times,” Zhou said when we first tried to take a walk alone through a Tibetan town. “You are not allowed to leave the hotel without me. You are not allowed to talk to Tibetans about anything political.”

Jan, nervous and worn out from her illness, burst into tears upon hearing Zhou’s reprimand and walked away. Zhou did not know how to respond. At a loss, he yelled for her to come back, but she kept going. I felt sorry for him. Jan had given his male ego a good beating. “Now you’ve done it,” I said sardonically, slapping Zhou on the back. I left in the opposite direction. Zhou retreated to his room to sulk.

I hurried into town and met up with Jan in the market, where we agreed to take advantage of the opportunity and go to the local People’s Hospital. “If Zhou finds out,” Jan said, “I’ll tell him you needed medicine for la du zi (diarrhea).”

We made it to the hospital at noon and waited for an hour in an anteroom while the doctors had their lunch. A pale, elderly Tibetan man patted the bench next to him and we sat down. Dirt caulked the cracks in his trousers and calloused hands. He was obviously a farmer and communicated with us through his twenty-four-year-old daughter, who spoke Chinese. I learned that he came from a nearby village, and he said that he had been suffering from a cough and pain in his right chest for a month, which was why he was here at the hospital. He also told us that he had seven children between the ages of eighteen and forty-two years old.

Jan asked how it was that he could have had so many children. He explained that the Chinese didn’t start family planning in Tibet until 1989. Now there was a 2,000-yuan fine for extra children. Our brief conversation confirmed what I had learned from interviewing refugees: there was regional variation in many aspects of China’s family-planning policy in Tibet. Jan was reluctant to ask the father and daughter about abortions, but she did. Both of us were surprised when the daughter said casually that all Chinese hospitals did abortions and sterilizations, and that most of the women in her village had been sterilized.

Within minutes of entering the People’s Hospital I came upon a room with four Chinese women internists huddled around a pot-belly stove. Jan introduced me as a mei guo dai fu (Western doctor). I said that in the United States internists were the most intelligent doctors. Jan translated this and the women smiled; apparently, this was also true in China.

The two-child policy for minority women had been changed this year, the internists told us after they stopped giggling. Now minority women who lived in towns could have only one child, just like Chinese women. I asked them about contraceptives and the doctors said that Tibetans didn’t like interfering with conception. Abortion for any reason was anathema to their religious beliefs.

“For these reasons,” Jan translated, “many Tibetan women would rather be sterilized than have an abortion or use contraception.” The implications of their statement saddened me; the coercive nature of this policy had even more profound implications for the Tibetans than I had assumed.

The day after our confrontation, Zhou could not look Jan in the eyes. During the night Jan and I had worked out a strategy to become super tourists. Our plan was to wear Zhou down with sight-seeing at the next few towns so he would want to leave us alone, enabling us to conduct our interviews. We dove into our roles with enthusiasm.

Several nights later, while resting at a truck stop, Mr. Chu, Zhou, Jan, and I drank rum and warmed our hands over the electric wire heater we used for boiling tea. Zhou’s face reddened after one sip of rum. He soon asked me to arm wrestle. I pretended at first not to be interested, then beat him handily. He pouted until I challenged him to do pull-ups on the door jamb. Zhou did three. I stopped at fifteen.

A local PSB officer barged into the room. I offered him a mug of dark rum. He sucked the black liquid enthusiastically through his decaying teeth and told us that he was fifty years old. Twenty years ago, when the army first sent him to this outpost, Tibetans wore animal skins without undergarments. I thought we were in for a lecture on the backward Tibetans, but the official said that he took pride in the local customs and had learned the local dialect. He encouraged us to return in late July and early August for a festival at which thousands of nomads congregated for horse races, dancing, and drinking.

After gulping his second rum he expressed his exasperation that a foreigner who had traveled here the previous year had written an article about how backward the area was. This had hurt him because he had seen how the local economy had improved. The official stood up and left as suddenly as he had entered. Although he did not return, his intrusion fed my growing fear that we would never have enough privacy in Tibet to do our research.

Mr. Chu said that some Tibetans had picked up bad Chinese habits, like cheating other people. He attributed this to Tibet having been taken over by China. Tibetans, he said, were compassionate, kind people. They seemed backward to those Chinese who didn’t have religion. The Chinese who had experienced contact with the Tibetans were richer spiritually.

Hearing both this Chinese official and Mr. Chu tell us that they genuinely liked the Tibetans enlivened me. The Chinese were learning compassion from the Tibetans. Zhou smiled broadly and offered us the use of the jeep, “for free,” for an extra day’s drive to Lanzhou. “I will personally show you the sights,” he told us.

Mr. Chu agreed and we all drank. I said that when I was Zhou’s age I had realized that my own government could not always be trusted. I mentioned Watergate as an example.

“Irangate,” Zhou added confidently. “About Tiananmen Square, I don’t know what the truth is.”

“A lot of demonstrators were killed,” I said.

“We can discuss these things among ourselves,” Zhou said. “Not with foreigners.”

Hundreds of thousands of yaks and sheep grazed on the plains as we crossed into Amdo a few days later. We spent an entire day driving on a dirt track and stopped often for yaks to get out of the way. Noble-looking men and women with one child on the back of their horses tended expansive flocks. Zhou was in a good mood and shared a large bag of cookies with the Tibetan families we passed riding yaks and walking barefoot through the fresh snow.

We were snowed in for three days in a small town. The fashionable Tibetans there wore leopard collars around their sheepskin coats. Zhou reluctantly agreed to accompany us to the local Tibetan hospital, where we found a Tibetan physician in his office on the second floor. He wore long underwear and a sweater beneath his soiled white coat.

Jan asked questions in Chinese. The Tibetan doctor’s name was Tenzin. He represented the seventh generation of physicians in his family, a heritage that had been passed from father to son. Before 1980, when the Chinese built the hospital, sick Tibetans had come to the doctor’s home. Now every township in Amdo had a Chinese-built hospital. Tenzin dreamed that in ten to fifteen years the Tibetans would have a major teaching hospital where local doctors could hone their skills. Although there was a Tibetan medical school 30 miles away in Aba with thirty students, most of the Tibetan physicians still learned medicine from their fathers.

By the time we finally got around to discussing family planning, Zhou was completely bored. In rural villages Tibetans were allowed to have three children, one more than the women from the local Hui and Chiang minority communities. As in Kham, many Tibetan women chose to be sterilized rather than face a fine of 2,000 yuan.

Tenzin surprised me by saying that many Tibetans had developed a greater sense of reproductive responsibility. They understood that with the privilege of being able to create life came a responsibility not to have more children than the environment could support. I asked him if Tibetan medicine had any birth-control pills and Tenzin replied that they did, but they were not 100-percent effective. Most Tibetan physicians advised their patients to abstain from intercourse from the twelfth day of a woman’s cycle to the end of her next period.

After we left I asked Zhou if he had a preference for a male child. He laughed. “When I was in university,” he said, “I joked with my friends that having a girl was bad. But I did not really feel that way. In cities everyone wants their child to prosper. This means having only one. Otherwise there will not be enough resources to go around. In urban areas people understand this. In villages they have backward beliefs. This is a matter of education.”

Later that same day Jan and I snuck back to the hospital on our own. This time we met two Chinese women obstetricians in a room identified as the “Family-Planning Office.” Jan introduced me to them as an American obstetrician and the three of us compared the contraceptive techniques used in our respective countries. The doctors said they had prescribed both IUDs and birth-control pills. They also sometimes used hormonal implants that prevented ovulation for from three to six months, but these also caused side effects like giddiness and blood clots. They also told us that most Tibetan women chose to be sterilized in order to comply with the family-planning policy.

The women doctors sat up proudly when Jan translated my statement that Chinese women had more options for family planning than Western women. In China, the doctors explained, they could do D&C’s up to four months after conception, and injections of levanor, which induces abortion, up to eight months. They claimed that they routinely performed tubal ligations that took no longer than fifteen minutes.

“What happens if the infant comes out alive?” I asked.

“They are given an injection of alcohol into the anterior fontanel [the soft spot on a newborn’s forehead] or submerged in water,” Jan said. “In China, this is considered abortion.”

We spent our last evening roasting yak meat on the heater and drinking bai jiu (rice wine). I turned the television on at ten, when the news was broadcast in English, and was surprised to hear the commentator denouncing George Bush. “The People’s Republic of China condemns George Bush for interfering in China’s internal affairs,” she said. “Today the U.S. president signed the State Department Appropriations Bill that recognizes Tibet as an occupied country.”

Mr. Chu and Zhou were excited about finally returning from the countryside to their homes. Mr. Chu stopped often to purchase freshly killed rabbit, three pheasant, and quail. Zhou refused to take a 200-yuan tip I pressed on him when we got back to our hotel in Lanzhou. “We are friends,” he insisted, holding my hand in his fist. We embraced, and I forced the money into his pocket. Mr. Chu gladly took the money I offered him and volunteered to drive for us again anytime. Jan organized the farewell photo. She messed Zhou’s and my hair. There was no need to mess Mr. Chu’s hair.

We soon learned that no permits were needed to travel in Gansu province. I was glad to hear this, because China had instituted its eugenics program in Gansu, where mentally handicapped women were sterilized to improve the “quality of the race.” Here I began using John’s video camera. I had an aversion to pointing a camera in anyone’s face, and I knew I would be in situations where I wanted to film people discreetly. I worked on shooting the camera from the hip, obscuring it under a loose shirt or jacket. I practiced on slogans painted in six-foot characters on the town’s adobe walls: ABORTION IS NOT OUTSIDE OF FAMILY PLANNING; AN OVERGROWN POPULATION CAN BE OPPRESSIVE; FAMILY PLANNING IS EVERYONE’S RESPONSIBILITY.

Jan was sick again when we arrived at our hotel and needed to rest. This left me at a real disadvantage, but I tried to buoy my spirits with the thought that every hospital we had visited so far had contained at least one physician who could speak English. I had also learned how to introduce myself in Chinese as an obstetrician, and how to ask essential questions.

I went to the local People’s Hospital and met Dr. Chang, a friendly young pediatrician whose English improved the more we talked. I said in Chinese that I treated babies, and he showed off for me all of his patients: three infants, all less than a year old, all admitted for rehydration. The children were plugged into well-used intravenous lines. I shuddered later when I saw the nurses refill the glass bottles with boiled water; if the children survived their rehydration, they could very well die from disseminated yeast and bacterial infections spread by way of the IV lines.

For an hour Dr. Chang translated into English the captions to the pictures in the pediatrics textbook in his office. I had not realized at first that he was Tibetan, and that though he could speak Chinese, and even a little English, he could not speak his native tongue. Jan confirmed this the next day when she returned with me. Dr. Chang had been sent to Lanzhou at the age of five, where he had lived until he had graduated from medical school two years before. He was twenty-three.

He did not realize that the video camera I had placed an arm’s length away from him on his desk was filming him as he explained China’s two-child policy for Tibetans. I realized that filming anyone without their consent could be seen as unethical. I also felt strongly that China’s coercive family-planning policy, like its oppressive occupation of Tibet, had to be exposed before it could be stopped. Dr. Chang blushed when I asked what happened to babies who were still alive after an abortion. I rephrased the question and he shook his head. He would not answer.

The next day, when a recovered Jan told him that I was an obstetrician, Dr. Chang took us to a conference room and recruited a tall friend of his who was also an obstetrician, as well as an internist who chain-smoked cigarettes, to talk with us. Each of the three were mesmerized when Jan spoke, enough so that none of them noticed the sound of the video camera’s small lens turning automatically as it focused. I aimed at the obstetrician when he said, “In cities they can offer IUDs. In minority areas sterilization is the only form of birth control.” When he bragged that he could do a tubal ligation in ten minutes, and had once done forty in one day, I could not resist looking down at the camera to make certain it was recording. I was mortified to see that it was not.

The chain-smoking internist explained in English that family planning was more lax in distant villages, where Tibetans were known to have three or more children, while in big cities like Lanzhou, women could have only one child. Most of the people in this area were minorities: Hui, Tu, Chiang, and Tibetans.

“What do you do with handicapped women?” I asked.

“Eugenics is part of China’s national family-planning policy,” the internist said. “The national government says that women who are diagnosed as being mentally ill are to be sterilized.” When asked how he diagnosed mental illness he replied, “We ask questions in simple terms in order to determine their intelligence.”

Before our meeting ended, I did not get to find out if a Tibetan woman who could not read or speak Chinese was at greater risk of sterilization. I also had not yet witnessed a procedure. Still, I should have known better than to return to the same hospital for a third time. Dr. Chang was not as pleased to see me, but he helped me look for an obstetrician. We found the head of the obstetrics department in the hall. He said that Dr. Chang’s friend was away visiting small villages today. Dr. Chang asked if I could see a tubal ligation and the chief berated him. “This hospital does not do operations,” Dr. Chang said sadly. “I’m afraid you axe not allowed here. You must leave immediately.”

We took his advice. Luckily, the bus driver stopped for anyone on the road who hailed him, regardless of how packed the bus had become. I was squashed next to a Tibetan woman and her cherubic daughter, who wore matching enormous corduroy overcoats. This left half of me hanging out into the aisle, battling hands and elbows. Jan had brought along a washboard to insulate her feet from the freezing metal floorboards; we had known setting out that since we would now be traveling by bus in rural Tibet, we would need to employ more sophisticated survival techniques.

The first pass offered vistas of distant curtains of rock. Herds of yaks, sheep, and wild horses grazed freely on the hills. We followed a red dirt track into a canyon. In one adobe settlement our Chinese driver had to slow down for a group of Tibetan women herding sheep through the road. He leaned on the horn and spat at the women as he plowed forward and scattered their sheep.

In the next town, we walked right into the obstetrics wing of the People’s Hospital and met five female Tibetan obstetricians. I put the video on wide angle and asked why there were no male obstetricians here. Jan and the doctors laughed at me. “Cultural barriers prohibit a Chinese man from being with a minority woman,” Jan translated.

A young obstetrician named Dr. Xian did most of the talking. Like most of the other Tibetan physicians we had met, these obstetricians could scarcely communicate with their Tibetan patients unless they spoke Chinese. After we compared different methods of abortion, Dr. Xian says that all obstetricians routinely performed abortions and sterilizations. I asked if I could observe an operation.

“Mei wenti“ (“No problem“), she said, and told us to return at two that afternoon.

I was so excited that I had a difficult time paying attention to Dr. Xian saying that Amdo had special teams of doctors and nurses that only visited remote areas. These mobile birth-control teams traveled year-round to educate nomads and villagers about diet, contraception, and family planning. The mobile teams performed abortions and sterilizations according to a two-child policy. The procedures were free; women had to pay for medicine.

Dr. Xian washed and dried her hands with a soiled rag before leading us into a room where a woman lay naked on a table with her legs spread in stirrups. Dr. Xian wore a surgical mask and draped a filthy cloth over the woman’s pelvis that exposed her vagina.

Shooting from the hip allowed me to capture the scene in graphic detail as Dr. Xian did a pelvic examination. The nurse handed instruments wrapped in a stained cloth to Dr. Xian. The patient moaned when Dr. Xian inserted the speculum and sounded the uterus with a metal wire. She pinched the cervix with forceps and pulled it up to insert the curette. I began to feel hot. I had gotten so accustomed to cold weather that I now habitually wore silk underwear beneath a union suit, a wool shirt, and the jacket I wore to conceal the camera. I tried to unbutton my shirt and long underwear as discreetly as possible. Sweat beaded on my forehead as Dr. Xian scraped the inside of the uterus and the products of conception sucked through the clear plastic tubing.

When large droplets of sweat began cascading off my forehead and upper lip, I knew I was about to pass out. The woman’s moaning made me think of all women in Tibet, and China, who were undergoing these mechanical, unsanitary, coerced abortions. With the blood draining from my head, I staggered white and shaking out of the operating room. I lay down on a bench outside. A Tibetan man there looked at me as though seeing overdressed Western men staggering out of operating rooms on the brink of losing consciousness was normal. I was sitting upright again when Dr. Xian came out to see what had happened to me. Jan told her that the procedure they used was just the same in the United States, and that I left because I had wanted to respect the woman’s privacy.

As we walked up the hill to town, I realized that I had gathered enough material for my report. I needed to get to Lhasa, and knew that this meant I could no longer keep my promise to not get arrested. Jan realized this too. She agreed to accompany me to Xining by bus, from which I would continue alone to Lhasa.

I stopped to talk with two Tibetan families waiting in a wagon behind a tractor. “Tashi delek. Nga America amchi yin“ (“Hello. I’m an American doctor“), I said. Most of the Tibetans on the cart looked at me trying to figure out what I had just said. A woman with two children on her lap understood. “Lhasa-kay“ (“Lhasa dialect“), she said, and explained to me that “hello” in the Amdo dialect was, “chö daymo, nee ya,”

I told her that I was thirty-three years old. She said I looked older. When she said she was twenty-nine years old, I said she looked younger. Changing the subject deftly, I asked, “Chop-chup, du-gay?” (“Have you been sterilized?“) The woman said yes, she had been sterilized after having her second child at the local People’s Hospital.

Although I did not have the Chinese and Tibetan language skills necessary to conduct a thorough interview, this encounter showed me that I could still glean some information on my own. I could also still try to get footage of a sterilization being performed in an operating room. As it turned out, I needed this newfound optimism to enter the land of mei you on my own.

When we reached Xining, the travel agent at the hotel said that the road from Golmud to Lhasa was closed: nine Westerners had died when a bus overturned. I abandoned the notion of taking a bus or hitchhiking to Lhasa and instead returned to Chengdu by train with Jan.

Except for the speakers playing socialist tunes and propaganda at high volume, I loved sleeping on Chinese trains. Even our two compartment mates, I noticed, seemed to dislike the intrusion. I waited for the two men to step out to smoke; fortunately, we did not have to wait long. Jan guarded the door while I liberated seven three-and-one-half-inch screws before each speaker fell forward and exposed the two essential wires. Clipping them, I felt a momentary surge of nostalgia-inducing adrenaline.

I found an Englishman on the train whom I had met in Dharamsala. He traveled under a Tibetan name, Nema, because he wanted to return to Tibet in the future. Nema shared Lanzhou bai jiu with us and told me the latest traveler stories.

“Two dozen foreigners are stranded in Golmud,” Nema told us. “No one is getting through. One Dutchman shaved his head and disguised himself as a monk, but the police caught him and turned him back. The truck drivers are afraid to lose their licenses if they are caught with a foreigner. One Frenchman supposedly hitchhiked to Lhasa. It took two weeks. He was so pissed off when he arrived that he would not speak to anyone for days.”

Nema had come to Amdo to improve his Chinese and Tibetan and to buy books. His trip had been a success; he had bought seventy pounds’ worth of books, so many that he was having trouble sending them all home.

The barren fields beside the train tracks made me feel detached. Patches of ice reminded me that I had not seen anything green for weeks. Winter was an ugly time to travel in Kham and Amdo.

“When George Bush did his seven-month stint as U.S. ambassador to Beijing,” Nema said, “the Chinese had a difficult time pronouncing Bush, They referred to him as Ambassador Bushi, which means ‘no’ in Mandarin.”

Back in Chengdu, I met Peter, a Canadian probation officer, and Anna, a Yugoslavian tour leader, at a travelers’ hotel. They were planning a four-day trip to Lhasa, the shortest possible tour, and asked if I wanted to join them. It sounded good to me, but I had hopes of staying longer.

They said they wanted to stay longer too, but were en route to India. After paying $600 each, which included round-trip airfare, we celebrated at a pub.

There we met a gregarious Tibetan man named Puntso who asked us to sit with him and his rinpoche (revered monk). He explained that the rinpoche was the head of a large monastery in India. This was their first trip to China. Puntso led us to a large man wearing thick gold rings and a pin-striped suit who presided over a group of six Tibetans. The men wore suits. The women wore elegant silk chubas.

The rinpoche barely acknowledged our presence when Puntso introduced us by our countries, as “Mister Canada, Miss Yugoslavia, and Doctor America.” He gulped a glass of warm Coca-Cola before the ice in it could melt and immediately called out to the waiter for another. When I asked where his monastery was in India he replied, “I hate Americans.”

Puntso laughed nervously. “Rinpoche does not hate Americans,” he said.

“I hate all Westerners,” the rinpoche said. “The West sold out Tibet.” One of the women burst into tears and pulled her coat over her head.

“If communism can fall in Eastern Europe, it can fall in China,” I said.

“Tibet is finished,” the rinpoche shouted as he gulped another Coca Cola. I looked at the angry, overweight man downing Coke and saw a diabetic on the verge of physical, emotional, and spiritual breakdown. I said resignedly that I hoped he was wrong and excused myself before losing my patience. If this had not been the eve of my return to Lhasa, I would have wanted to talk more with the despondent rinpoche.

Once aloft, Peter and Anna each shot a roll of film before we landed in Lhasa. I too was moved by the snowcapped leviathans rising above the clouds, but I knew the mountains would look diminutive in their photos. Instead I pondered what Lhasa might hold for me this time. I wanted to find out what had happened to my patients in the Jokhang Monastery, especially Champa Tenzin. I was also determined to videotape a sterilization.

Landing in Gonggar Airport and having to walk through a gauntlet of soldiers with machine guns reinforced my plan to avoid our tour as much as possible. Andy, the English name of our preassigned guide, had no trouble picking out the only three foreigners on the flight. He was tall and friendly and fluent in English. He welcomed us to our black luxury sedan with dark tinted windows, the same car government officials used. “For the next three days the driver and I will take you wherever you want,” he assured us. During the two-hour drive to Lhasa we learned that going “wherever you want” meant choosing between tours of the Potala Palace, the Ganden, Sera, and Jokhang monasteries, and a carpet factory. We were forbidden to go anywhere without Andy.

“In Yugoslavia we have more freedom than this,” Anna said, demanding that Andy stop the car. “I want to take a photograph of that Tibetan village. Is that all right?”

“Whatever you wish,” he said, feigning a smile.

“How long have you been in Lhasa?” I asked.

“Too long,” Andy said. “First the government told me two years. Five years later I’m still here.”

We stopped to take pictures of eleven Tibetans riding on a tractor cart, barley fields, and a gigantic image of the Buddha painted on a

boulder. Instead of taking a picture of the Buddha, I photographed a military convoy in desert camouflage coming out of Lhasa: trucks packed with soldiers, more trucks towing artillery and antiaircraft guns, chauffeured jeeps carrying officers in dark glasses. After the convoy passed I asked Andy what he thought of the Eastern European countries becoming independent.

“Russian communism was a proletarian revolution,” Andy said. “The workers revolted because they wanted a higher standard of living. Chinese communism is a peasant revolution. In China, peasants have a good standard of living. Housing is free. So is health care and education. China will not revolt.”

“What about Tibet?” I asked.

“Have you been to Tibet before?” Andy asked. I said that I had, but lied in telling him that I had last been here in 1986. He bought it. “Maybe Tibetans will get independence,” he said indifferently. “The longer I am in Tibet the more I want to go home.”

We stopped at a military checkpoint outside the city limit. Andy relinquished our passports and permits to soldiers wearing riot helmets and AK-47s. Peter trembled when I aimed my camera from my lap and photographed a soldier peering inside our car. When we drove through Andy pointed out dozens of three- and four-story buildings under construction for Chinese settlers, including a war college campus of forty-three buildings, as though this would impress us.

Peter and Anna started arguing with Andy when we stopped at a sterile cement hotel. “This has nothing to do with Tibet,” Anna complained, “and it costs ninety FEC, the same as the Holiday Inn.” Andy said that it was too late to change. We should rest for two hours before going to Sera Monastery. I agreed.

When Andy left, I suggested to Peter and Anna that we head over to the Barkhor in the heart of Lhasa. They enthusiastically agreed, but began to look worried as we walked through mile after mile of housing complexes for Chinese immigrants. There were so many more buildings and Chinese in Lhasa since I’d last been here that I lost my bearings.

Finally, we stumbled into the Barkhor Square and its living stream of pilgrims circumambulating the Jokhang Temple. Peter and Anna were enchanted. They stopped so often to take pictures that I made plans to split off and meet them back at the hotel.

A quick stop at the Snowlands, Yak, Kiri, and Banak Shol hotels revealed that a dozen overland travelers were presently legally registered at the Yak Hotel, for only ten FEC a night. I took this information to the police station where I had previously gotten an “Alien Travel Permit.” A plainclothes Tibetan man said he was in charge and demanded to know what I was doing in Lhasa. I said that “Golden Dragon” had arranged everything, and he relaxed immediately. I asked him if Lhasa was an open city. At first he said that all foreign guests had to be on a prearranged tour, but after further questioning he admitted, “Technically, Lhasa is an open city. All travel outside the city limits must be arranged in a tour.” I thanked him and returned to my cement box of a hotel.

When Andy returned I told him that I needed to rest. He said that I would feel better tomorrow and whisked Peter and Anna away in the sedan.

I waited about ten minutes before heading out, taking a circuitous route to one of Lhasa’s Chinese hospitals. I started walking along the river until I was sure that no one was following me, then cut through alleys to the main road. A bicycle rickshaw took me to the emergency room, where an intern directed me to the run-down women’s building. I entered with the video camera filming from my hip.

A nurse shrieked and ran when she saw me. I followed her and soon came upon a Dr. Tashi, the oldest of the staff’s four female Tibetan obstetricians. I stuck out my hand and introduced myself in Chinese. Using a combination of Chinese, Tibetan, English, and sign language, Dr. Tashi gave me a tour.

We started with the operating room, where three doctors were trying to start an intravenous line in a pale Tibetan woman’s foot. Dr. Tashi said “hemoglobin” and scribbled a note to herself, “4%,” on her hand. She explained that the woman was having a miscarriage and would have to have an abortion the next day.

Dr. Tashi led me into the next room, where she stopped at each bed to give a brief diagnosis that summarized the patient’s condition. She introduced me to patients and their family members as an American obstetrician. Of the seven women in the room, I understood that two were there for chop-chup and one for gengo (abortion).

Some family members of hospital patients were cooking on the hospital’s rooftop, where we could see the Potala Palace rising above the sprawling concrete suburbs. Dr. Tashi’s tour ended in the doctors’ lounge. We flirted mildly, comparing our ages and then discussing techniques for abortion and sterilization. She laughed when I said that I was single. I laughed when she said that she was married. She herself had one child and used an IUD, she said, but most Tibetan women had chop-chup.

The next morning, I told Andy that I was too sick to see Drepung Monastery. “I hope you feel better this afternoon.” Andy said. “You will like the Potala Palace.”

When I got to the Jokhang, the Barkhor was packed with nomads and villagers who had arrived in Lhasa on religious pilgrimages. I also noticed a few Chinese beggars from the mainland. I entered the monastery with a group of Italian tourists who made videotapes of Tibetans prostrating, monks chanting in the central courtyard, and pilgrims offering dollops of yak butter to butter lamps.

I waited to find a familiar face, then finally began wandering down a hall. I eventually came upon Sonam, whom Heidi and I had treated for burns in 1987. He hugged me and pointed to the absence of scars on his face. “Yapo-du,“ he said, and left to find a translator. He returned with an English-speaking monk named Tenzin, whom I also remembered, and then began talking with manic intensity. Tenzin translated quickly to keep up with Sonam.

“In 1987,” Tenzin translated, “the Jokhang had eighty monks. Twenty have since died, some in prison. Some ran away to India. Others are still in prison. Many people worry: in the future, maybe few monks. Maybe someday lost.”

“We are workers in a museum,” he continued. “We have no true religious freedom. If we had true religious freedom, then monasteries would be like schools. There would be students here, and knowledge persons. Today, people are only allowed to pray and offer butter. After that, nothing. In Buddhism, the most important thing is to learn. The scriptures are very deep. The first time you can’t understand. After teaching and meditation you begin to understand. Today people only know devotional practice.”

A knock made Sonam go to the door, where he received a whispered message. Tenzin laughed when I hid my camera. “Champa Tenzin is waiting to see you,” he said. Word of my arrival must have spread through the monastery. Tenzin also said that we had to be careful that spies did not see us. As they had so many times after the riot, monks led me across the many-tiered rooftops to a secluded room.

Grotesque scars covered Champa Tenzin’s face, arms, and neck, but his eyes radiated a gentle strength. Before we started talking, he held up a picture of President Bush meeting the Dalai Lama, his smile breaking into an earsplitting grin. Through Tenzin, I learned that Champa’s friends had taken him to the Mendzekang several days after the October 1 riot. There the police interrogated him every day. After one month they took him to Sangyip Prison, where he was tortured; his burns proved to them that he was a “splittist agent of the Dalai Clique.” The police beat him with cattle prods and put him on starvation rations, but he did not break. After one month they stopped beating him daily. When they let him out after four months he learned that the Panchen Lama had helped win his release.

Tenzin said that I had to leave before any spies noticed me. He told me to come back in two days and Champa Tenzin would have for me a tape recording of prisoners describing their treatment and what they thought of Chinese occupation.

“A Tibetan guard at Sangyip is making the tape now,” Tenzin said. “It is important that it get out of Tibet safely.”

I agreed and asked if Champa had anything he would like to say to people in other countries. “We need help from the world people,” Tenzin translated. “We need freedom. We need independence from the Chinese.”

Later, our sedan broke down halfway up the steep driveway to the back of the Potala. I forgot that I was supposed to be sick and walked ahead, faster than the tour. Peter and Anna listened attentively to Andy’s tour guide perversion of Tibetan history. I surreptitiously ducked under a canvas tarp and followed the sound of women singing down into a dusty courtyard, until my eyes gradually distinguished forms shoveling rubble amid the cloud of dust. This was the real Potala, still under reconstruction after all these years.

I rejoined Andy on the rooftop. He was ordering a Tibetan worker to find the key to the Dalai Lama’s sleeping quarters. The worker replied in Chinese that he did not have the key. The man who did had gone for the day. “Tibetans are stupid,” Andy said. I made a panorama with the video camera that showed the ocean of new concrete apartment buildings stretching toward the mountains up and down the valley; smokestacks pouring black soot into the air cast a haze in the air that rivaled that of Los Angeles.

I whispered in Tibetan to the worker that I was a doctor who had seen the Lhasa riots in 1987, and that the Chinese occupation was bad. His face brightened and he produced the key to the Dalai Lama’s winter quarters from his pocket. When Andy came upon me photographing His Holiness’s bed, with his robe folded just as he had left it in 1959, he said, “You must have good karma.”

I said that I did, and took the opportunity to ask if I could extend my stay for two more days. Andy said this was impossible; he had already made our plane reservations. I mentioned the police captain who said I could stay at a Tibetan hotel as long as I did not leave the city limits. Andy refused again, but as he did so I noticed he was eyeing my 35-millimeter camera.

“This is a remarkable camera,” I said.

“How much did you pay for it?” Andy asked.

I told him the truth: I had bought the camera in Hong Kong two months ago for $100, and I would sell it to him for seventy-five. We shook hands and went straight to the Golden Dragon office. Andy gave Peter and Anna their tickets and changed mine to leave two days later. Then he borrowed American dollars to pay me. All of this happened so quickly that I wished I had asked him for more money.

“Where are you staying?” Andy called as I left.

“A Tibetan hotel,” I said.

“Call me if you need a guide.”

A woman in the market recognized me, and as we talked she fought to hold back tears. Her husband had been in prison for two years along with another man I had known. The woman smiled when people greeted her on the street, but her face quickly resumed its sad expression.

“I can’t trust anyone,” she whispered. “More than a thousand plainclothes police are always on the streets.” I wanted to reassure the woman that her husband would be all right, but this was not likely.

A Taiwanese woman doing laundry in the courtyard spoke enough English to communicate to me that she had hitchhiked here from Chengdu. Every night the police caught her in town and sent her back east in the direction from which she had come. Every morning she got up early and hitchhiked west.

I met an Israeli couple who spoke English, but they were too preoccupied with getting out of Lhasa to help me. Their flight from Kathmandu to Chengdu had landed in Lhasa with engine trouble. The local PSB had questioned them for a few hours, then agreed to let them stay for a week. There were also several German hippies who had hitchhiked in from the Nepalese border. They knew Otto and told me he was due to arrive any week now. Otto still came to Lhasa every year. The passage of time allowed me to remember the wildman’s spirit with fondness.

I went to sleep discouraged. However, the next afternoon I was recognized on the street by Rinchen, a Tibetan woman who had heard me address a demonstration at the United Nations in New York City. She asked me what I was doing in Lhasa. Within minutes she had agreed to go with me to the People’s Hospital.

Rinchen gasped as we walked straight into the operating room at the People’s Hospital. There we discovered Dr. Tashi putting a bandage over a vertical incision on a woman patient’s pubic region. The woman unceremoniously pulled her pants over the bandage and got dressed. “She was just sterilized!” Rinchen exclaimed after talking briefly with Dr. Tashi. I greeted Dr. Tashi and asked Rinchen to inquire how many children the woman had. “One child,” she was told.

At the next table blood was pouring from a pregnant woman’s vagina. Two doctors were trying to insert a rubber catheter into her urethra. Dr. Tashi explained for a long time in Tibetan before Rinchen translated, “There’s some problem with this baby. The mother’s got internal bleeding. The doctors feel the best thing to do is cut the whole thing out.” At first I thought this meant they would perform a hysterectomy, but it turned out they were talking about a Caesarean section.

“Is this what they would do in the United States?” Rinchen asked. She was not reassured when I said yes. Dr. Tashi said that she had to work. I thanked her and asked if we could see the patients I had seen the other day. “Mei wenti,“ she said—no problem.

“Isn’t she cute,” Rinchen said to a young mother and father holding their newborn daughter on the next bed. “It’s their first baby,” Rinchen told me. “They are in the performance business. He is in the Tibetan opera. She is a violin player. They are allowed to have a second child, but they have to wait three years. Otherwise, there is a 1,000-yuan fine.”

Another patient’s husband offered us large hunks of boiled lamb. “This man has five boys and six girls,” Rinchen said. “Last year the Chinese implemented family planning in his village. They have eleven children. This will be their twelfth. According to the local officials, what is already born is born. Nothing to do. But this new one in the stomach is a problem. There is a fine but no one is sure how much it is. Apparently they are more strict with city folks, especially cadre workers. All of the other families in the room are passing comments like, ‘He’s going to take it out.’ He is reluctant. He doesn’t know what to do. He says he wants to have more children, especially if they’re sons. His mentality is like counting his herd.”

Lying under two blankets in the next bed, a woman told Rinchen that she was pregnant for the second time that year. She had lost the first baby. “She asked the doctors to please let her have this child but they insisted that she have an abortion; the doctors say she will die if she has the child.” Another woman at the end of the row said that the doctors were pressuring her to abort her second pregnancy. Both women felt well and wanted to deliver.

When we returned to the Barkhor, Rinchen’s cousin was waiting outside her room at the Tibetan hotel. He had come by bus from Gyantse. When Rinchen saw him scratching, she started to pick nits from his head, throwing them over the wall. I went back to my hotel to retrieve a medicated shampoo that I was glad I had not needed to use. Rinchen was still nit-picking when I returned.

Under my direction Rinchen used warm water from my thermos to apply the shampoo to her cousin’s head. While waiting ten minutes for the shampoo to work, I told her the lice would walk off by themselves if he stood on his head. Rinchen helped lift her cousin’s feet above his head and held them against the wall. Neither he nor Rinchen questioned the Inji amchi (Western doctor), even after I said the lice would leave faster if he sang a song, Rinchen realized that I was playing a joke when her cousin started singing, but she did not say anything until he had finished. It was a rare moment of levity during my otherwise bleak return to Tibet.

There was no one around to translate when I saw Champa Tenzin for the last time to pick up the tape. In Tibetan we told each other that each of us, the Dalai Lama, and Tibet’s freedom were all yapo-du. Then we said farewell to each other. I carried Champa Tenzin’s smile with me while I waited for my ride to the airport. I had documented more than I ever imagined would be possible; to stay any longer would only increase my chances of getting caught. I tried to assume the countenance of a happy tourist who would someday like to return to Tibet in order to spend more money.

I had enough video interviews to show that China was implementing a two-child family-planning policy for rural Tibetans, and a one-child policy for those in larger towns and cities. To enforce this a host of economic, social, and political sanctions had been established. Although some contraceptives were available, abortion and sterilization were the primary forms of birth control in Tibet. The implications of the mobile birth-control teams and eugenics programs in Amdo were particularly disturbing. I did not know if China was committing genocide in Tibet, but it was my belief that China’s family-planning policy, and its colonization of Tibet, were having a genocidal effect on the Tibetans.

A Tibetan man gave me a ride to the airport at four in the morning in a dilapidated jeep that could only reach a top speed of thirty miles per hour. Tourist buses and Land Rovers passed us continually during the two hours it took to reach the airport. I arrived after the flight’s scheduled departure, but found the mob of passengers still pushing to get through customs for our flight.

A soldier looked at my ticket and pointed to the date, which was for the previous day—I had inadvertently overstepped my two-day extension. “Mei you,“ she said. How well I’d come to know those words.

“Golden Dragon,” I said. She smiled and stamped my ticket. She also ordered another soldier to carry my pack.

Soldiers walked back and forth along the line of passengers, who were kept standing outside the airplane for another half-hour in the frigid dawn air. I was the last person to get on the plane and the first to disembark in Chengdu. There, luckily, the customs agents were talking among themselves. I picked up my pack and casually walked past them. Looking back, I saw the agents beginning to search the long line of passengers.

I could not relax until I had cleared a second customs for a direct flight to Hong Kong. I wrote rock and roll titles on my video cassettes and befriended a Canadian couple who spoke Chinese and told me they loved China. They could tell that I was nervous and asked if something was wrong. I said that I had la du zi.

Soldiers searched my pack thoroughly and found the video cassettes. One looked at the tapes carefully and asked what I had taken pictures of.

“Beautiful people,” I said, as he leafed through my passport.

“Did you go to Tibet?”

“It was too cold,” I said. The soldier waved me through.