CHAPTER SEVEN

Chinese National Day

On October 1, Chinese National Day, no one had any idea that Lhasa would erupt in the largest nationalist uprisings witnessed by Westerners since the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950. As they had four days before, a handful of Buddhist monks circumambulated the Jokhang Temple at 9:00 that morning. The monks carried outlawed Tibetan flags and chanted, “China out of Tibet.” Pilgrims stopped prostrating. Urchins stopped tugging on tourists’ sleeves. Monks stopped chanting scripture. Women stopped hawking necklaces of cheap turquoise. All business activity ceased as Tibetans left their shops and homes to follow the monks.

At the completion of their third circuit around the Jokhang, hundreds of chanting Tibetans faced seven jeep-loads of police. The police beat the demonstrators with shovels and rifle butts. In the time it took the police to drag twenty monks into a nearby police station, the crowd outside swelled to about a thousand. Gunfire inside the building apparently made the crowd of Tibetans believe that the police were killing the monks.

I learned all of this from Julie, when she returned to find me breakfasting on sweet tea and yogurt on the third-floor balcony of our hotel. Julie had gotten up and gone out early, and had seen the crowd grow so fast that she knew something horrible was going to happen. By the time she returned I had already seen the column of black smoke rising above the Tibetan rooftops in the distance. John had come by fifteen minutes earlier to tell me he was going out on his bicycle, convinced that something important was going on. He had kept us up late the night before talking in legalese about how China’s “liberation” of Tibet was a euphemism for colonialism and violated international law. Now it seemed that Tibet’s unrest under Chinese domination might be erupting into violence. The thought of treating wounded demonstrators terrified me. As a newly minted physician I had never treated patients on my own. I stuffed bandages and antibiotics into my shoulder bag.

Julie and I held hands as we ran among the hundreds of people flocking to the Barkhor Square. The streets were so crowded that people had climbed on top of the metal fence around the Tibetan Medical Institute to look into the square. I searched the crowd for John; he was probably in front of the Jokhang. A police line kept us from crossing the open square, where a single overturned police jeep poured smoke into the air. A soldier raised his AK-47 to strike a Tibetan woman who tried to step through the line.

“Should we go back to our hotel?” a couple obviously from the Lhasa Hotel asked us from where they stood at a bus stop. “Isn’t this exciting! What’s happening?”

A shrill cry came from a Chinese man twenty feet away who was being beaten by a crowd of Tibetans. Blood spurted from his head amid a swarm of fists. He cried for mercy as the Tibetans beat him with stones and stripped the film from his camera. I felt a wave of revulsion for the Tibetans. No one deserves to be beaten. Desperately flailing his arms, the man broke free and ran toward a group of Chinese watching from a distance.

A troupe of kuchi kuchi children chased another Chinese man who was trying to ride his bicycle through the mayhem. The children threw rocks that thumped against his back. One rock hit the man’s head and sent his bicycle reeling. The children shrieked and threw more rocks. They treated the Chinese man the way they might have tortured an insect.

The crowd parted for a fire truck that I assumed would be used to extinguish the burning jeep. Instead, soldiers on top of the truck aimed the hose into the crowd. Sixty soldiers goose-stepped toward the crowd from behind the truck. The sound of coordinated boot steps striking the cobblestones punctuated the soldiers’ collective yell. Instead of stopping to extinguish the burning jeep, the fire truck headed toward the Jokhang.

Defiant fists rose out of the crowd of Tibetans guarding their most holy temple. They threw a volley of rocks that shattered the fire truck’s windshield. The truck made a u-turn and the soldiers followed. The Tibetans cheered. Julie and I took the opportunity to sneak past a policeman who had turned to watch the fracas. We sprinted in a wide arc around the burning jeep, wider around the truck and retreating police, and joined the thousand-strong crowd of Tibetans who were cheering and crying in front of the Jokhang.

Tibetan women alongside the monastery’s outer wall were pounding the street’s cobblestones into baseball-sized pieces, which the children in the crowd scattered at everyone’s feet. A monk standing on the Jokhang’s roof raised his fists and yelled down into the square. The woman next to me screamed, “They’re killing our monks.” I looked around for John and saw another crowd forming in front of the police station. More overturned vehicles clogged the alley.

The Tibetans next to me stoned a Tibetan man who had been taking photographs of the crowd. The man dropped his camera and fought for his life. The Tibetans are killing their own people, I thought; had they gone mad? Suddenly it dawned on me that this Tibetan must be an undercover policeman, like the other man with a camera. Their developed film would have been used to identify and arrest people later.

Julie was gone. I called her name and looked frantically around the crowd. I needed to find her, John, a familiar face. A crackling sound stampeded the crowd. I found myself stooped over, scurrying toward the burning vehicles. I ran past an overturned jeep with a young boy squatting next to a puddle of leaking gas. I spotted a policemen on the roof and jumped into an alcove where several families had taken refuge. Most of the people looked frightened. Two of the Tibetan men in the alcove stepped out into the alley, threw rocks at the policeman on the roof, and ducked back.

The two men laughed. They seemed deranged, and they presented easy targets for the police. A withered Tibetan woman with a baby in her lap motioned for me to come farther inside as the men stepped into the alley to throw another rock. When they returned to the alcove amid a burst of firecrackers, their faces were frozen in terror.

I peered around the corner and saw a woman shouting at the head of a crowd in front of the police station. Five Khampas with red tassels wrapped around their heads ran up to the station and climbed in through the broken first-floor windows. Other men followed. Soon every window had Tibetans climbing into them. Office furniture and police files were thrown out of the windows and piled at the station’s front door. Boys lit the pile using gasoline-soaked rags. The flames quickly engulfed the mountain of furniture and paper and reached up to the police on the roof. A nearby explosion paralyzed me, and I felt my heart thundering in my chest. A tire had exploded on one of the vehicles; I felt my arms and legs to make sure they were all there.

More fireworks from the rooftop drove home the sickening realization that the sounds I was hearing were actually weapons fire. I thought for a second about how easily human flesh is torn, took a deep breath, and ran out of the alcove and back to the Jokhang. I found Julie holding a Tibetan woman’s hand in front of the two-story pillars at the Jokhang’s main entrance. The three of us embraced. Tears rolled off the woman’s ruddy cheeks. She said something that neither Julie nor I understood and we started crying. I cried for the Tibetan children throwing rocks at the Chinese and for what it must have been like to grow up in Lhasa. I also cried for the Tibetans still inside the police station, and for John, who I hoped was not hurt, or worse. But mostly I cried for the fear of losing my life.

“John’s taking pictures in front of the police station,” Julie said. “I’m running film for him. It’s a miracle Otto hasn’t been shot. He’s at the front of the crowd, throwing rocks at the soldiers.”

Four running men carrying a monk on their shoulders materialized out of the smoke. The men ran as fast as they could and seemed to transport the monk effortlessly. Bullets strafed the wall over the men’s heads. They ducked and kept running toward us. Even at a distance, I could see the monk was badly burned. A policeman on the roof took a bead on the men with his pistol as they ran. Everyone around me was crying.

“Amchi yin” (“I am a doctor”), I said, and the crowd let me squeeze closer to the monk. He appeared to be unconscious. The skin on his arms, face, neck, and head was covered with second- and third-degree burns. Large sheets of flesh hung from his scarlet arms like onion skin. I could see in an instant that he needed intravenous fluids, antibiotics, and sterile bandages, none of which were available. Instead, the crowd lifted the monk overhead. He opened his eyes and raised a clenched fist. Everyone cheered.

The sweet smell of the monk’s cooked flesh made me gag. I could do nothing for him except document what I had seen. The crowd headed toward the soldiers at the far side of the square. The soldiers fidgeted with their machine guns. They looked nervous, as though they did not know how to respond to the angry Tibetans.

A Tibetan man came toward me carrying a small boy in his arms. Blood poured from the boy’s mouth and soaked the left side of his shirt. The man stared straight ahead. The boy looked up at me with weak eyes as I examined where the bullet had entered through a small hole near his heart and exited through his back. The boy needed a trauma surgery team. I pressed my hand onto the wounds as life faded from his eyes. His dazed father kept carrying the boy through the maddening crowd. There was nothing I could do. I looked for a weed or tuft of grass with which to wipe the blood from by hands.

Six men carried another man on a table through fifty yards of machine-gun fire on the ground in front of the police station, dodging single rounds from snipers on the roof. Even before they arrived I could see that the man on the table was dead. Pink foam oozed from his nose and mouth. His neck was warm but he had no pulse. Like the boy, he had been shot through the chest from the front, but this bullet had gone through his heart.

Eight small children hiding behind an overturned jeep used slings to throw rocks at the police in front of the burning station. They used the same slings that the shepherd boys had shown us in the mountains, but they were not old enough to make them CRACK when the rock shot out. The police fired back over the children’s heads. I doubted the kids understood that they could be killed by the police. “Stop,” I yelled at the children, but they didn’t listen.

A group of Tibetans huddled in the middle of the square. My first “Amchi yin” got me close enough to see a woman in a lavender chuba cradling the head of a sixteen-year-old boy. The bone structure and soft tissue on the right side of the boy’s face had been completely caved in by multiple blows with a blunt object. A Tibetan man wearing a business suit told me in broken English that the police had beat the boy inside the station. I watched the woman pour water from a chalice into her son’s unresponsive mouth. The boy was dead.

A war cry rose from a line of soldiers at the far end of the square. Their cry continued as they ran toward the Jokhang. Tibetans in front of the temple raised their fists in the air. The thought of fleeing did not occur to me. I picked up rocks along with the hundreds of Tibetans all around me. In a desperate reaction to the killing I became part of the violence myself. “Motherfuckers,” I yelled at the oncoming soldiers. “Die, motherfuckers,” I screamed with the first volley of rocks.

To my amazement, the soldiers turned in mid-stride and fled before our mob. We chased the soldiers off the end of the square and down the wide boulevard toward the Cultural Palace. This ignited cheers form the Tibetans as though for a day they had reclaimed Lhasa.

At dusk I stared at the smoldering remains of the collapsed police station. I still had not found John or Julie. Besides the few Tibetans who were sifting china cups and other such prizes from the rubble, I was surprised to see how quickly the pilgrims had resumed their circumambulations of the Jokhang. Amazingly, tourists were browsing among the stalls, most of which had already been set up again. A young man I had never seen before approached me and asked, “Are you the American doctor?” in an English accent. He introduced himself as Andrew and asked if I would come with him to treat a man he knew of who had been shot in the ankle. During the riot Andrew had put a pressure dressing on the wound, and had gotten directions to the man’s home.

Between the two of us we confirmed six deaths that we had witnessed personally: two monks in their twenties shot with AK-47s; one ten-year-old boy shot through the chest; a thirty-six-year-old woman shot in the head; a thirty-five-year-old man shot in the heart; and a sixteen-year-old beaten to death inside the police station. Andrew recorded each detail in a notebook.

Snapping his head from side to side as though he were still under fire, Andrew led me along the shadows from the two- and three-story Tibetan buildings, where darkness hid the dirt but not the smell of the excrement spread onto the streets. I walked quickly behind him, carrying a rock in each hand. After throwing rocks at the police I was nervous about carrying them now, but I was afraid of being attacked by mongrels. Lhasa’s dogs were out in force.

Headlights swept toward us across the cobblestones and we ducked into a side alley. A Lhasa Apso barked ferociously, and just got louder after I pretended to throw a rock at it. The dog continued to bark while a Toyota Land Cruiser filled with Chinese police drove slowly past the alley. We crossed a well-lit area that cast an eerie glow over a pack of mongrels heaped in confusion against a wall. Piled on top of each other they looked like adorable children; I counted fourteen of them before we rounded the corner.

“This is it,” Andrew said in front of a large wooden door. He knocked using its serpentine brass ring and shouted in Tibetan that he was with a Western doctor. Two men appeared in the alley and I turned to the wall and pretended to urinate. Andrew continued to knock and yell—too loudly, I thought. I became convinced that the whole neighborhood could hear him. He didn’t even know for certain if this was the man’s house.

Footsteps approached from inside. Andrew started speaking in Tibetan, then in Chinese. “Shit!” he said, walking away. “When I was talking in Tibetan, she said this was the right house. But my Chinese is better than my Tibetan. Once I switched she said that the man had already gone to the hospital.”

Andrew said that he knew of another man who had been shot in the leg. “He’s somewhere near here,” he said. After we first knocked loudly at two wrong doors a woman let us into her home.

“Thank you for coming,” the woman whispered before closing the wooden shutters. “I know how dangerous the streets are after dark.” She wore a colorful striped apron over a turquoise chuba. “My name is Pema. I am sorry that we have to be so secretive.” Pema smiled as she said this and I noticed that she spoke fluent British-accented English. In the dim light she motioned for us not to make a sound. We followed her up wooden stairs that were so steep I had to use the handrail.

“There are informers in every compound,” Pema whispered. “One of the neighbors will report us if they see us coming in or out.” The darkness scared me, but I was more afraid of not being able to help anyone who had been shot in the leg.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” Pema’s brother said, lifting a heavy hand to greet us. He said his name was Tsering. They were Nepalese Tibetans who had come to visit relatives in Lhasa. Tsering pulled the sheet back to reveal dirty, blood-soaked gauze wrapped too tightly around his right thigh. Most of the blood on the bandage had dried. Both of his feet had good pulses and color, which meant that the bullet had not severed an artery. I asked Tsering if he could move his toes, which he did, slowly. He could also move his foot and raise his leg.

Andrew asked a series of questions to find out what Tsering had seen. A Tibetan doctor had stitched Tsering up and discharged him before the police surrounded the Mendzekang. Tsering went on to say that he had heard of wounded Tibetans who went to the People’s Hospital, the only place where Tibetans had access to Western medicine, and the doctors there sent them to prison.

Tsering looked more relaxed than I felt. I couldn’t remove bullets without hemostats or injectable anesthetic; I had only bandages and antibiotics. Butter lamps beneath an eight-by-ten-inch color photo of the Dalai Lama lent an air of calm to the room. Pema poured cups of butter tea and my stomach shuddered. I sipped the tea anyway and found it to have a fresh, clean taste. I thanked Pema in Tibetan and she refilled the cup to the brim after the first sip.

“You speak Tibetan well,” Pema said.

I smiled back. Tibetans always said this no matter how little Tibetan you spoke. I asked if she had any boiling water with which to wash my hands.

Pema shook her head yes from side to side the way Indian and Nepalese people do. “I am familiar enough with Western medicine to know that you would need lots of boiling water.”

Pema poured hot water over my hands and the dried blood coming off my fingers unleashed mental images of the riot: the burned monk, the boy beaten to death inside the police station, the man shot in the heart. Tears blurred my vision for an instant. Pema offered me a filthy towel, but I air-dried my hands instead.

“Did the bullet go in here?” Andrew asked as I dabbed gauze on the bloody, fingertip-sized holes in Tsering’s thigh.

Tsering beamed. “In one side. Out the other.”

“Where were you when you were shot?” Andrew asked.

“I was standing in the alley next to the police station,” Tsering said. “The police were shooting pistols and machine guns from the rooftops and the street. I was looking right up at the policeman on the roof who was aiming down at me with his machine gun. A monk next to me was hit first. Then something hot ripped through my leg and I knew I was hit.”

“What happened to the monk?” Andrew asked.

Tsering turned his head to stare straight up at the ceiling. A single tear rolled down his unshaven cheek. “The bullet blew the back of his head off. Blood got in my eyes. I couldn’t see anything after that. Someone dragged me back.”

I cleaned the entrance and exit wounds with hydrogen peroxide, imagining the tunnel of macerated flesh through the thickest part of Tsering’s thigh. He needed intravenous antibiotics in a hospital. If an infection set in he could die, or at least need to have his leg amputated. By adding a mere squeeze of antibacterial cream, I was just putting a Band-Aid on an abyss. After rewrapping Tsering’s thigh with a clean roll of gauze, I asked if his leg hurt.

“No,” Tsering replied, and we both laughed. I knew he was lying. It was an odd moment to laugh but it made me feel better.

“You’re a lucky man to have such a wonderful woman taking care of you,” I said, and paused for their full attention before asking if Tsering had ever had a bad reaction to Western medicine before. I explained how to take the antibiotic pills and Tsering reached up and squeezed my hand. After effusive thanks and a few last sips of butter tea, Pema hurried us out into the dark hall. Before entering the street, Pema thanked us for saving her brother’s life. I said that I would bring more antibiotics later.

“Please don’t come back,” Pema said. “It is too dangerous. If the police see you…”

“Wait,” Andrew said, as I left to go off in search of John and Julie. “I need your help at a meeting.”