---

Barbara Demick is an American journalist who is the former Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times and soon-to-be Cullman fellow at the New York Public Library. She is famous for writing narrative nonfiction books, in which she uses individual characters to tell complicated and challenging stories. She started her journalism career in Eastern Europe, and wrote Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood, which describes one street’s experience during the siege of Sarajevo. In 2009, she published Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea about a group of six North Koreans living in the real-life version of George Orwell’s 1984. This year, she published Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town, which follows a group of characters in Ngaba, a town in the Tibetan part of China’s Sichuan province. Ngaba has become famous for being the self-immolation capital of the world, after scores of Tibetans started setting themselves on fire in the small town in 2009. In this interview, we asked her the challenges of reporting about Tibet, how those challenges compared to reporting on North Korea, the Chinese government’s policy towards Tibet, and the future of the Tibetan community in China and abroad. 

Q: What inspired Eat the Buddha? 

A: People keep asking me that, and I’m never quite sure what to answer because I didn’t grow up with an obsession with Tibet. I’m not a Buddhist, I wasn’t really a follower of the Dalai Lama. But I was attracted by the mystery of it, and the inability that I had to understand what was going on in Tibet and what it was like to be a Tibetan. It was some of the same factors that inspired me to write about North Korea — the mystery, the challenge. It seems to me that there are so few places left that we are not peering into on Google Earth and picking out all the secrets on the internet. There is just so much that is unknown about Tibet.

Also, I was a newcomer to China when I started this project. I’d moved to Beijing in 2007 without a lot of China background — I’d had like a year of Chinese. Everybody I met in Beijing seemed to be such a budding Sinologist, and I was not. So I thought, what’s left to write about? There were so many books about China that concentrated on the Northeast Corridor, going from Beijing down to Guangzhou, maybe as far west as Chongqing. A lot of what was left to write about was in the West. I was also very interested in Xinjiang. When I set out, I originally thought I would write a book that incorporated Xinjiang. But I do narrative nonfiction, and I follow people, and there was so little interaction between Uighurs and Tibetans, so I really had to pick one. 

Before starting on this book, had you done a lot of shorter reporting on Tibet?

I had not. I went to Tibet for the first time in 2008. But even before I did that trip, I had a feeling that I would write about Tibet or Xinjiang; I just knew that was what interested me. So, I started traveling regularly to the Tibetan areas in 2008. At that point, my book about North Korea was done but had not yet been published. I thought about it in a lot of the same ways: a place that was undercovered and where the people tended to be lost in the geopolitics. I felt a lot of what was written about Tibetans was stereotyped: Tibetans were these noble nomads and saintly hermits. But I didn’t really have a good sense of what it was like to be Tibetan, especially in the 21st century living on the cusp of China’s rise. And I just really wanted to understand them. That was a lot of what attracted me, because I felt like a lot of the Tibet story was just lost in this fog of propaganda from both sides. 

One of the ways you penetrate that fog is by following a group of Tibetan individuals. What are the advantages of using that narrative nonfiction style?

People like to read stories. They like to read narrative. There are books that are beautifully written and very eloquent, but if there’s no flow of a story, it’s hard for readers to get through. And the format really allows the reader some degree of empathy. This was the case with my other books as well, writing about Sarajevo and North Korea. I was trying to take people whose names and appearances and experiences were so foreign to my readers and trying to bring them alive. On the topic of empathy, when I started covering the war in the former Yugoslavia, it was already late 1993 or 1994, and there had been so much written about what was happening that people were talking about empathy fatigue among the public and aid agencies. I felt that by really getting close to the people on the ground, people whose names my readers couldn’t possibly pronounce, I would bring them alive, and I would get readers to care. I did something that was quite different. Normally as a reporter, if you’re writing feature stories, you have to find different people each time. If you’re writing about children going hungry, maybe you interviewed a great family last week, but then if you’re writing a story the following week about water shortage or political prisoners, you can’t use that family again. But I use the same people again and again so that the readers really get to know them and understand what it is like to be a Sarajevan under siege or North Korean or Tibetan. You can read news stories, but readers just don’t have a feel for what they would do if they were in that person’s shoes. So that is the idea behind the technique. When my first book about Sarejevo came out, which was also based on a newspaper series, it was somewhat unusual, but I don’t think it’s that unusual now.

And how did you choose the characters that you ended up following for this book?

I originally wanted the book to be about young Tibetans. The central question I had was: what do you do if you’re a Tibetan? Do you try to fight for your culture and tradition, or do you try to enjoy the rewards of living in rising China and try to partake in the China dream, as Xi Jinping would call it? It seemed to me that 21st century Tibetans were faced with an impossible dilemma: do you join them or do you fight them? So that was my original intent. But in the process of reporting, I stumbled upon this woman who is the daughter of the last king of Ngaba, and was a member of the nobility. She wasn’t really an ordinary person, and I kept saying that she’s not the kind of person I’m looking for because she’s lived out of Tibet for a while [in Dharamsala, India, where the Dalai Lama lives and the Tibetan government-in-exile is based], and she’s from this aristocratic family. But she was so interesting, I couldn’t ignore her story. So she somewhat changed the book, and it really became a saga of these Tibetan families going back to 1958, which for the people in the eastern part of the Tibetan plateau, was when it all began.

She was my favorite character, so I’m very glad you included her. 

Yeah, I just couldn’t ignore her. She’s a very shy person and the first time I met her, she really didn’t want to be interviewed. Somebody from the Tibetan exiled government kind of dragged her into a conference room to meet me. But I kept on going back to her, and eventually she became more forthcoming, and started giving me family photos, and I really could see a lot of the story of Tibet through her eyes. And what she had in common with some of the younger people in the book was this internal conflict, because she was not militantly anti-Chinese. She’s married to a Chinese man, and she had a very traditional Chinese education. She was educated as a socialist, and she is a believer. So she’s been very torn between her feelings towards the Chinese government and her feelings about the Dalai Lama and about Tibetan tradition. She doesn’t really want to choose. And that seemed to be the case with many people. It was not that they were overwhelmingly loyal to the Chinese Communist Party, but many of the people in the book were proud of some of China’s achievements. They felt that economically, their lot in life had improved, but they still cared about their language and their culture. And that tension runs throughout the people in the book. This was true when I did the North Korea book as well. I didn’t want people who were spouting propaganda. I wanted people who could say, ‘This is good about the government rule and this is bad’ — giving you a more nuanced view.

It’s important to note that the book is not set in what people think of as Tibet, which is the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR). It is actually set in a part of the Tibetan Plateau in Sichuan province. How did you settle on Ngaba, and decide not to set it in the TAR?

At the time, I was living in China and I was a journalist, so it was very difficult to visit the TAR. After I left China, I went to Lhasa and Shigatse as a tourist, but it seemed to me that the majority of Tibetans live outside the TAR. And the Tibetan Plateau is much larger than the TAR. Whenever I ran into somebody who said, ‘I’m a Tibetan,’ they were from what the Chinese would say is Sichuan, Gansu, or Qinghai province. So, I felt like somehow this was the real Tibetan experience. Besides the difficulty of reporting in Lhasa, it is kind of a showcase city. To me, it’s sort of like Pyongyang in North Korea. It’s the place everybody goes. It might be difficult for journalists to go there, but most of the world travelers I know have been to Lhasa. I wanted  someplace a little bit more off the beaten path. Ngaba kind of came to me. I was interested in picking a town well before the self-immolations started, but once they did, I said, if I’m going to pick a place, this ought to be it.

But it wasn’t just the self-immolations that attracted me to Ngaba. I started reading some historical accounts of Ngaba. In particular there were two Tibet scholars whose work I was following on a blog, Matthew Akester and Jianglin Li, who is Chinese American. They have been writing a lot about Ngaba and about the history of the Long March and these early encounters between Tibetans and the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s. And they’d written about some of the earlier uprisings in Ngaba during the Cultural Revolution. So I was also discovering this rich history about Ngaba. It wasn’t even that I picked Ngaba, it kind of picked itself. It just jumped out of the pack.

Is self-immolation a Buddhist tradition? Why is it so prevalent in the Tibetan community?

It’s not really part of the Tibetan Buddhist community tradition, but it is part of Chinese Buddhism. There’s a good book on this called Burning for Buddha (2017) about Chinese Buddhists who made a show of immolating themselves. It was quite a developed tradition, but not among Tibetans. And again, there are a lot of arguments about it. Some people will cite the story that one of the incarnations of the Buddha fed himself to a tigress to prevent her from eating her own young. And they say that’s justification for self-immolation —  you’re consuming yourself for a cause. And then others say it violates Buddhist teachings about the sanctity of life. So everybody can seem to find a justification or not. But I would say no, it was not a tradition in Tibetan Buddhism, and that’s why it was rather shocking to people. 

What was your experience of talking to Tibetan people about the self-immolations in Ngaba?

I would say it was emotional. And it was conflicted. You hear in one breath: it’s a terrible thing he did to leave his parents, siblings, whatever — but also, I’m so proud that he did this for the cause of Tibet. People went back and forth, and they really weren’t sure what to think of it. That’s true of the Dalai Lama, too. He would say, ‘it’s not a good thing, but I’m not going to say anything bad because I don’t want to offend them.’ I found it hard to get really clear articulation about people’s sentiments about self-immolations.

Your book really drives home the fact that Tibetans aren’t looking for independence or more autonomy. They’re just looking for the same rights as the Chinese Han population. What drives the Chinese government’s decision not to give them those rights? 

Yeah, this decision not to give Tibetans passports, which is a very big issue, stems from the Chinese government’s fear that Tibetans will go and see the Dalai Lama or go to one of his prayer services in India, which many have done. There’re a lot of Tibetans who would like to go and attend one of the teachings and then come back. I think it has to do with their [the CCP’s] obsessive fear of the Dalai Lama. I’m sure you’ve heard this, but the foreign correspondents used to always call the Dalai Lama “he whose name can’t be mentioned.” They are just so obsessive about it in a very counterproductive way, if you ask me, and it causes a lot of unhappiness. The policy has changed every now and then. For example, in the last couple of years, Tibetans were able to get passports to go on package tours to Thailand, but then they had to give them back.

Beijing says it wants the Tibetans to be more loyal to the Communist Party, but it has to treat them the same way. That’s the dilemma.

But that is the point of the book. It’s not about the economy. It’s just not. There are some Tibetans who are very poor and some Tibetan villages that are very underdeveloped, but there are other Tibetans who are doing well, though not as well as Han Chinese. But it’s about personal freedoms, not in the way of Western democracy, but the same basic rights that are given to Han Chinese citizens of China. Beijing says it wants the Tibetans to be more loyal to the Communist Party, but it has to treat them the same way. That’s the dilemma. 

Right, and it’s a similar dilemma to what we are seeing with the Chinese government’s treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang. Have you been thinking about the parallels between the two populations in recent months?

I have thought about it a lot. It’s funny because when I first started this project back in 2008, I was maybe even more interested in writing about the Uighurs. I spent a fair amount of time traveling to Kashgar. But I couldn’t really do both. 

But the parallels are obvious. It’s been so awful for Uighurs in the last few years with the mass incarcerations, and [Beijing has] been actually quite a bit gentler on the Tibetans. Maybe this is because at some point somebody said, ‘by the way, in all these self-immolations there were no Chinese killed.’ 

The Tibetans themselves, at least the ones I know, are not actually very charitable about Uighurs. There is a history of Buddhist-Muslim tension in this part of the world, and the Tibetans feel like they emerged with the moral high ground because in the self-immolations they were killing themselves and not others. I think sometimes Tibetans don’t like to see the parallels.

Are there any obvious differences between the situation of the Uighurs and the Tibetans?

Well, I do think the Chinese government had a legitimate concern about Uighur violence and terrorism. I covered some of those cases, and I saw, with my own eyes, terror attacks targeting civilians committed by Uighurs. But I think the cultures are also very different. Many Tibetans are historically nomadic people and herders. Many Uighurs are farmers. But they’re obviously in parallel situations. 

My first reaction when I started writing about Western China was: wow, there’s an awful lot of China that is Xinjiang and the Tibetan Plateau. And I think the Chinese government is very concerned about protecting its Western flank and its Western trade routes, especially with the Belt and Road initiative. 

There are so many Chinese who go to India to see the Dalai Lama. They’re seeking something that they feel like is missing in China.

There’s such a deep resonance in China of Tibet and Buddhism. I feel like Tibet is part of China, not in the ownership way, but in the way that Tibetan Buddhism is part of the soul of China. You always hear about how China needs Tibet because it wants the water, infrastructure, and minerals. But there’s a very deep connection. When you read all these books from Evan Osnos and Ian Johnson about the lack of religion in China, there’s a sense of lost soul. And that soul would seem to be residing in Tibet. I don’t know if there are a lot of Chinese who love Xinjiang, but I know there are a lot of Chinese who love Tibet. And when I was in Lhasa about three years ago, it was filled with young Chinese tourists who weren’t trying to take selfies of themselves in some exotic location, they were really moved by Tibet, and they were seeking something. I’ve also seen that in Dharamsala, there are so many Chinese who go to India to see the Dalai Lama. They’re seeking something that they feel like is missing in China.

There are some hopeful parts of your story, but most of it is relatively bleak. Given that, what do you think the future of the Tibetan community is within China?

I think it’s going to be very difficult for China to completely assimilate the Tibetans. The Tibetans’ love for their culture, their language, and the Dalai Lama is extremely strong. And I think a lot of the Tibetans now see the struggle not as a struggle for independence, but a struggle for cultural survival. And I think they will do everything they can to keep that culture alive. It would be very difficult for the Chinese Communist Party to extinguish the strength of the culture. I hope at some point the Chinese government can see the Tibetans as less of a threat, but I’m not particularly optimistic for the short term, especially given what’s happened in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. But I can envision a time when things will be a lot better.

The last scene of your book describes how young Tibetans in Ngaba tried to pack gifts into your car to give to the Dalai Lama for his 80th birthday, even though you would not be with the Dalai Lama to pass along the gifts. That really illustrated for me the devotion you are describing.

That was a very funny scene because those young Tibetans were kind of hipsters. I was traveling with one of the Chinese news assistants from the Beijing Bureau [of the Los Angeles Times], who was really into music, and they got along great and they were talking about music and exchanging photos. But then there was a switch, and the devotion was so strong. After all those years of covering Tibet, I was always surprised by the power of that faith.

Were there any misconceptions about Tibet that you realized were wrong through your reporting?

I expected it to be more black and white, and I expected people, especially those in India, to be more anti-Chinese than they were. Several of the people in my book have Chinese spouses. When I was working in Dharamsala doing interviews, whenever we went out for a meal, they always wanted to go to the Chinese restaurant. It’s a very strange, complicated relationship.

What was the biggest challenge you had in reporting this book?

I think language was the biggest challenge. The first couple of times I was working on the Tibetan Plateau, I worked with a Tibetan translator. But that became increasingly difficult because any Tibetan who was working with me could get into trouble, and they were always very nervous. So I ended up mostly working in Chinese, rather than Tibetan, and that was very limiting. 

Another challenge, which is always the case for reporters working in these areas, is what’s going to happen to the people you interview, and what’s going to happen to the people who work with you. I was an accredited reporter, so if I was picked up, I would be escorted back to the train station or the airport. I was not illegally in the area. The area was open to us, at least on paper. But it was always very hard to think about what could happen to other people. So eventually, as I went in more often, I tended to work with Chinese drivers and a Chinese news assistant. Sometimes we did the interviews in Chinese, and a younger Tibetan would translate from Tibetan into Chinese. There were some periods where I was working alone in Chinese, and my Chinese is not that good. And sometimes the Tibetans I was interviewing did not speak good Chinese either. So I would just tell them to say it in your own language, and I would tape it and have the tapes translated.

How did the challenges of writing this book compare to the challenges you faced reporting on North Korea for Nothing to Envy?

Well, the North Korea book was set in a city that I never visited. I went to North Korea quite a few times, but I never went to Chongjin, which is the city in the northeast where the book took place. That was also very deliberate because Pyongyang is the showcase capital. I wanted the real North Korea.

In this case, I did spend a fair amount of time in Ngaba, so that was easier. But there were some things that were harder. Tibetan society is not very document oriented, and so it was sometimes hard to pin down dates and chronologies. And they were just big chunks of the history, especially the 50s and 60s, that don’t seem to be documented. This area of Tibet is called Amdo, and in the late 1950s, there was enormous loss of life there. There was really a war going on. And a lot of the monasteries were closed and desecrated. It coincided with a lot of the Great Leap Forward, but it really happened earlier. So it’s a very complicated history, and not a lot of it is documented in Tibet sources and not very well documented in publicly available Chinese sources. There still are scholars working on this period, but there’s an awful lot that’s unknown.

For those undocumented periods, did you rely on people’s memories?

I did a lot of oral history. It was hard to find people who remember the 1950s clearly. There were some memoirs written by Tibetans, but not a lot. There’s a book by Naktsang Nulo, called My Tibetan Childhood: When Ice Shattered Stone. What happened in the TAR happened a little bit later, so this is really a separate history. A lot of the abuses and excesses in eastern Tibet led to the uprising, that, in turn, led to the flight of the Dalai Lama [to India] in 1959. It is very complicated because most of the history of Tibet is written from the standpoint of Central Tibet, of Lhasa. The elites of Lhasa who left for India wrote their stories, but there’s still a lot to be uncovered in Eastern Tibet. A few scholars are working on it; Jamyang Norbu, for example, is doing a history of the Tibetan resistance. But there’s just so much still to be reported.

Hopefully, your book will mark the beginning of more writing on this. 

Yes. And it’s just very interesting looking at the Great Leap Forward period, because obviously the Han Chinese suffered. There’s this whole generation of trauma in the Chinese population. But everything that was done to the Han was done worse to the Tibetans. And a lot of those stories are not really told. Even in the leading books about the Great Leap Forward, what happened in Tibet was seen as this sideshow. I really think it’s those traumas of the late 1950s, particularly 1958, which is the year when this book begins, that led to the self-immolations half a century later.

---