Eat the Buddha

June 1, 2020
A portrait of one town reveals Tibet's tragic past. Demick, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times who served as its bureau chief in Beijing and Seoul, offers a vibrant, often heartbreaking history of Tibet, centered on Ngaba, which sits at 11,000 feet on the plateau where Tibet collides with China. The author made three trips to the town beginning in 2013, and she interviewed Tibetans in Ngaba and many others living abroad, including the Dalai Lama and an exiled princess, who spoke candidly about the culture, religion, and politics of the besieged region. Tibet has long been vulnerable to Chinese invasion: In the 1930s, Red Army soldiers, after ransacking farms and slaughtering animals, caused widespread famine. Desperate from hunger, they discovered that votive statues in the monasteries were sculpted from barley flour and butter and were forced into "literally eating the Buddha." Demick chronicles decades of incursions, beginning in the 1950s, that resulted in cultural upheaval, economic hardship, and the deaths of about 300,000 Tibetans. Determined to sweep out religion, the Chinese demolished monasteries. Images of the Dalai Lama--or even mention of his name--incurred harsh punishment. Tibetans were herded into communes, where they could not even cook for themselves. Schoolchildren were indoctrinated to believe that the Communist Party "had liberated Tibet from serfdom." By 1968, protests arose, demanding the "dismantling of the communes, the distribution of livestock to the people, and the right to reopen the monasteries." Not surprisingly, the Communists refused, directing militias to intimidate and persecute the activists. The protests, Demick writes, "established Ngaba's reputation for rebelliousness," which intensified in 2009, when Ngaba became notorious for self-immolations, "an unequivocal register of discontent." Although many Tibetans are grateful for the economic growth and technology that the Chinese have brought, the loss has been tremendous. "I have everything I might possibly want in life," one Tibetan businessman told Demick, "but my freedom." Memorable voices inform a penetrating, absorbing history.

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Starred review from July 1, 2020
Journalist Demick does for Tibet what she did for Sarajevo in Logavina Street (1996) and North Korea in Nothing to Envy(2010): reveal the lives of individuals struggling against state tyranny and violence. Demick anchors her Tibetan chronicle to Ngaba, a town on the Tibetan Plateau in the former kingdom of Mei. Gonpo, a daughter of the last Mei king, who was deposed by the Chinese in 1958, is at the center of the group portrait Demick meticulously composes, weaving in defining details of everyday life as she recounts harrowing stories of brutality, loss, sacrifice, and love that embody the larger story of Tibet's long fight for freedom. A stellar student who tried to conform to the party line, Gonpo was nonetheless sent to a remote hard-labor camp, surviving to eventually join Tibet's government in exile. Readers also meet intrepid entrepreneur Norbu; the unofficial historian Delek; Dongtuk, a monk; and poet, teacher, and dissident Tsegyam. Writing with pristine clarity made possible by complete fluency in her complex material, Demick provides the missing human dimension in coverage of twenty-first-century Tibet, including the legacy of resistance that has engendered tragic protests by self-immolation, and all the anguish and paradoxes of lives heavily surveilled by the Chinese government, yet largely invisible to the greater world.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

Starred review from July 27, 2020
In this heartbreaking and doggedly reported account, journalist Demick (Nothing to Envy) views the tragic history of Tibet under Chinese rule through the stories of people with roots in Ngaba County, the site of the Mei kingdom in the remote reaches of Sichuan province. Demick recounts the region’s first violent encounters with the Red Army during its Long March in the 1930s, when starving soldiers “ate the Buddha,” devouring Tibetan votive offerings made of barley flour and butter as they fled Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces. Her survey of the Chinese Communist Party’s grinding, decades-long repression of Tibetans also includes the odyssey of the daughter of the last ruler of the Mei kingdom, who fled the family’s palace during the 1958 crackdown that eventually forced the Dalai Lama into exile in India; the harrowing story of an elderly market stall operator whose young niece was killed when Chinese troops fired on civilians in a 2008 demonstration; and sketches of monks and nuns who set themselves ablaze in protest of Chinese rule. “For the most part,” Demick writes, “they were regular people who hoped to live normal, happy lives in China’s Tibet without having to make impossible choices between their faith, family, and their country.” Demick captures her subjects’ trials and sacrifices with superb reporting and razor-sharp prose. This poignant history could do much to refocus attention on the situation in Tibet.

June 1, 2020

This latest from Demick (Nothing To Envy) replaces the mystery that surrounds discussion of Tibet in the West with candid, heartbreaking stories of real Tibetans who have lived through periods of great tumult in their homeland. The stories are beautifully rendered and walk readers through the events that shook Ngaba, a town in Tibet that became synonymous in the 21st century with tragic self-immolations, and is geographically a difficult place to visit. By showing how people's individual lives unfolded and the hardships and dangers they endured, Demick sheds light on how Chinese oppression led many Tibetans to fight back, sacrificing their lives in the hopes of preserving their culture and their peoples' right to freedom. Readers will be moved by the tragedies and triumphs of these unforgettable individuals and will develop a greater understanding of those who call the "rooftop of the world" their home. VERDICT Taking a compelling approach to documenting Ngaba's history through the eyes of its own people, this wonderfully written book will leave readers with a stronger appreciation for why the movement to support the Tibetan people deserves so much more attention.--Sarah Schroeder, Univ. of Washington Bothell

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2020

Author of Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, a Samuel Johnson Award winner and National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Demick tells the story of Tibetan resistance to Chinese occupation through the lives of six young people in the town of Aba, perched 12,000 feet above the Tibetan plateau and a wellspring of the nation's defiance.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.