TIBET, TIBET
A Personal History of a Lost Land
by PATRICK FRENCH
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. 326 pages, $25

reviewed by John M. Lundquist

As the title indicates, Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land is a book that chronicles the many-year-long involvement of the author, a native of Scotland, with Tibetan history and with the Tibetan exile community, and his extensive travels in Tibet itself. The core of the book is an account of a several-month-long journey Patrick French took during the summer and fall of 1999 through the four main parts of traditional Tibet: Kham (now part of China's Sichuan Province), Amdo (now part of Qinghai Province), U-Tsang (central Tibetnow part of the Tibet Autonomous Regioncapital Lhasa), and the area around the town of Lhatse, in the western part of the Tibet Autonomous Region.

This narrative of French's travels, mainly by public transportation (although he also hitches rides on tractors, trucks, and whatever else comes his way), interviewing local people, many of whom relate fascinating and tragic private histories covering the years since approximately 1950, is juxtaposed with accounts of Tibetan history going back to the monarchic period of the seventh century C.E. By means of this juxtaposition, French covers much of Tibetan history within the central travel narrative. Although this has its own interest and value (particularly the chapter in which he illuminates the historical relationship between Tibet and China and places this relationship within the context of the occupation of traditional Tibet by the People's Republic of China from 1950 on), if what one wants is a history of Tibet, one would be better served to read one of the many standard histories of Tibet in order to get a smooth, unbroken narrative account.

The greatest contribution that this book makes is the transcripts of numerous interviews the author conducted with many Tibetans, recording their personal histories of having lived through the agonies of the Mao Zedong–instigated horrors, from approximately 1950 into the 1980s. One of these stories which stands out in my mind is that of a woman named Pema Wanglha, a Tibetan who had served as a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, who gave the author an eyewitness account of the destruction of the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, the central cathedral of Tibetan religion, in August, 1966. A great darkness covers the history of China during these years, especially as it pertains to Tibet, and any and all eyewitness accounts of the period will help to bring to light the cruelty of the regime of the Communist Party of China.

A puzzling feature of these many interviews, however, is the exact nature of the author's interviewing technique. He clearly states his linguistic limitationsthat he did not possess the requisite proficiency in the three dialects of Tibetan and two of Chinese that he would have needed to carry out such interviews. Throughout the book, however, he constantly represents himself as meeting and talking with people who could not possibly have spoken English, such as truck drivers in remote corners of central Tibet or nomads. He describes linguistically negotiating potentially impossible physical and bureaucratic barriers to meet subjects, always with no mention of interpreters, who must have been with him on these occasions to have made such interviews possible. How he learned what he learned is something of a mystery.

Nonetheless, another important contribution of the book is that it debunks many of the myths about Tibet, particularly many that are held in the West. Without in any way belittling or demeaning Tibetans or Tibetan history, French points out that the Tibetans were fiercely militaristic during much of their history, that Tibetan governance, even at the level of the Dalai Lamas, exhibited the unsavory characteristics of governance everywhere, including intrigue and venality. He gives a clear picture of the centuries-long relationship between Tibet and the central government of China, demonstrating how the Chinese can feel that they possess historical sovereignty over Tibet.

The opening and closing chapters deal with the author's experiences in the Tibetan exile community in India, his probing and often highly critical analyses of the occasional ineptness and the foibles of the Tibetan exile government, and of the shallowness of much of the Western celebrity adulation of Tibet and Tibetan religion. One of the more poignant sections of the book is a partial transcript of a guest appearance of the Dalai Lama on the Larry King Live show during the summer of 2000. It shows the extent to which this great, charismatic religious figure, viewed as a virtual god by his followers, is often reduced to a semicomical, sometimes ridiculous figure, grouped in with Deepak Chopra, Darva Conger, and Hugh Hefner, in the great maw of the American commercial media.

This book, although fascinating in many ways, is also a challenge. Because of the disjointed sequence of anecdotes taken from the author's personal experience, interwoven with accounts of Tibet's history, it is only with some effort that one can figure out the chronology of the main "narrative." Within this rather confusing material, however, there are numerous gems, consisting of the accounts of the experiences of Tibetans encountered by the author, and it is these which give the book its redeeming value.