Translator Matthew Akester begins his introduction to Tubten Khétsun's autobiography by correctly noting, “What went on in Tibet during the twenty years of Maoist rule between 1959 and 1979 is still only vaguely known to the outside world” (p. vii). The scion of a fairly prominent family of Lhasa officials who becomes a “class enemy” after the 1959 Lhasa uprising, Khétsun chronicles his childhood in the 1940s through his departure into exile in the early 1980s. While autobiography has often been strategically employed by exiled Tibetans as a mechanism to publicize their country's plight, this volume separates itself from the bulk of its predecessors by offering perhaps the most in-depth, wide-ranging, and relatively rhetoric-free glimpse yet into a time and place that has been the subject of much speculation but few details.
Originally intended for a Tibetan audience, Khétsun's story is a powerful indictment of the physical and psychological exploitation...