A few weeks earlier a man in Chengdu had told me about his experience of a prison in Kandze. When I met the man, half Han and half another ethnic group I did not recognize, he was fixing a flat tire on my bicycle at a repair shop. He did not tell me the reason for his incarceration on the Tibetan Plateau. I thought he probably was busted for theft, but I had no way of knowing. He spoke matter-of-factly of what had happened inside the prison walls, the way only someone who has spent time in jail can do. He detailed the physical abuse in prison, even smirking at the way one particularly skinny policeman’s punches did not hurt him. Beatings and electric shock, he said, were a routine part of interrogation. He was released after a month without explanation or charge. There were pink scars on his wrists above his greasy hands, not yet completely healed.
“Handcuffing our hands to our ankles with our arms behind our back, they made us squat all day in the blazing sun outside in the courtyard,” he said while demonstrating the position. “If we moved, the self-tightening cuffs cut into our wrists. When they threw us back in the cells, there were no roofs. It was intensely cold at night.”
The bike repairman encouraged me to see for myself the prison where he had been held. Drawing a map, he noted where the prison was located in Kandze and how the sign on the front of the building indicated a leather-tanning business, typical of the Chinese laogai, or prison-labor camps. Walk¬ing north of the prison, I was to turn west through a series of alleyways leading to a washed-out gulley. Walking along the gulley until an irrigation channel began, I was to bend southward around the hillside through a barley field, following a series of rock outcroppings that concealed the final ap¬proach to a hilltop perspective. The prison would reveal itself as I stuck my head over the edge of the cliff.
“Prison guards never look upward there. They are just waiting to give prisoners their next beating.”
After I was turned away from Kalzang Monastery, I decided to fol¬low the repairman’s suggestion to document the prison conditions at the so-called leather tanning shop. This was not what Khenpo had told me to do, nor what Sogyal Rinpoche had sent me to Tibet to find. Before leaving my Kandze hotel room, I took one last look at the greasy sketch the repair¬man had drawn in my Moleskine notebook. I strolled into the streets, hiding in plain sight, in this infrequently visited corner of Tibet. As I moved up the low-angled, parched hillside to the rock ledge that overlooked the prison, the clarity in my mind was more that of a bank robber than an attentive meditator.
Peering over the edge of the cliff, I saw the glass window of the sen¬try post of the cement-walled compound built above the single-story prison. Eight cement cells with prisoners inside were below, with open bars for a ceiling, just as I had been told. In the narrow prison courtyard behind the cells, two prisoners in faded green jumpsuits squatted facing the wall with their hands behind their backs at their ankles. I learned later in the week the two prisoners were Tibetan monks who had refused to denounce the Dalai Lama in the government-imposed “Patriotic Education” classes in their monastery. I retrieved my camera like a slow-motion gunslinger. Adrenaline pulsed as I fired off shots. I crawled backward from the ledge. Quickly taking the memory card out of my digital camera as I walked, I placed the electronic images inside the amulet I wore on my chest.
(from Matteo Pistono’s “In the Shadow of Buddha: One Man’s Journey of Discovery in Tibet”)
“Handcuffing our hands to our ankles with our arms behind our back, they made us squat all day in the blazing sun outside in the courtyard,” he said while demonstrating the position. “If we moved, the self-tightening cuffs cut into our wrists. When they threw us back in the cells, there were no roofs. It was intensely cold at night.”
The bike repairman encouraged me to see for myself the prison where he had been held. Drawing a map, he noted where the prison was located in Kandze and how the sign on the front of the building indicated a leather-tanning business, typical of the Chinese laogai, or prison-labor camps. Walk¬ing north of the prison, I was to turn west through a series of alleyways leading to a washed-out gulley. Walking along the gulley until an irrigation channel began, I was to bend southward around the hillside through a barley field, following a series of rock outcroppings that concealed the final ap¬proach to a hilltop perspective. The prison would reveal itself as I stuck my head over the edge of the cliff.
“Prison guards never look upward there. They are just waiting to give prisoners their next beating.”
After I was turned away from Kalzang Monastery, I decided to fol¬low the repairman’s suggestion to document the prison conditions at the so-called leather tanning shop. This was not what Khenpo had told me to do, nor what Sogyal Rinpoche had sent me to Tibet to find. Before leaving my Kandze hotel room, I took one last look at the greasy sketch the repair¬man had drawn in my Moleskine notebook. I strolled into the streets, hiding in plain sight, in this infrequently visited corner of Tibet. As I moved up the low-angled, parched hillside to the rock ledge that overlooked the prison, the clarity in my mind was more that of a bank robber than an attentive meditator.
Peering over the edge of the cliff, I saw the glass window of the sen¬try post of the cement-walled compound built above the single-story prison. Eight cement cells with prisoners inside were below, with open bars for a ceiling, just as I had been told. In the narrow prison courtyard behind the cells, two prisoners in faded green jumpsuits squatted facing the wall with their hands behind their backs at their ankles. I learned later in the week the two prisoners were Tibetan monks who had refused to denounce the Dalai Lama in the government-imposed “Patriotic Education” classes in their monastery. I retrieved my camera like a slow-motion gunslinger. Adrenaline pulsed as I fired off shots. I crawled backward from the ledge. Quickly taking the memory card out of my digital camera as I walked, I placed the electronic images inside the amulet I wore on my chest.
(from Matteo Pistono’s “In the Shadow of Buddha: One Man’s Journey of Discovery in Tibet”)