Forbidden Memory: Tibet during the Cultural Revolution 1612349692, 9781612349695

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A Note on the English Edition Robert Barnett and Susan T. Chen

This English edition of Forbidden Memory is a revised, updated, and edited translation of the original Chinese text, which was first published in Taiwan in 2006 under the name Shajie. It incorporates additions and corrections made by the author for the second Chinese edition, which came out in Taiwan in 2016, as well many new passages and updates provided by her especially for this edition, together with a large number of editorial insertions, notes and clarifications. We have also included in this version the postscript to the second Chinese edition of Forbidden Memory, consisting of photographs taken by Woeser from some of the same vantage points her father had used some forty-­six years earlier. With Woeser’s permission, one chapter from Tibet Remembers (Xizang jiyi), the companion volume to Forbidden Memory, has been included, with minimal editing, as an appendix containing Woeser’s edited transcript of her interviews in 2003 with Jampa Rinchen, the former monk from Drepung Monastery whose experience and memory of the Cultural Revolution are referred to throughout Forbidden Memory.1 In preparing this edition we adapted the original text significantly to allow for the needs of English-­language readers, taking into account those who might not be as familiar as its initial audience with many of the details and references found in the original. Thus we have moved some of the more detailed information provided by the author in the main text of the original into endnotes in this edition (to be distinguished from notes that we have added, which are indicated by the notation “Trans./Ed.”). We have also added explanations within the main text for certain concepts or references and have reordered, reworded, or clarified some sentences and phrases to allow for ease of reading and comprehension. Woeser’s writing style is precise and taut, with very little elaboration but frequently with extensive references, and we found that frequently we had to sacrifice these features in order to create a text more closely aligned to English-­language reading conventions. All Tibetan names and words were given in Chinese in the original text, and these have been replaced here by their original Tibetan names or terms, where we could xxxvii This content downloaded

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identify them, roughly rendered phonetically in a form intelligible to most English speakers (there is unfortunately no standard way of writing Tibetan phonetically in the Roman alphabet). Thus the term jiuji, the Chinese way of writing bcu gcig, the Tibetan word for “eleven,” has been given here as “Chubchi,” and the name Raoxi, the Chinese approximation for the Tibetan name or title yab gzhi, has been written as Yabshi. For Chinese words and names, we have used the pinyin system, except for well-­known names from the pre-1949 period. We have provided the correct spelling for the main Tibetan and Chinese words and phrases found in the book in the two glossaries that follow the appendix. Explanations about each term are included in the online versions of the glossaries. We have used the standard abbreviations for the People’s Republic of China (the prc ), the Chinese Communist Party (the ccp ), the People’s Liberation Army (the pla ), the Chinese People’s Consultative Conference (the cpcc ), the Tibet Autonomous Region (the tar ), and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (tap ). We owe special thanks to Woeser for her generous and active engagement with the translation work, her support during the lengthy editing process, her readiness to discuss, adapt, and update her text in response to our many questions, and her long-­suffering patience and tolerance with all our questions and interminable delays. We are also grateful, as always, to Wang Lixiong, Matthew Akester, James M. Hastings, Yonten Nyima, and Jessica Yeung for their help throughout this project. We are specially thankful to Robin Huang, who will no doubt outshine us all eventually, for her help with the glossaries. Our special thanks go to Karen Brown for her help and insights and to William Fruct for his work on the images. Peter Bernstein our editor and Joeth Zucco at the University of Nebraska Press provided advice and assistance during the publishing process. Thanks are especially due to Tseten Wangchuk, Tseten Dolkar, Dawa Tsering, and all the other unnamed and named Tibetans and others in Lhasa and elsewhere who, at earlier stages of this project, enabled it to come to fruition. Finally, we would like to express our special thanks and respect to the late Tsering Dorje and to his wife for all they did, in different ways, to make this work possible. Any errors in the translation and editing are of course our responsibility, for which we welcome suggestions in the hope of correcting them in the future.

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F o r b i d d e n M e m o ry

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