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 of the Tibetan people and natural environment in the service of building a “new” China. If one overarching theme emerges, it is the controversial suggestion that under the Mao-led Chinese Communist Party, Central Tibet was essentially turned into a massive forced labor camp where civilian and prison life differed only in the degree of coercion and personal space allowed to the individual. Interspersed within this narrative—and perhaps the reason it was deemed worthy of publication by a university press—are extremely valuable, if often too brief, accounts of political events little known outside Tibet. Among these notable contributions are descriptions of a short-lived plan to move the capital from Lhasa to remote Powo Yiwang, the construction of the Chinese military-administrative center of Bayi, the situation of Lhasa's Muslim population, and the local impact of the 1962 Sino-Indian War. Khétsun also provides important new details on the Cultural Revolution and firsthand accounts of a number of lesser-known campaigns, including the “One Smash and Three Antis” campaign, which the author refers to as the “most vicious political campaign of its kind” (p. 218).

In Khétsun's recollections, the Chinese are depicted as universally cruel, cynical, and deceitful. However, more problematic is his treatment of Tibetans. Khétsun wants the reader (or perhaps himself) to believe that a clear demarcation can be drawn between the “patriotic” and “loyal” masses and the “small number of contemptible, mercenary Tibetans” who supported the Chinese regime (p. 23). However, the lines between collaboration and resistance are rarely so clear, and this tension is felt throughout the story. Rather than a weakness of the memoir, however, I would suggest that this uneasiness accurately reflects the reality of the Tibetan experience, which has yet to come to terms with its own equivocal responses to the incorporation of Central Tibet into the modern Chinese state.

For this very reason, Khétsun's story is most compelling and insightful when he describes the quotidian hardships of a Tibetan “class enemy,” the physical and mental deprivations, strategies of survival, fear of betrayal, systems of rewards and punishments, cruelty of the powerful, and the persistence of humor, hope, love, and the human will. Unfortunately, however, at times the story veers from personal to national narrative, in the process blurring the lines between eyewitness account and a more amorphous national memory. Most noticeably, Khétsun's description of the 1950s follows a well-worn narrative and offers few new insights into the events leading up to and during the 1959 rebellion. Indeed, when Khétsun writes of the initial period after “liberation,” “Then, in typical colonialist fashion, and in order to appease Tibetan sentiment, the Chinese established a ‘People's Hospital’ … and primary school” (p. 13), it is difficult not to feel that the author is expressing retrospective indignation rather than his contemporaneous reactions. Nonetheless, in succumbing to these tendencies, Khétsun's autobiography is no different than most, including the myriad “Cultural Revolution” memoirs that have flooded the English-language market. In fact, many of Khétsun's recollections will feel all too familiar to anyone who has read this parallel literature, as when he writes, “Having to go to the [political education] meetings every evening before we could recover from the day's toil was one of the worst torments of the Communist system” (p. 164). Yet, as this work demonstrates, to ignore the ethnic element and to equate the Tibetan experience with that of Han Chinese would be to grossly misunderstand both the past and why the reform-era narrative that blames the “Gang of Four” for the horrors of the Maoist period holds little weight in Tibetan regions. As such, not only will the publication of this book be a welcome event for anyone who is interested in modern Tibet, but also it marks a valuable addition to undergraduate and high school syllabi that wish to provide a more inclusive and representative introduction to recent Chinese history.