“My father couldn’t bear to see me so lonely, but all he could think of doing to help was to send me one of his servants. It never entered his mind that I might fall in love with the groom.”

A shadow of anguish passed across Zhuoma’s face.

“My father was furious when he found out. He told me that what I was experiencing was not love but simply need. All I knew was what I felt: that I wanted to be with this man all the time, and that I loved everything about him.

“In my area of Tibet,” Zhuoma continued, “love between a noble and a servant is forbidden. It is the will of the spirits, and there is nothing anyone can do to change that. But we are all creatures of emotion, and emotions are not so easily circumscribed. Because of this there are certain rules in place. If a male servant and a noblewoman fall in love, then the only option is for the man to take the woman far away. If he does this, she loses everything: family, property, even the right to exist in her native place.

My father knew I was stubborn so he took the advice of the family retainer, who had been his counselor since he was a child, and sent me back to Beijing with a group of servants.”

The man who had first taken Zhuoma to China had Chinese friends in Beijing and the seventeen-year-old Zhuoma went to stay with them. Soon afterward her servants were ordered home. They could not cope with their alien surroundings. To them Beijing seemed not to belong to the human world at all. They felt surrounded by demons. No one spoke their language or ate their food. Without temples or monasteries they were completely unprotected by the spirits. Zhuoma, on the other hand, thrived. She enrolled at the Central Institute of Nationalities-a university set up by the Communist government specially to educate young people from China’s minority territories. There the groom was soon replaced in her young mind by her love of Chinese culture.

“I loved meeting people so different from Tibetans,” Zhuoma confided to Wen. “I loved Beijing, with its huge Tiananmen Square. At the institute, my Chinese was already much more fluent than that of most of the other minority students and I progressed well in my studies. At home I had never traveled beyond the confines of my father’s land and I was excited to learn that the various regions of Tibet had many different customs and many branches to its one religion. When I graduated, I decided to stay on as a teacher and translator of Tibetan.

“But it was not to be. Just as I was in the process of moving from the students’ to the teachers’ dormitory, I received a message that my father was seriously ill.”

Zhuoma described how she had set out for Tibet that same evening, traveling as fast as she could day and night, first by train, then by horse and cart, and finally on horseback, whipping on the horse in her haste to return to her father’s lands. But when she arrived at the foot of the Tanggula mountains, servants, who had been waiting for her there, broke the news that their lord hadn’t been able to hold out for a last sight of his daughter. He had died seven days earlier.

Overwhelmed by grief and disbelief, Zhuoma made her way home. She could see in the distance the prayer flags fluttering from the hall where her father lay in state. When she came nearer she heard the chants of the lamas who would send her father’s spirit to heaven. Inside the hall, her father was already wrapped in a shroud, with his two wives kneeling silently to his left. On his right was a portrait of Zhuoma’s dead mother with the jade Buddha amulet she had used while alive. The gold-embroidered hassock Zhuoma used to pray on had been placed beneath the golden statue of the Buddha that sat at her father’s head. He was surrounded by offerings to the spirits, white khata prayer scarves, sacred inscriptions, and other objects brought as tributes by friends, relatives, and the household and farm serfs.

“I was my father’s heir,” Zhuoma explained. “As a young woman, I had never thought about my father’s duties as the head of such a large estate. Nor had he ever talked to me about such matters. But now, after the forty-nine days of burial rites had been observed, my father’s retainer took me aside and explained to me the heavy burdens that had been my father’s in the weeks before he died.

“He showed me three letters. One was from another local governor urging my father to support the Army of Defenders of the Faith and rise up against the Chinese. It said that the Chinese people were monsters and were bringing shame upon the lands of the Buddha. The letter told him to contribute silver, yaks, horses, cloth, and grain to the army and to poison the water sources to deprive the Chinese of sustenance.

“The second letter was from a Chinese general named Zhang who wanted my father to help ‘unite the motherland.’ He said that he hoped my father would help him to avoid bloodshed but that, if he did not, he would have no choice but to send soldiers onto his land. He told my father that I was being well cared for in Beijing.

“The third letter was from my father’s fourth brother. It had arrived just before my father died. My father’s brother advised him to flee west with his family, saying that in his region fierce fighting had broken out between Tibetans and Chinese. All the temples were destroyed, the landowners slaughtered, and the serfs fled. He had heard a rumor that I was being held captive in Beijing. He hoped his letter would arrive in time. He himself was awaiting his fate.

“On reading these letters I was thrown into confusion. I did not understand why there should be so much hatred between my homeland and my dreamland. I realized that my father’s death must have been caused by his great anxiety. He was caught between threats from both the Chinese and the Tibetans. He would not have been able to bear the scenes described in my uncle’s letter. Religion is the lifeblood of the Tibetan people.

“For hours I thought about what to do. I had no desire to help the Army of Defenders of the Faith kill Chinese people, nor did I want the blood of my own people to pollute the land. My property and my role as head of the estate meant little to me any longer. And so I decided to walk away from the fighting in the hope of finding freedom…”

Zhuoma went on to describe in a quiet voice how she had dismantled her estate. Having sent her stepmothers away with great piles of gold, she let the household servants go free and divided much of her property among them. The ornaments and jewels that had been in her family for generations she concealed in her clothing, hoping they would protect her and allow her to buy food in days to come. Then she opened the granaries and distributed their contents among the serfs. She sent the household’s precious golden Buddha and the other religious objects to a monastery. All the time she was conscious of being watched by her father’s retainer. He had been with the family since her father was three and had begun to learn the scriptures. Three generations of her family had benefited from his wisdom and resourcefulness. Now he was forced to witness the destruction of the household.

When all was done, Zhuoma walked through the house surveying its empty rooms. It was dusk and she carried a flaming torch. Before she left, she intended to burn the house down. As she was about to set the building alight, her retainer approached her, his head bent.

“Mistress,” he said. “Since in your heart, this house is already burned to ashes, will you leave it to me?”

Zhuoma was taken aback. It had never occurred to her that this servant would ask such a thing.

“But there is nothing here,” she stammered. “How will you live? The fighting is getting nearer…”

“I came here with empty hands and I will leave with empty hands,” said the man. “The spirits will direct me. Here I was received into the Buddhist faith. In life or death my roots are here. Mistress, please grant my request.”