num_pages: 325
description: Just as she did with North Korea award-winning journalist Barbara Demick explores one of the most hidden corners of the world. She tells the story of a Tibetan town perched eleven thousand feet above sea level that is one of the most difficult places in all of China for foreigners to visit. Ngaba was one of the first places where the Tibetans and the Chinese Communists encountered one another. In the 1930s Mao Zedongs Red Army fled into the Tibetan plateau to escape their adversaries in the Chinese Civil War. By the time the soldiers reached Ngaba they were so hungry that they looted monasteries and ate religious statues made of flour and butterto Tibetans it was as if they were eating the Buddha. Their experiences would make Ngaba one of the engines of Tibetan resistance for decades to come culminating in shocking acts of self-immolation. Eat the Buddha spans decades of modern Tibetan and Chinese history as told through the private lives of Demicks subjects among them a princess whose family is wiped out during the Cultural Revolution a young Tibetan nomad who becomes radicalized in the storied monastery of Kirti an upwardly mobile entrepreneur who falls in love with a Chinese woman a poet and intellectual who risks everything to voice his resistance and a Tibetan schoolgirl forced to choose at an early age between her family and the elusive lure of Chinese money. All of them face the same dilemma: Do they resist the Chinese or do they join them? Do they adhere to Buddhist teachings of compassion and nonviolence or do they fight? Illuminating a culture that has long been romanticized by Westerners as deeply spiritual and peaceful Demick reveals what it is really like to be a Tibetan in the twenty-first century trying to preserve ones culture faith and language against the depredations of a seemingly unstoppable technologically all-seeing superpower. Her depiction is nuanced unvarnished and at times shocking.
language: English
title: Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town
publisher: Random House