My name is Tashi Tsering.
In Tibetan, Tashi means "good luck" and Tsering means "long life." Looking back on my life now, I believe my name has turned out to be prophetic. For a long time, though, it didn't seem so. But that is getting ahead of my story.
There was nothing particularly unusual about my childhood. I came into the world in 1929 the year of the "iron horse"in a small village called Guchok in a mountain river valley about a hundred miles west of Lhasa. I was born during what is now called the "old society," although while I was growing up I had no idea there was going to be a ''new society." There was simply our traditional Tibetan way of life.
My first ten years were like those of most other Tibetan peasant boys. When I was very young, I ran and played on the slopes and in the meadows, carefree and without many duties or responsibilities. On those wonderful days when it was warm enough in our valley, I sometimes ran around naked with the other children just for the joy of it. Although the country was rugged, the horizons were majestic. There seemed to be an endless expanse of great mountains and beautiful valleys, and I loved the physical sense of freedom.
Guchok was like most other small Tibetan villages. The few hundred inhabitants lived in clusters of stone houses scattered along the sloping foothills of a mountain valley fed by a glacial stream that provided the precious water needed for irrigating our crops. The flat-roofed houses were two and three stories high, and like most families, we lived on the second and third floors, keeping our animals on the first.
Guchok was divided into an upper and a lower village. We lived in the upper village, in the higher part of the valley where it was harder to grow crops but easy to find forage for the grazing animals. Thus not only did we grow barley and lentils, but we kept many yaks, goats, and sheep. Ours was basically a subsistence economy. We ate the produce of our fields and flocks and made virtually all of our clothing spinning our wool and weaving it on wooden looms. When we needed something we couldn't produce ourselves, such as salt, we bartered to get it, although Tibet had its own coinage, which we sometimes used. Like most villagers throughout Tibet, we were surprisingly self-sufficient.
My family was large, ten of us in all. There was my mother and then my four paternal aunts who, though they were celibate Buddhist nuns, mostly lived at home and provided the family with a significant labor force. There were also my paternal grandmother, two younger brothers, and my two fathers. I say two fathers because it is common in Tibetan society for brothers to take a wife jointly. It was only when I lived abroad that I learned how rare and shocking this marital custom was to Americans and even to other Asians like Chinese and Indians. I never thought about it then, and it does not bother me now. In our culture, it was completely natural for brothers to marry the same woman, and there was no stigma at all about brothers sharing a woman sexually. We saw this custom as an effective way to conserve resources and enhance the material well-being of the family. We believed that polyandry, as this custom is called by anthropologists in the West, prevents fragmentation of the family's land across generations. If each son in a family marries monogamously and brings in a new unrelated bride, we think the family is unstable and likely to split up, with each son and his wife and children taking a share of the land. By contrast, with polyandry, there is only one wife and one set of children, so fission is far less common.
Keeping brothers together was also important for us because not only was all of the work of our household done without machines by people (and animals)but our normal activities often involved the need to provide people for free corvée labor. For example, we had to provide animals and people to move goods and commodities for the government's transportation system. The more available the labor, the stronger the whole family unit became.
The older of the two brothers who were my fathers was the one we actually called "father." He also was the head of the household and slept with my mother in a separate room on the second floor of our stone house. My other father, his younger brother, was always called "uncle" in our region. In our household, he slept downstairs, where we kept the animals. I remember now that my mother would sometimes go downstairs to sleep with him, but I didn't think much about it at the time. In our culture the wife played the key role in holding such marriages together. She was responsible for visiting all the brothers regularly and making sure they were satisfied and that the marriage and household functioned effectively. My mother must have done a good job, because there was no friction between my fathers.
We never worried about who the biological father was, and I had no idea which of the two fathers was actually mine. My mother never told me anything, and it never occurred to me to ask. I don't think the brothers knew the truth themselves or cared. Both "father" and "uncle" called me "son," and they treated all the children equally. To this day I cannot fathom why non-Tibetans find polyandry so strange and even disgusting. In America it is common for one woman to have two or three husbands in the course of her life and occasionally to have sexual relations with more than one man at a time. In Tibet it is the same; the only difference is that sometimes both husbands are there at the same time, and they are brothers. We find this system eminently logical and natural.
My family was relatively well off by local standards, and I had a carefree youth with little or no work until about the age of seven, when I started doing odd jobs around the house. My first major responsibility came when I was eight years old and my father told me I was to work as a shepherd in the summers like the older boys. I was thrilled. My job really was not hard, but I felt great pride. I had to help drive the animals (about three hundred sheep and goats) into the mountains each day, stay with them while they grazed, and bring them back in the evening. In summer the days were long, the skies were immense, and the mountain valleys were beautiful. I loved the feeling that I was doing something that mattered to my family. But I have to admit that it was mainly just fun, because I met many other young herders like myself, and there was always something to do while watching the herd graze. When the weather was hot, we shepherds played in the icy streams. And despite the dominance of Buddhism in our society, with its strong emphasis on the sanctity of life, we often hurled stones at birds and rabbits with our slingshots, and sometimes we even caught fish in the streams with our hands. When we spotted a fish hiding we reached out with cupped hands, careful that no sudden movement frightened it. Then, holding our breath, we would grab as fast as we could. Usually we missed, but occasionally we got lucky and were able to fling a fish onto the bank. We boys thought that was a great feat and would immediately set up a makeshift hearth of stones and dung, which we lit with the flint strikers we all wore. I can still recall the glorious taste of the freshly cooked fish. On quieter days we spun wool on simple handmade spindles or sewed boots for the winter. We ran, occasionally fought, and mostly played and enjoyed the delicious feeling that we were on the way to becoming men while our charges grazed on the mountain meadows! Herding was serious work since our animals represented the major portion of our family's wealth, but for us kids, it was mostly fun.
The way my family and my village lived from day to day, season to season, and year to year seemed a timeless, comfortably repetitive pattern. As I think back about this life after so many years, I find it easy to idealize and to become nostalgic but only up to a point. Most of the people I knew then had no interest in change. They worked hard to improve their place in the social and economic system but not to change the ground rules. They had no wish to leave the places they were accustomed to or to break the seamless continuity of the traditional way of life. However, even as a young boy I began to realize that I was different. I liked the life I was living, but I also began to feel dissatisfied. As a child I found it hard to put my finger on exactly what was wrong, and I recall feeling more than a little bit confused about my misgivings. Somehow I felt I wanted something more out of life even though I had no words to describe it. I think that this feeling stemmed from my intense desire to become literate.
~~The Struggle for Modern Tibet: The Autobiography of Tashi Tsering -by- Melvyn Goldstein, William Siebenschuh, and Tashi Tsering
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