The New Yorker
March 29, 2004
ISABEL HILTON
I never met the tenth Panchen Lama, who died at his
monastery in Tibet in 1989, but I was introduced to
his family in Beijing in the mid-nineties, and
recently I went to Washington to see his daughter,
Yabshi Pan Rinzin Wangmo, a twenty-year-old
political-science student at American University who
likes to be called Renji. She met me at Dulles
airport, slightly flustered, thinking that she was
going to be late. She had attended a conference on
Tibetan medicine that morning, she explained, and had
had to go home to change her clothes. Renji, whose
mother is Chinese, uses the title "princess." It's on
her calling card. The Chinese government-bizarrely for
a country that still thinks of itself as Communist-not
only permits the royal honorific but endorses it.
Renji's role carries certain obligations, among them
the self-imposed discipline of wearing Tibetan
national dress on formal occasions. She had spent the
morning in a traditional chuba, the long robe worn by
both men and women in Tibet. Now she was wearing a
white knitted top over a black shirt and black
trousers.
We walked out to Renji's car, a metallic-beige
Mercedes. A fluffy holder on the dashboard contained
one of her two mobile phones. There was a blowup toy
on the back seat-a replica of a Japanese cartoon
bear-and a heart-shaped cushion. Two squishy zip-up
cases shaped like hamburgers concealed her CD
collection. A photograph of her father dangled from
the rear-view mirror, a small version of a formal
picture that is given out to pilgrims and other
believers. It shows him in a yellow chuba, serious,
already fat-although not as fat as he became later-his
gaze remote. On the reverse side was an image of the
Buddha that reminded me of photographs I had seen of
the gilded and embalmed body of Renji's father, which
is interred in a mausoleum in Tibet. The pictures were
encased in plastic and hung alongside a dharma wheel
attached to a tasselled gold cord. As Renji drove, she
often touched the pictures or smoothed out the cord in
a quick, reflexive gesture.
Renji's father was the tenth incarnation in a line of
lamas who became powerful in Tibet in the seventeenth
century, when the Gelugpa school of Buddhism was
established as the country's ruling sect. The Panchen
Lama and the Dalai Lama are twin pillars of the
Gelugpa hierarchy. The Dalai Lama rules as a king, but
the Panchen Lama, who has no formal political role,
has, for some believers, greater spiritual authority.
They are both bodhisattvas-highly evolved beings who
have chosen to return to the mortal world to help
others find enlightenment. The Dalai Lama is a
reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion. The Panchen
Lama is a reincarnation of the Buddha of Boundless
Light. They are spiritual brothers.
Renji has never lived in Tibet, but in 1990, a year
after her father died, her mother took her to the old
Tibetan province of Kham, which has been largely
absorbed by the Chinese province of Sichuan. Hundreds
of people set up tents by the roadside, waiting for a
glimpse of her as she passed. "They told me that there
were people lining the road for fifty miles," Renji
said, in fluent, American-accented English. "Thousands
and thousands of people, all wanting to touch me. I
was little, only seven years old. I just thought, Oh
shoot, it means I can't go to sleep in the car."
There is, religiously speaking, no reason that Renji
should attract devotion. Her father's position as an
incarnation of the Buddha is not hereditary.
Nevertheless, large numbers of Tibetans treat her as
an object of reverence in her own right. "As long as I
can remember, people have been interested in me," she
said. "People love me and want to be with me because
of my father. I have to tell them that I am not a
religious leader and that I never will be."
When Renji was seventeen, she went back to central
Tibet-which was designated an autonomous region of
China in 1965-for the first time since the death of
her father. "I wanted to pay my respects to him just
before I became an adult," she said. "It's a serious
moment." She spent three days in Shigatse-Tibet's
second-largest city and the site of the Tashilhunpo
monastery, the traditional seat of the panchen
lamas-and two days in Lhasa, the capital. Again, huge
numbers of people turned out to see her. Renji showed
me photographs of long lines of people waiting,
carrying khatags, the white scarves that Tibetans use
on formal occasions. "I would get totally dehydrated,"
she said. "I tried to say something to each one. They
had waited for hours, just to greet me, and some of
them went back and joined the line again.
"It's tiring," Renji went on. "After a few days, my
arms hurt because of putting the khatags around
people's necks. People seem to think that I am like
some kind of Buddha statue. They run into me all the
time with their heads. They take my hand and they put
it on their heads for a blessing. I tell them I am not
a religious teacher, but they want it anyway. I can't
complain, because it makes them so happy to see me and
to touch me. The only thing that I ask my bodyguards
to stop is when they lift up my skirt."
"Lift up your skirt?" I asked.
We were having dinner in a seafood restaurant in
Washington that Renji had picked from a list she had
printed out from the Internet. It was a Friday night
and the restaurant was full of diners.
"Why do they lift up your skirt?"
"Because they want to get to my legs," she replied.
Devotees wish to touch the feet of an important figure
and will lift up a robe to do it. "They do it to men,
but at least men wear trousers," Renji explained. "I
wasn't wearing trousers."
Renji's father was born in 1938 in a Tibetan community
in the province of Amdo, most of which has now been
incorporated into the northwestern Chinese province of
Qinghai. He was then Gonpo Tseten, the son of the
headman of the modest village of Wendu. In 1941,
representatives of the court of the ninth Panchen
Lama, who had died in exile in China after a dispute
with the thirteenth Dalai Lama, came through Wendu
searching for the Panchen Lama's reincarnation. The
search was rather fraught, since the entourage in
exile was still at odds with the Dalai Lama's
government, which considered it too pro-Chinese. The
Dalai Lama's court in Lhasa and the monks at the
Panchen Lama's monastery in Shigatse had their own
list of boys who might be the new Panchen Lama.
Neither side was willing to give way. For three
hundred years, the dalai lamas had played a central
role in recognizing and accepting the panchen lamas'
reincarnations. Likewise, the panchen lamas were
crucial to the critical task of identifying the
reincarnations of deceased dalai lamas. (When the
thirteenth Dalai Lama died, in 1933, the ninth Panchen
Lama gave three names to the Tibetan monks searching
for his reincarnation and told them where the child
who was later recognized as the fourteenth-the
current-Dalai Lama would be found.)
Gonpo Tseten's birth had not been thought particularly
remarkable, although later there were claims that it
had been accompanied by miraculous signs, and he was
not, initially, a favored candidate. But three boys
who were considered more likely to be the
reincarnation died in alarmingly quick succession, and
on June 3, 1949, the Kuomintang government, in one of
its last acts, officially declared Gonpo Tseten the
tenth Panchen Lama. He was by then eleven years old. A
few months later, the Kuomintang fled to Taiwan, and
Gonpo Tseten's entourage declined to go along.
Instead, a member of the new Panchen Lama's court sent
a telegram to the victorious Mao Zedong in the boy's
name, congratulating him on the founding of the
People's Republic of China and confirming that the
Panchen Lama would give his unqualified support to the
Chinese cause in Tibet. In 1951, shortly after the
Chinese invaded Tibet, a list of seventeen demands was
presented to a delegation in Beijing that represented
the Dalai Lama's government. At the top of the list
was the Dalai Lama's recognition of Gonpo Tseten as
the tenth Panchen Lama. After a hasty divination, the
demands were agreed to, and the tenth Panchen Lama
arrived in Tibet with a contingent of Chinese troops.
Renji's father settled into the Tashilhunpo monastery
in 1952, when he was fourteen. It was the beginning of
a terrible time for Tibet. Although Mao had promised
that central Tibet would be exempt from the socialist
"reforms" planned for the Chinese, in eastern
Tibet-the provinces of Kham and Amdo-the Chinese
Communist Party set about destroying traditional
society. Monasteries were disbanded, monks and nuns
were forced to live a secular life, and religious
treasures were stolen. Then Mao's Great Leap Forward
brought starvation, rebellion, mass imprisonment, and
the virtual destruction of the Buddhist church,
especially in the Panchen Lama's home province of
Qinghai. The Panchen Lama's entourage had been
pro-Chinese in the beginning, but how much the Panchen
Lama himself supported the Party remains a matter of
dispute. It is clear that the Chinese Communists
thought he had the makings of an ideal puppet.
After 1959, when the Dalai Lama fled the country, the
Panchen Lama was the most senior religious figure left
in Tibet, and, as he began to understand the effects
of Chinese rule, he moved inexorably toward a
devastating confrontation with the leaders he had once
admired. In the spring of 1962, he formally submitted
a long report that detailed the consequences of
Chinese policies for the people in his home province.
The Panchen Lama thought that he had made a reasoned
contribution to the Party's rule, but Mao Zedong saw
him as one of a growing multitude of
"reactionary"enemies. That fall, the Panchen Lama was
ordered to make a self-criticism. Educated as he was
in logic and in the importance of truth, he struggled
to identify errors in his conduct. He fell back on his
spiritual training-the use of dreams and
divination-but nothing he tried, or the public
humiliations that he was subjected to, led him to the
kind of confession that was demanded.
The Panchen Lama's disgrace deepened. In December,
1964, he was brought to Beijing, where, at the height
of the Cultural Revolution, he was twice dragged out
for vilification at a mass rally. By 1968, he had
disappeared into solitary confinement. For years he
was thought to be dead. When the Panchen Lama was
released, on October 10, 1977, Mao, his old tormentor,
was dead and Deng Xiaoping had begun the slow process
of reversing the damage done in Mao's last years. But
the Tibet the Panchen Lama had known was gone. Only a
few of the great monasteries were still standing, and
they were all but empty of monks. His enemies in Lhasa
who had profited from collaboration in the Cultural
Revolution resisted his return. Wherever fate took him
after his long imprisonment, it would not be Tibet.
His old life over, he decided to build a new one, and
he did what no Panchen Lama had ever done. He married.
I had heard several versions of the story of how
Renji's parents met, and Renji told me hers. Her
maternal great-grandfather, she said, had been a
general in the Kuomintang army who had successfully
switched allegiance and stayed on after the civil war
to serve the Communists. He had met the Panchen Lama
when they were both members of an official delegation,
and the Panchen Lama had confessed to him that he was
thinking of marrying. He asked Renji's
great-grandfather to arrange a suitable introduction.
Li Jie, Renji's mother, was preparing for her first
year of study at an army medical school. "My mother
was very popular," Renji said. "Very pretty. She was
the best student in her class. Great-Grandfather asked
her if she could help find somebody for my father."
Li Jie said that she would have to meet him first, and
a rendezvous was fixed at a popular park in Beijing.
Li Jie, who was nineteen at the time, took her sister
along as a chaperone.
"I think my father just assumed that mother was the
girl that great-grandfather had found for him," Renji
said. "Father was still very poor. He had no money,
his head was shaved, he had no political rights. He
told her that he had nothing, but he was very honest
and touching. They spent the day together."
Li Jie's family was opposed to the match, Renji said.
Marrying a recently released-and not yet fully
rehabilitated-political prisoner, and a Tibetan to
boot, was not a promising move. Besides, Li Jie had a
medical career ahead of her. Li Jie's grandfather
refused to speak to her until the wedding day.
"No one in the family supported her except my aunt-the
one who had accompanied her on that first meeting-and
my great-grandmother, who believed in Buddhism and
knew my father was a Living Buddha," Renji said.
If there was trouble in Li Jie's family, there was
bitter disapproval on the other side, too. With the
monasteries destroyed, many monks had married-either
willingly or unwillingly-but it was still no small
matter for a figure as eminent as the Panchen Lama to
break his monk's vows, especially to marry a Chinese
woman from an army family. The Panchen Lama's mother
was never fully reconciled to the match.
The wedding took place in the Great Hall of the People
in Beijing on January 28, 1979. It was attended by,
among other senior figures, the widow of the late
premier of China, Zhou Enlai, who had known and
protected the Panchen Lama during the worst times.
After the wedding, the couple lived in a house on Dong
Zhongbu Street in central Beijing. The Panchen Lama
was slowly rehabilitated-the process was completed
only in 1988-and, as one of several vice-chairmen of
the National People's Congress and the most important
Tibetan in the People's Republic, he became a figure
of some political importance. In June, 1983, Renji was
born. Renji showed me photographs of her family. There
was one taken the day after her birth. Her mother is
sitting in bed, holding her, her father bending over
them both and smiling into the camera.
The Panchen Lama wielded influence through the
National People's Congress, and he was allowed to
visit Tibet. He set up several businesses to repair
and support the Tashilhunpo monastery and to try to
boost Tibet's development. He established a training
school for reincarnate lamas who had missed out on a
religious education, and he recovered the mortal
remains of his predecessors, which had been scattered
when their tombs were smashed by mobs, and set about
building a mausoleum for them. Some of the monastery's
former wealth was restored.
As Deng Xiaoping steered China through the reforms of
the nineteen-eighties, the family joined the
privileged inner circles in Beijing. They were
assigned a house in the Western Hills, an area of
wooded parkland west of the city, where Renji spent
her early years, surrounded by devoted Tibetan
servants-there were forty in all-and playing with a
small zoo of deer and horses, cats and dogs. There
were seaside holidays on the well-guarded beaches of
Beidaihe, the resort that is occupied every August by
senior Party officials. There were toys and pretty
dresses, birthday parties and picnics. Back in town,
the Panchen Lama began to build a grand, Tibetan-style
house on the edge of the Forbidden City. There were
trips, too. In 1986, the family went to Qinghai
Province, Renji's father's birthplace, and she had her
first experience of being at the center of a crowd.
Religious life gradually revived in Tibet, but in the
second half of the eighties there were renewed clashes
with the authorities. In 1987, in a speech to the U.S.
Congress, the Dalai Lama proposed a peace plan for his
country, and this triggered a series of demonstrations
in Lhasa. Monks who came into the streets to call for
independence were brutally suppressed. The Panchen
Lama condemned the protests, using the official
designation "disorder." Although he never supported
independence, he worked behind the scenes for the
release of the monks who had been arrested, and he was
a trenchant critic of government policies. On January
23, 1989, while on a visit to Tibet to dedicate the
new mausoleum of his predecessors, he told a group of
religious and political leaders that the dogmatism
that had destroyed Tibet's monasteries and temples
thirty years earlier was still threatening the
country. There had been development in Tibet under
Chinese rule, he said, but the cost had outweighed the
benefits. Five days later, he collapsed and died in
his palace near the Tashilhunpo monastery. The
official cause of death was a heart attack, but rumors
soon spread that he had been poisoned.
"I was in kindergarten," Renji recalled. "Mother
picked me up and we went straight to the airport and
flew to Lhasa. We took a helicopter to Shigatse. I
didn't really understand what was going on. Mama went
in to see my father first, and later they took me in,
although our servant got into a fight with a policeman
about this. My father was covered with a
yellow-and-white sheet. He didn't reply to me when I
talked to him, which was when I figured out that he
had passed away."
Li Jie and Renji went back to Beijing, and riots soon
broke out in Lhasa. Martial law was declared-the first
time such a step had been taken since the
establishment of the People's Republic, in 1949.
Hundreds of people were killed and thousands were
arrested.
The status of the Panchen Lama's widow and child at
this point was ambiguous. For many Tibetans, and
especially for the leaders of the Tashilhunpo
monastery, they were an anomaly. Li Jie had taken a
Tibetan name and dressed in Tibetan clothes. She had
learned the language and become a Buddhist. She ate
Tibetan food and drank butter tea. She had tried hard
to live up to a role that had no precedent in history,
but widows simply did not figure in the arrangements
of a religious order in which celibacy was a founding
rule. Traditionally, a deceased lama's property is
kept in trust for his next incarnation. Li Jie, in
spite of her Buddhist faith, had a more secular view
of her rights. She was determined to insist on a
proper provision for herself and her child from the
considerable wealth that her husband had enjoyed at
the end of his life.
The dispute over the Panchen Lama's property dragged
on for years. The Chinese government wanted Li Jie and
Renji to move out of the Beijing palace and, at one
acrimonious stage of discussions, the power supply to
the house was cut off. "Lots of things were messed
up," Renji said. "People were coming and going. There
were endless meetings. Mama would ask the servants to
take me out. She was very protective." Finally, a
settlement was reached that left Li Jie comfortably
off. The family's former home was rebuilt at
government expense, and Li Jie gave up the palace.
The search for the eleventh Panchen Lama became a
bitter contest over who had the right to recognize
him: the exiled Dalai Lama, whose claim to the role
was evident, or the Communist government, which sought
to demonstrate the legitimacy of its rule in Tibet by
claiming that the critical roles of the Dalai and the
panchen lamas-whom they referred to as "local
leaders"-had always been filled by candidates approved
by the emperor of China. Renji's father had been dead
for only two days when the Xinhua news agency in
Beijing published an article to this effect. Both
sides knew that the search for the eleventh Panchen
Lama could serve as the dress rehearsal for an even
more important event-the search for the fifteenth
Dalai Lama. The Chinese needed to establish a
precedent for that process. And they needed a Panchen
Lama who could be trusted to approve the right
candidate when the time came.
On May 14, 1995, the Dalai Lama announced that in a
remote district of central Tibet a boy had been found
who he was satisfied was the reincarnation of the
Panchen Lama. A few days later, there were rumors in
Lhasa that the boy and his family had been taken into
custody by Chinese security forces and had
disappeared. The abbot of Tashilhunpo was jailed for
secretly collaborating with the Dalai Lama, and the
monastery was occupied until all resistance was
broken. On November 29th, a ceremony was held in
Lhasa, attended by government officials, at which
another boy, whose parents were both reported to be
members of the Communist Party, was declared to be the
real reincarnation of the Panchen Lama. The Dalai Lama
issued a statement describing the Chinese action as
"unfortunate." The "Chinese Panchen Lama" was
installed in a heavily guarded villa on the outskirts
of Beijing. The Dalai Lama's selection has not been
seen since.
The following year, Renji's mother decided to send her
abroad, "to learn English and meet more people," as
Renji explained it. "I had never left home before.
When I said goodbye, I didn't know when I would see my
mother again." In those days, travelling abroad was an
uncertain business for a Chinese citizen. Years might
pass before the two were reunited. Li Jie sent her
daughter to stay with an aunt who was living in New
York and working in the travel business, but the aunt
was struggling to support herself, and when Li Jie
managed to visit, a few months later, she decided to
move Renji to California. She put out feelers, looking
for people who might help.
Southwestern Academy, the school that Renji attended
for most of her years in the United States, lies just
off the main road in San Marino, perhaps a
twenty-minute drive from downtown Los Angeles. It has
a pleasant eight-acre campus, which is home to some
hundred and seventy students, half of whom are
American and half from overseas, and most of whom
would not prosper in a more competitive environment.
The majority of the students I met there were Chinese,
and Mandarin was more in evidence among them than
English.
Southwestern's headmaster, Kenneth Veronda, recalled
that some members of a local Buddhist community had
approached him about Renji in January, 1997. They
asked him to interview a young girl who they said was
very important to them. Later, a delegation of a dozen
people, some of them prominent Tibetans in exile, came
to discuss her. Renji, he was told, had changed
schools several times. If she came to Southwestern,
she must have anything she wanted. Veronda told me he
replied that she would be treated like any other pupil
at the school.
Renji was not, Veronda said, a studious child, a
judgment echoed by a number of her teachers. She loved
shopping and pop music, was known as a sharp dresser
with a conspicuous taste for Prada, and was close to a
boy from Beijing whom the school eventually expelled
for smoking. She herself never posed a discipline
problem,Veronda said. There were no piercings or
tattoos, though she did go startlingly blond for a
while, and one of her former teachers said that she
went through a worrying phase of attachment to
motorcycles. This passed, but Renji does, she
confessed to me, love cars. "My father loved cars,"
she said. "I think I get it from him."
Many of Renji's fellow-students and friends were the
sons and daughters of China's newly rich
nomenklatura-officials who, by virtue of their
position, have made vast fortunes in the past two
decades of rapid economic growth in China. "Renji and
her friends used to tease me about my clothes," one of
her former teachers told me. "They would talk about
what shoes I should wear, and she suggested Gucci,
because it was the cheapest, at around three hundred
dollars. I said I couldn't afford that. When I told
her I paid fifty dollars for my shoes, she was really
shocked." The teacher said that students once had a
serious discussion about the relative merits of flying
first-class or using your own jet. When another
teacher proposed the essay topic "What would I do with
a million dollars?" the exercise fell flat, because
the students unanimously agreed that a million dollars
didn't go very far these days. "It was way out of my
league," he said. "One of the girls had an
eighteenth-birthday party at the Argyll on Sunset
Boulevard, with 'NSync singing 'Happy Birthday.' "
After Renji graduated, she invited the teacher to go
out for an evening with her friends. "They were
incredibly nice to me," he recalled. "We went to a
club where she seemed to know the doorman well." The
bill came to several hundred dollars per person. The
other guests paid without demur, and Renji tactfully
covered the teacher's share.
But if the other students could give themselves over
to the sybaritic pleasures of spending their parents'
money far from home, Renji, the Tibetan princess, was
too important a figure, at least symbolically, to be
left entirely to her own devices. Too many people took
an interest in her future. For the representatives of
the Tibetan government in exile, she is a potential
bridge between them and the Chinese. For the Chinese,
who keep a close watch on her through their embassy in
Washington, she is someone with a high street value in
Tibet, a value that could be politically helpful, but
explosive if mishandled. And for Westerners who
sympathize with the Tibetan cause Renji is a trophy to
be guarded, precious both for her ancestry and for her
potential as a figure who will play an as yet
undefined role in Tibetan politics.
Most weekends during her time at Southwestern, a
stretch limo would arrive at the campus to take Renji
to the home of the action-movie star Steven Seagal. I
had met Seagal by chance some years before in
Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama lives in exile. As I
waited in an anteroom, the Dalai Lama's secretary,
Tenzin Geyche, appeared in the doorway, dwarfed by an
enormous man who was clad from head to toe in green
silk. His hair was tied in a ponytail and he seemed to
be in a mild dream state. "Do you know Steven Seagal?"
Tenzin Geyche asked. We shook hands. Seagal smiled
benignly, as though from a great distance.
The Tibetan community in Dharamsala is accustomed to
exotic visitors. One more Hollywood star made little
impression, despite the rumor that his limousine had
proved too big for the hillside community's
vertiginous narrow roads. Some days later, I read an
interview with Seagal in an Indian newspaper. Asked
about his Buddhist beliefs, he replied that there was
only one God. Shortly after that, Seagal was
recognized as the reincarnation of a lama by a Tibetan
guru of the Nyingmapa school. For a while, the
Internet hummed with outraged comments from distressed
Buddhists and supporters of Tibet. As a choice for
Renji's protector in the United States, he was, to say
the least, controversial.
One evening, Renji and I drove to Seagal's house in
the hills above Los Angeles. We pulled off the road
into a driveway and stopped by a metal gate. "It's
Renji," Renji said into the intercom, and the gate
swung open. We drove along an uneven track and pulled
up behind a low house.
Seagal was sitting on a long couch in a cluttered
living room, fielding telephone calls. A huge oil
painting hung on the wall behind him. It depicted a
Tibetan guru, surrounded by monks. Young aides came
and went, announcing new calls. Behind another couch,
a large collection of guitars were piled up at crazy
angles. Two German shepherds came over and inspected
me closely.
Seagal looked up and asked if I knew a journalist who,
I later discovered, had written a series of articles
about what he suggested were Seagal's connections with
Mafia figures. "I have had no good experiences with
journalists," Seagal said. "But I hear that you
understand that Himalayan politics are"-he paused,
searching for the right word-"deep." He gave me a
significant look.
I asked Seagal how he had come to have charge of the
Panchen Lama's daughter.
"Well, because of Tibetan politics," he replied. "When
Renji was eight or nine, we got word that she wasn't
safe. The Tibetan government in exile has its own
spies. So she had to get out. It wasn't going to be a
kidnapping but an amiable trade-off. Her mother was to
remain in China, and she would get out without it
seeming absolute. When she was ten or eleven, we got
word that this was going to happen. I spoke with my
friends there, and they said I was one of the few
people who could protect and take care of her . . . be
her father figure, her guardian. Try to guide her so
that she kept her heritage in the dharma."
He broke off to take a call.
Seagal's account differs from that of other insiders,
and, indeed, from that of Renji. She was not in danger
in Beijing, and her leaving seems to have been
straightforward. Seagal did, however, send his plane
to collect her when she moved from New York to Los
Angeles. "This is my home here," she said to me. "He
was always there for me. My mother and Steven Seagal
are the most important people in my life."
Seagal finished his call. He said that he was closely
watched when he went to China. He said that he had
been studying Buddhism and martial arts since he was a
child, and that in Japan, where he lived for a while,
he had often been told that he was a reincarnate lama.
The Dalai Lama's entourage had changed, he said.
Relations seemed to have cooled since I had seen him
in Dharamsala.
"The danger for Renji now is getting in with the wrong
people," Seagal said. "She has a pure heart. I just
tell her, I'm always there for her. Any wisdom I have
is at her disposal.
"You're born naked, you die naked," he added. "In
between, you should find a spiritual guide. Certain
things, you have to do on your own."
I said good night, and we left. "You see what a nice
man he is?" Renji said, anxiously.
In Renji's last year at Southwestern, her mother
decided to come to California and supervise her
daughter's studies to insure that she did well on her
S.A.T.s. The two of them moved to an apartment near
the school. "It was very tough for my mother, because
she couldn't speak English," Renji said. "She cooked,
but the kind of cooking she does uses lots of heat and
she kept setting off the smoke alarms. It was the
first time that I had lived with my mother, just the
two of us."
As a high-school student, Renji had hung out, partied,
shopped, learned to surf. Back home in Beijing, she is
a noted tennis player, but she is also being groomed
for public life. Her vacations from school are crammed
with meetings. "I have to get three days' notice so I
can go shopping with my friends," she said. "I meet
all kinds of people-sometimes officials or
businesspeople-and I have to read their portfolios so
I know what to talk to them about. Sometimes I have to
attend two dinners in a day.
"When I get back to the U.S. after a trip home," she
said, "I feel really lonely and lost for a week. I'm
on my own. No staff. I have to do my own grocery
shopping. And I wake up and think, what am I going to
do today?"
In 2002, her mother decided that Renji should make an
official visit to Tibet alone. "Actually, I wanted to
go to Egypt, but my mother insisted I had to go to
Tibet," Renji said. It was the first formal trip that
she had undertaken without her mother's supervision,
and she was received by high-level officials in Lhasa.
The plan was for her to spend several weeks in
Shigatse, receiving instruction in religious studies
and the Tibetan language from teachers at Tashilhunpo.
(Renji speaks Tibetan but does not read it well.) She
settled in with her entourage in a hotel in Shigatse,
and a schedule was drawn up. She was to pay her
respects to her father's body at seven-thirty each
morning, then spend the day studying with her teacher
in a room on the second floor of the stupa where her
father is interred. But within a day of her arrival
crowds began to gather at the monastery.
"They stood outside, wherever I was, waiting for me,"
she said. "At the beginning, it was a little chaotic.
They wanted to offer khatags and touch me. After two
days, the police figured out what to do. They lined
them all up and every hour I would come out and go
down the line. I would go back and study, and then, at
the end of the hour, down the line again." The people
brought Renji petitions and letters of encouragement.
They gave her money, which she returned. They told her
how much they missed her father and urged her to visit
more often. Some would try to speak to her but were
overcome by emotion and simply wept.
The crowds grew bigger each day. Renji's quiet visit
was turning into a major public event. The local
authorities began to worry about things getting out of
control.
Then the "Chinese Panchen Lama" arrived in Tibet. He
was approaching his twelfth birthday, and a special
visit to Tashilhunpo had been arranged. The boy now
lives in Beijing, in the palace that Renji's father
built, under the supervision of his religious tutor.
His visits to Tibet have been rare and heavily
policed. This time, he arrived when Tibetans, who have
shown little sign of spontaneous affection for him,
were flocking to see Renji.
"My plan was to stay in Shigatse, to be close to my
father," Renji said. But she was asked to travel to
Lhasa, three hundred miles away, where a meeting
between her and the boy had been set up. "They made me
leave Shigatse," she said. "They said there was too
much distraction. I was very unhappy about it, and I
felt sorry for the people. Whole villages were coming
from far away, and I know that there were people who
were still en route. But they made me leave the next
day."
The meeting in Lhasa was very short, Renji said.
"There were twenty or thirty people, all officials,
his people. I walked in, said hello, how are you. We
exchanged khatags." She did not, however, prostrate
herself before him, though everybody knew that a
photograph of the tenth Panchen Lama's daughter
prostrating to the Chinese Panchen would be an
important affirmation of the government's position on
the reincarnation.
I asked Renji how she had avoided prostrating.
It was not an issue, she said. "My father had given me
special permission-just to me-not to prostrate to him.
If he is my father's reincarnation, I don't have to
prostrate to him."
I asked if she had felt anything toward the boy. She
shrugged. "I was curious," she acknowledged. "But I
didn't really feel anything. We didn't really have a
chance to talk." And the other candidate-the Dalai
Lama's missing boy?
"I have never met him," she said. "So I don't know."
Renji was bored in Washington. Because of visa
complications brought on by tightened security
regulations, she had been delayed in getting to school
and hadn't been able to register for fall classes. So
one weekend we drove to New York with a friend of
hers. She pointed out a cafe in SoHo where she had
spent a lot of time. "When I first came to
Washington," she explained, "I was so lonely and
depressed that I used to come up to New York and I
would sit in that cafe and watch people go by. I was
full of rage. But it's O.K. now." We went to a Prada
store, and I watched her inspecting racks of clothes
with the expertise of a seasoned shopper. I wondered,
not for the first time, what it must be like to be
both an icon for the Tibetan faithful and a
well-heeled, fashion-conscious young woman at home in
L.A. and London.
One of Renji's teachers at Southwestern had told me
that Renji had seemed intellectually detached for much
of her school career. "She didn't seem to feel
empowered," he said, "about her life, about anything."
He thought it was hard for her to study because her
destiny was out of her hands. After her visit to
Tibet, when she was seventeen, that changed.
Renji has a standard answer when she's asked about her
future. She wants to help the people of Tibet, she
says. When she is pressed, her plan sharpens. She
wants to be a member of the National People's
Congress, as her father was. "It's power," she says.
"You need to have power to do things."
Gaining power will involve negotiating several
competing interests, although her singular inheritance
is strongly in her favor. "The Chinese have a
problem," the Tibetan historian Tsering Shakya says.
"They have recognized their Panchen Lama and they
can't allow Renji to undermine him. On the other hand,
her mother has accurately identified a leadership
vacuum. The Dalai Lama is outside Tibet, and there is
nobody like the old Panchen Lama in the country. There
is an opportunity here, and perhaps Renji has it in
her to grasp it."
The power that Renji already has is a startling
demonstration of the flexibility of a society that
many outsiders see as bound by tradition. In that
tradition, authority is vested in celibate religious
leaders and institutions rather than in family
dynasties. Robert Barnett, a lecturer in modern
Tibetan studies at Columbia University, remarked to me
that Renji's popularity and the influence it gives her
has defied all expectations. "She has emerged as a
political phenomenon by word of mouth. This has no
historical precedent, and I think it shows that
Tibetans are capable of creative political solutions
to entrenched conflict. They instinctively recognize
this as a way of creating a middle ground."
I once asked Renji if she had ever been tempted to
choose an ordinary life-a job, marriage, children.
"I can't," she said. "Well, I could, but I can't. It's
my duty. It's who I am."
After a pause, she suddenly said, "Who should I marry?
Should it be a Chinese? A Tibetan? An American? What
would be best?"
"What does your mother say?" I asked her.
"She still thinks I'm a kid," she replied. |
