Ama Adhe — or Adhe Tapontsang — was born in 1932 to a Tibetan nomadic family in Nyarong, Kham, in eastern Tibet.
Ama means mother in Tibetan. Over the years, armed with her extraordinary story of grit and survival, she inspired and nurtured many young Tibetans and non-Tibetans to join the Tibetan freedom movement. Her loving personality and motherly warmth won many young hearts — who now see themselves as her adopted children.
As someone from a nomadic Tibetan family myself, Ama’s recollection of the pristine beauty of her childhood village, the snow-covered mountains and the valleys teeming with trees and flowers always made me homesick.
As fate would have it, she could not live a normal life in her beautiful village, unlike her ancestors. Some dark forces were to upend not only her life, but also the life of her nation.
After their 1949 victory in the Chinese Civil War, the People’s Republic of China under founder Mao Zedong (毛澤東) began to occupy Tibet from the east and the north.
Ama Adhe was to experience the horrible transformation of her country under a ruthless colonial regime. As Chinese expansion was met with fierce Tibetan resistance, violence and bloodshed ensued.
Ama Adhe and her husband planned to escape to Lhasa and then to India, but her husband was poisoned by Chinese agents and died, leaving her with a young son and pregnant. That changed the course of her life.
Along with 300 women from her village and others nearby, Ama Adhe joined the Tibetan resistance movement. The male members from her region went to hold strategic positions on mountains, to fight against the invading enemy, while the women shouldered the responsibility of providing food and other supplies.
The Chinese army outnumbered the ill-equipped Tibetans and crushed them — and Ama Adhe and her group were arrested. What followed were 27 years of unimaginable torture, exploitation and humiliation at the hands of Chinese authorities.
After they were rounded up, a Chinese soldier killed her brother-in-law in front of her with a point-blank shot to the head. The solider then turned to her and asked sardonically: “Look, who is the winner?”
Ama Adhe was imprisoned for three years. Of 300 women, only four survived. They were denied food and condemned to forced labor, so many starved or died from exhaustion.
Ama recalls that the hunger reduced them to skeletons and their skin darkened.
While dying, some women moved their lips, saying: “Please give me some food — please give me some water,” while others cried for their family members.
Ama Adhe survived as a primary witness to the inhuman ordeal her people experienced.
The Chinese then transferred her to a labor camp where she spent 24 years. She was released in 1985, when then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) pardoned some political prisoners as the Chinese market began to open to the outside world.
When she returned to her village, the mountains stood barren — the forests were gone due to excessive deforestation. The monasteries were gone, too.
Even worse, her son had died in her absence. Luckily, Ama Adhe’s daughter, who was just a few months old at the time of her arrest, had survived and become the mother of two.
They could not recognize each other as they had never had the opportunity to see or get to know each other during Ama Adhe’s incarceration.
Freed from the Chinese labor camp, Ama Adhe could have settled in her village with her daughter, but feeling a moral obligation to tell the truth about what had happened to her country and its people during Chinese occupation, she fled Chinese control.
Ama Adhe escaped into exile in India in 1987 and settled in Dharamsala. After that, she made every effort to tell the story of the harsh reality of Tibet under Chinese colonial rule, based on her own experiences and on the inhuman treatment that she witnessed the Chinese dole out to other Tibetan political prisoners.
Through her 1997 book Ama Adhe: The Voice that Remembers — The Heroic Story of a Woman’s Fight to Free Tibet and numerous talks and interviews in a dozen countries, she countered Chinese propaganda on Tibet that was couched in a colonial language of “liberation, emancipation and development.”
Her heroic story of surviving with dignity and courage inspired thousands. It revealed the immense ability of the human spirit to endure the unthinkable and still find the grace to smile.
Her life and story symbolize the indomitable spirit of the Tibetan nation and its people, and the courage to dream for a better future against all odds.
Although her life was terribly disturbed by the toxic combination of a communist revolution and the colonial politics of violence, oppression and suspicion, she never lost her sense of humanity — that was a great victory.
Ultimately, if “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” as Milan Kundera put it, then her life and story contributed greatly to a movement that resists power and defeats forgetting.
Ama Adhe is survived by the fight for a free Tibet.
Palden Sonam is a researcher in the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies’ China Research Programme in New Delhi, India.
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