Robert Barnett
This is the first unmediated, single-authored autobiography to appear in English by a Tibetan who lived through Lhasa's gulag era of the 1960s and 1970s. Tubten Khétsun, an officer in the former Tibetan government, is an assiduous and unflinching chronicler of events and their details. He has produced a book that has little trace of the rhetoric or emotion of nationalist loss. Instead, he offers a painstaking, unvarnished account of the everyday mechanics of socialist transformation as he experienced it in Tibet. The result, in this meticulous translation, is a new and important source for understanding modern Tibeto-Chinese history as seen by inhabitants of the Tibetan capital.
— Robert Barnett, director, Modern Tibetan Studies Program, Columbia University
Jamyang Norbu
A tremendously moving and important document. Tubten Khétsun modestly claims that his is not a tale of greatness, heroism, nor historical significance but the story of an ordinary Tibetan who lived a life of 'animal servitude' under Communist Chinese rule. Yet the straightforward, rancor-free recounting of the banal details of 'normal' life in occupied Tibet gives this work the kind of compelling verisimilitude of Solzhynitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
— Jamyang Norbu, author of Warriors of Tibet: The Story of Aten and the Khampas' Fight for the Freedom of Their Country
Donald S. Lopez
Memories of Life in Lhasa Under Chinese Rule provides the most detailed account to date of life in Tibet during the period between 1959 and 1979. Devastating in both his detachment and in his detail, 'class enemy' Tubten Khétsun chronicles the quotidian horrors suffered by the citizens of Lhasa during two of the darkest decades in Tibet's long history.
— Donald S. Lopez, Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies, University of Michigan
