By BETHE DUFRESNE
NEW LONDON – I knew Palden Gyatso was a man of divine purpose when the 78-year-old Buddhist monk postponed digging into Dakpa Gyaltsen’s specially prepared feast to talk about freeing Tibet.
“Food is secondary,” Gyatso told me through an interpreter, to the mission of pressuring the world to pressure China to withdraw from his native land.
We all have our priorities, and I could hardly argue with his. Nevertheless, I said, “I’ll try to talk fast, because I don’t want your food to get cold.”
Having eaten often at the Northern Indian Restaurant on New London’s State Street, I knew what culinary treats were in store. The restaurant is co-managed by Gyaltsen, himself a former monk, and his brother, whose Tibetan parents were forced by the 1959 Chinese military crackdown to flee Tibet for India.
Out of respect, Gyatso was the first to be served during a welcome dinner last week at the city’s All Souls Unitarian Universalist Congregation. He was part of a group of 20 walking from Boston to New York, where they planned to demonstrate this Saturday at the United Nations and the Chinese Embassy.
They were logging 15 miles a day in high heat and humidity, along highways designed to thwart pedestrians, stopping at night in churches, private homes and Buddhist temples if they could find any. Occasionally they picked up sympathizers, such as Keith Beard of Westerly, who offered them water and then fell in line.
Four were Westerners, 15 were Tibetan, and one was from Japan. Gyatso, I was told, held up his end, only occasionally taking a brief rest in the support van.
Gyatso spent a total of 33 years imprisoned by the Chinese for his efforts to liberate his homeland. You can read how he was tortured, persevered and escaped in his 1998 memoir, “The Autobiography of a Tibetan Monk.”
Tough, wiry and agile, both mentally and physically, Gyatso cut quite a figure in his red robes and worn athletic shoes. As he talked, his eyes shone, and he jabbed the air, the table and his interpreter’s shoulder with a bony finger.
Clearly he was the group’s celebrity, albeit of the type that doesn’t sell big here. Someone aptly likened him to Nelson Mandela.
I thought of Michael Jackson’s and Martha Stewart’s pathetic, self-delusional attempts to compare their legal troubles to Mandela’s epic imprisonment.
Stewart’s upcoming release from house arrest will probably get almost as much news coverage here as Mandela’s release did in South Africa.
Sadly, marchers for a free Tibet are but a blip on our radar, unless they fall victim to violence. Despite our empathy, you have to be cynical about their short-term prospects. China is on a roll, economically and militarily, and a top Chinese general recently spoke of waging nuclear war with us over Taiwan all too matter-of-factly.
Gyatso said he had a Tibetan cellmate who was executed for saying he wished America would nuke China into oblivion, even though he would be part of the ashes. In light of this, Gyatso found the general’s talk especially galling.
I asked why China wanted Tibet. Gyatso’s answer: gold, diamonds, oil, strategic location. In the rush to extract resources, he said, the Chinese are wrecking the environment as ruthlessly as they attacked the people and the culture.
Like so many other injustices, this one begs the question: But what can we do?
Paying some attention is at least a start.
