On My Tibetan Friend Dondrup Who Still Lives in Exile
Luna Tian
Even now, in this age of instant connection and seamless borders, there are those who live in exile.
This is the story of Dondrup.
In Tibetan, his name means “to fulfill deeds of meaning.” He was the elder brother of my friend Zhuoga, who, at the time, was studying at a boarding school on the mainland. She was in the class next to mine; we often played together, and it was through her that I came to know Dondrup. He was only five years older than I was, though, in memory, he seems infinitely older, like someone who already carried a world’s worth of sorrow in his silence.
In the summer of 2017, during an internship at a Chinese media company, I was invited to join a “new media delegation” organized by the Yushu government. Before the trip, I pestered Zhuoga with a flurry of questions: What food should I try? Was the potato-based liangfen any good? Would the yogurt suit my palate? Would I, accustomed to lighter tastes, be able to stomach butter tea? Zhuoga replied patiently, laughing sometimes, assuring me that I would find much to love.
Food was, admittedly, the only thing I genuinely anticipated. I understood too well the real nature of such trips: they were not investigations but orchestrations — performances staged against a backdrop of new developments and patriotic slogans, meant to be photographed, edited, and paraded through the channels of official pride. Yushu would smile. Our editors back home would smile. A perfect transaction.
As the plane descended into Batang Airport, the landscape spread out beneath me: muted plains of grass, the hush of distant snow peaks. It was beautiful in a way that demanded silence. In October, even wrapped in a cotton coat, the wind sliced sharply through me. It was my first time visiting Zhuoga’s homeland, and despite everything, I was thrilled. I sent her a photo from the airport. She wrote back: Yushu is vast. Her family lived in Nangqian, far from where I stood.
Over the following days, we were ushered through the expected itinerary: the reconstructed Jiannama Mani Stone Mound; the freshly painted “Happiness Demonstration Community”; a lecture on “Religious Freedom and Ethnic Unity”; and the solemn Earthquake Museum. The events were sterile, almost anesthetic in their banality.
On the final days, we were given free time. I wandered along a river where a woman was releasing fish as an act of mercy. I tried to speak with her; her Mandarin was broken. Yet when I mentioned I had a friend from Yushu, she smiled, muttered a string of Tibetan words I could not decipher, and pressed her hands together in a gesture of blessing. Later, I would understand she had wished me health and peace.
Even now, I remember the fluttering red banners bearing slogans: “Be Grateful to the Party, Listen to the Party, Follow the Party.” I remember the bright new school uniforms, the children’s recitations in flawless Mandarin, the candy-colored houses, the antiseptic streets. I remember how all of it, so carefully arranged, sat heavily in my chest, like a weight I could neither swallow nor set down.
Shortly after returning, I ended my internship ahead of schedule. I could no longer stomach the work. I began talking with a journalism student friend about building an independent site, a place where other kinds of stories could live. I had heard enough firsthand accounts by then to know there were truths that demanded loyalty. There were illusions that, no matter how brightly lit, were betrayals nonetheless.
At the time, Dondrup — Zhuoga’s brother — was still imprisoned. I told Zhuoga once that when I returned from Hong Kong a year earlier, I had been detained too, interrogated for a documentary I had made about the Tianjin Port explosion. I told her that I understood, in some small way, what it meant to be afraid.
We kept in touch. Then, in late 2018, a call came.
“Nana,” Zhuoga said, her voice crackling slightly through the line. “I’ve been reading your site. I saw what you wrote about Xinjiang. Would you consider writing about Tibet? About Yushu? About my brother?”
“Your brother?” I asked, my heart in my throat.
“He’s escaped.”
I nearly leapt from my chair. Where was he? Was he safe? Could I speak to him?
“You can video call him,” she said. “He can tell you everything.”
I said yes. Of course, yes.
Looking back, I realize I was never afraid — not once.
Perhaps I should have been. Telling stories like these carries its own quiet dangers. But more than fear, there was something else: a need. A hope that if enough people knew, if enough people saw, something somewhere might shift.
At the time, I was twenty years old, a Chinese student shaped by the battered but still breathing ideals of a certain generation. I had grown up reading Southern Weekly, witnessed the SARS outbreak, the Wenchuan earthquake, the Wenzhou train crash. I had seen good journalists lose their posts, good stories buried alive. I had watched history flicker and fade before my eyes.
I kept a scrapbook back then, thick with news clippings: dispatches from Beijing, Hong Kong, Taipei, New York, Berlin, Singapore. I wanted to find the lines myself, walk up to the edge of them. I believed, almost religiously, that journalism was still a calling.
On the first day of my journalism course, our teacher had told us that her alma mater’s motto was this: To write for the conscience of humanity, and the morality of society. She gave that line to us like a benediction. I took it seriously. I believed it was why I was here — to tell the truth, no matter how small or how fragile it might be.
So when Zhuoga asked me if I was afraid, I told her no.
When she asked why, I said:
“Because you are not afraid. Your brother was not afraid. And neither am I.”
Meeting Dondrup for the First Time
The first time I met Dondrup was online. He was sitting in a dimly lit teahouse in Kathmandu, Nepal. Through the blurred video feed, his figure appeared especially thin, almost translucent. He wore a faded red monk’s robe, his hands cupping a bowl of hot tea, his fingertips trembling ever so slightly.
In that virtual conversation, he spoke in a soft Mandarin laced with a Tibetan accent:
“Thank you for being willing to listen,” he said.
His voice was calm and gentle. He looked so much like his sister. I thought of where he had come from — the brightly painted houses, the prayer flags fluttering in the mountain air. I asked him if he was doing all right. I told him I could hardly imagine that, even in our time, there were still those who lived in exile.
He told me it was raining outside, as it often did. He said he missed the monastery, missed so many things.
And then he told me his story — the night of snow, the night he was taken away.
There was no violence, no shouted threats. Just a few dull knocks at the door, then the slow creak of the hinges. Three men in plain clothes entered. One tapped him lightly.
“Get up,” one said quietly, in Mandarin. “Come with us.”
Instinctively, Dondrup clutched the sutra book lying by his pillow. He remembered the firm pressure of a hand on his shoulder. During the rough search, a photograph of the Dalai Lama, tucked between the pages, slipped to the floor. For a moment, the room froze. No accusations were spoken. No words at all.
One of the men nodded slightly. Another stepped forward.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Cooperate with the investigation.”
They led him through the monastery’s darkened corridors, his arms pinned between two officers, into the biting cold outside.
As he passed the main hall, Dondrup turned back, catching a final glimpse of the golden rooftop that had witnessed so many of his dawn and dusk prayers. It trembled now in the mist of the snowstorm, distant and indistinct. A black SUV, unmarked and silent, waited at the gates.
“I thought that was the end of me,” he said.
I asked him, where did they take you?
“I don’t know,” he replied. “It seemed like an abandoned warehouse. No signs, no markings. Inside, just a single bare bulb swinging from the ceiling. No one told me why I was arrested, or how long I would be held.”
Each day, someone would open the door just long enough to toss in a bowl of cold rice and a cup of water. Occasionally, he was dragged into a brightly lit interrogation room, where indifferent officers asked the same questions, again and again:
“Where did you get this photo?”
“Who gave it to you?”
“Are you connected with foreigners?”
Most of the time, Dondrup remained silent. He knew that any word he spoke might endanger others. Every few days, they demanded he sign a confession, admitting to “possessing separatist images,” “disrupting social order,” and “endangering national security.”
“They told me, if I signed, I could go home earlier,” he said, a bitter smile flickering across his face. “But I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
Refusing came at a cost: endless hours of standing punishment, or days without food.
There were no windows in his cell, only a small vent in the corner, through which an icy draft seeped. “Time stopped existing there,” he said, glancing out the window during our call, his eyes carrying a faraway, almost alien quality. In that crushing isolation, Dondrup silently recited scriptures, day after day, keeping rhythm with an invisible mala between his fingers — even when his hands were empty.
He endured this for half a year. 183 days and nights.
One morning, without warning, he was told to leave. No formal notice, no documentation. A plainclothes officer threw him an old jacket and a pair of worn shoes.
“Go,” he said.
Dondrup stumbled down a narrow, gray corridor, into the freezing morning mist. A small SUV was waiting by the roadside. The driver said nothing, dropping him off at a deserted path on the outskirts of Jiegu Town in Yushu.
“From here,” the driver said, “you walk on your own.”
“You can imagine,” Dondrup said, his voice even. “When I returned, I found that the gates of the monastery were plastered with slogans about Socialist Core Values. The senior monks I knew were gone — some had left, some had been sent to study sessions. They told me, whether we could stay depended on whether we could promote the government’s policies. If not, we had no place there.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “At night I curled up in my tiny room, staring at the butter lamp in the corner. I had never felt so cold.”
When he finally left, he didn’t look back.
“To stay,” he said softly, “would have been just another kind of slow death.”
He wrapped himself in an old sheepskin coat, packed the last of his tsampa, hardened butter, and a flask of water into a tattered canvas bag, and set off toward the southern mountains.
The plateau in winter is merciless. At night, temperatures plunged to twenty below zero, the winds cutting like knives.
By day, he hid in caves or behind rocks. At night, he moved under the pale light of the moon. “I had to avoid all roads and checkpoints,” he said. Every few hundred steps, he would stop, pressing his ear to the ground, listening for the distant growl of engines or the bark of patrol dogs.
On the third day, near a nameless village, he encountered an old Tibetan herder. The man asked no questions, simply handed him a bowl of butter tea, and whispered, “Southwest. Over the third mountain. Travel at night. Beware the border guards.”
That night, Dondrup hid in an abandoned sheep pen. From far away came the sounds of barking dogs and the sweep of patrol lights. Lying flat on the frozen earth, he barely dared to breathe.
The next few days were the hardest of his life.
The snow was knee-deep; the mountain paths narrow and treacherous. Dondrup could only crawl forward, inch by painful inch. Every ten steps he would collapse, gasping for air, his chest heavy as stone. His fingertips had long gone numb.
As he neared the Nepalese border, he was barely alive. His lips cracked and bled. His feet were so swollen he could no longer bend them. Darkness flickered constantly at the edge of his vision.
One night, he lost his way in the snow and spent the entire freezing night huddled against a rock, whispering the Six-Syllable Mantra over and over to keep despair at bay.
On the eleventh morning, through a valley shrouded in mist, he spotted a winding gravel path in the distance — the first road inside Nepal.
Dragging his broken body, he stumbled downhill. A few Tibetan-Nepali villagers, dressed in worn clothes, were working the fields. They saw him, hesitated, then one of them beckoned quietly.
In that small village, Dondrup tasted his first hot tea in months. He ate his first warm bowl of tsampa porridge. And then, finally, he broke down, resting his head on a rough wooden table and weeping silently for a very long time.
Weeks later, he made it to a crowded Tibetan refugee center in Kathmandu. There, among countless others like him — dispossessed yet unbroken — he began to rebuild a life. Each morning, he still recites his prayers, his fingertips tracing the worn pages of his battered sutra book.
I think, perhaps one day, I will go to Nepal.
Perhaps I will meet him.
Perhaps I won’t.
I don’t know.
When I disconnected the call, the screen faded to a dull gray. My room fell into a heavy, unnatural silence.
This story has no grand heroic climax, no sweeping arcs of triumph or despair. It unfolded just as Dondrup had spoken it — slowly, gently, with a kindness that felt almost unbearable.
We became friends.
Every now and then, I would message him.
I once told him I had dreamed of him — of his small room, of the butter lamp flickering in the corner.
I am not a Buddhist. I am a Christian.
And yet, I am moved by his story in ways I cannot fully explain.
I often think about the courage it must have taken to survive those endless nights, to endure the long marches through the freezing dark.
On one side of the mountains was the promise of a “new Tibet” — the flags, the banners, the bright slogans of prosperity and harmony.
But even the memory of those polished little houses has begun to blur in my mind.
I keep thinking: How many are still out there, waiting, wandering, suffering through endless nights?
What wrong had they done to deserve it?
I find myself unable to let it go.
God, I wonder — are these trials simply part of what it means to be human?