Tibet, My Story by Jetsun Pema, Element Books, $288 When Jetsun Pema's elder brother was recognised as the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, the lives of their simple, rural Tibetan family were changed immeasurably. Tibet: My Story, the autobiography of the Dalai Lama's sister, is an unusual (if patchy) glimpse of the family of the spiritual and, for many, the temporal leader of Tibet - particularly during a time of great upheaval for the Himalayan region.
Regrettably, Pema's unemotional writing style gives little idea of the suffering of people during Tibet's time of travail. Rather she is documenting her life and that of her famous brother.
Pema was born five years after her brother in the village of Taktser. By the time she was five, they had moved to Lhasa.
'On their arrival in the capital, my parents were given by the Tibetan Government everything they could possibly need and had probably never even dreamt of. Servants were assigned to look after them and they were told that a house was to be built for them half way between the Potala [palace] and the town,' she writes.
Despite the pomp of office, she says the family remained humble, living off income from their rural properties.
Pema describes many of the important rituals of the time, few of which can be observed now. Of some historical interest are her descriptions of the great Tibetan monasteries before their destruction during and before the Cultural Revolution.
At the beginning of the 1950s Pema travelled outside Tibet for the first time - to Sikkim, and to Kalimpang and Darjeeling in India. It was a tense time. Sikkim (then an independent kingdom, later annexed by India) was 'the only place where we could establish radio contact from Lhasa', she says. But 'the news from Tibet was very alarming. Chinese troops had invaded part of the country.' Pema went to boarding school in India, where she was joined by another brother, Gyalo Thondup. Generally recognised as the most politically astute of the Dalai Lama's family members, he fled Tibet while pretending to deal with the family properties near the Indian border. Thondup had lived in Shanghai and then Taiwan (in the 1980s he would live for a period in Hong Kong) and spoke fluent Chinese, so he acted as the Dalai Lama's interpreter when the Chinese invaded.