Barbara Demick: “I want to portray history through the eyes of the people living it.”
One lesson to be learned from Barbara Demick’s books is that peace and prosperity are fragile—society can fall apart at any time. Demick, who has more than twenty-five years of experience as a foreign correspondent, has spent her career writing about people living in places torn apart by violent change. In her first book, Logavina Street, she writes about the Bosnian War by telling the stories of the inhabitants of one street in Sarajevo. Her second book, Nothing to Envy, a finalist for the National Book Award, offers a glimpse into the daily lives of North Koreans. When Demick moved to China in 2007 as the Beijing bureau chief for The Los Angeles Times, she turned her attention to Tibet. Now she has published her third book, Eat the Buddha, which focuses on a town in Eastern Tibet after the Communist takeover in 1951.
Not long after Demick’s arrival, Tibet erupted in anti-government protests that were swiftly suppressed, with increasing surveillance and military presence. But Tibetans found another way to express their dissatisfaction: Since 2009, 159 Tibetans have set themselves on fire in protest. Nearly a third of them came from one eastern border town, Ngaba, which is administratively part of Sichuan Province. Ngaba came to be known as the capital of self-immolations. In Eat the Buddha, Demick explores the lives of Tibetans from this town by talking to people like Gonpo, the daughter of the last king of Ngaba, who lost her family during the violence of the Cultural Revolution and who later became a Communist Party member; Tsegyam, a poet and teacher who secretly agitated for independence; Norbu, an orphan who rose from homeless street hustler to wealthy entrepreneur; and Dongtuk, a monk closely related to two of the self-immolators. The people Demick portrays try to make peace with the
