Background
The writing of…
Like many Westerners I have had a long-standing fascination with Tibet. As a child, I vividly remember many trips to a remote cabin in the mountains of southern Colorado where, amongst the old National Geographic magazines cached there, was an issue devoted to Tibet. I can still see the faded photo of the Potala on the front cover and being enthralled by the account of this country “at the top of the world.” Thus began the yearning to visit Tibet.
After making several trips to China, I traveled to Tibet in the fall of 2004. I was unprepared for the grandeur and scale of the Himalaya. As a native Coloradoan I am accustomed to mountains, but I had not seen anything that compared to what I saw in Tibet. In trying to describe the Himalaya to friends I told them that you had to double the height and base of the Rocky Mountains to appreciate the size and scale of the Himalayas.
I was struck by many other things in Tibet. My guide was Tibetan, but she kept referring to time in terms of ‘before liberation’ and ‘after liberation.’ It seemed to me that the more accurate terms were ‘before occupation’ and ‘after occupation.’ But then I remembered that the Chinese are masters of propaganda. This was one of many things that struck me on that visit.
I was traveling with a group of Chinese tourists and the looks of anger and scorn, which greeted us as we traveled through Eastern Tibet, could not be ignored—and neither could a minor attack on our mini bus. I also watched as a group of small Tibetan children gathered in front of a Chinese restaurant looking for a hand out only to be chased away by the Chinese proprietor.
I was only in Tibet for a week but these events and others had a tremendous impact on me. I have traveled extensively in China on numerous occasions and had never seen any of this social unrest. It was on the flight from Tibet back to China that this novel literally sprang full-blown into my consciousness. I had not traveled to Tibet with the idea of writing a novel, yet scenes and even dialogue particularly—the beginning and ending scenes played out in my mind on that flight. From then on I was on a mission to write the novel.
From the very beginning I knew that I had to present the factual side of the story with regard to Sino-Tibetan history. It has been said that it is the victor in a war that gets to write the history and so it has gone with the invasion and occupation of Tibet. Chairman Mao, in a seeming masterstroke of deception, referred to the brutal invasion and occupation of Tibet as “the peaceful liberation of Tibet.” It was neither. But much of the world has accepted this version of history. Through the character of Frances “Frankie” LeMond I have attempted to accurately state the Tibetan-Sino relationship through the ages.
Throughout the novel I have attempted to be factually accurate. The events and venues at the 2008 Summer Olympic Games are, as I write this in the fall of 2007, in the process of being constructed on the site which will become the Olympic Green in Beijing. I have also attempted to be as accurate as possible when describing the 1924 Mallory and Irvine attempt to climb Mt. Everest. Naropa University exists in Boulder, Colorado and the CIA really did recruit and train Tibetans at Camp Hale, near Leadville, Colorado to fight the Chinese invasion.
The characters in the story are amalgamations of people I have known or wish I had known. To my knowledge there is no lamasery located seven days away from Darjeeling. I wish there was.
Buddha did give to the world The Four Noble Truths and Jesus left us with two great commandments—to love one another as we love ourselves and to love God above all else. And there is a state of mind that transcends our conscious three-dimensional mind.