Lhakpa gave a grunt of acknowledgment and sighed. “The seeds of this battle didn’t sprout in the valley below, but at Larung Gar. It was only the two of them at first, Jiao and Xun. Jiao came in from some high political office in Lhasa, claiming to be the expert at subduing Tibetans. Xun was from some paramilitary unit that targeted social unrest. They showed up one day at our morning prayers, pushing their way through the assembly of monks and nuns, and announced they headed the new Committee of Reconstruction and Safety. The chief lama, our abbot, offered them a blessing and placed prayer scarves around their necks. They laughed, and Jiao blew his nose on the scarf. The next morning they drove up in a limousine in front of a line of cranes and bulldozers. They sounded a siren, though none of us knew what it meant. It became a fixture of our lives for weeks. It was the five-minute warning, after which the bulldozers and wrecking cranes went to work. They ripped right through classroom buildings without even bothering to check if they had been evacuated. Several of our students suffered terrible injuries. The abbot and I went to Jiao and Xun to complain, and they said we should be thanking them for they were going to create a new, sanitary community where everyone would be much healthier. They even showed us their plans, with new cinder block buildings that looked more like one of those reeducation camps than a Buddhist school. I tried to keep my temper and just remarked that the compound in the drawings was not nearly big enough. They laughed again and said several thousand would be leaving, for their own safety. They even offered us jackets with that ridiculous slogan of theirs.”

“Safety in Serenity,” Shan said.

Lhakpa nodded. “I said they had no right to attack a peaceful community. They called me by my Chinese name and said I was lucky, that I was a traitor who had been allowed to go into exile instead of prison, but the government could always change its mind.