Eat the Buddha: Reportage on the Tibetan Plateau

Please join us for a lecture with:

Barbara Demick, former Beijing bureau chief for the LA Times and currently a Cullman fellow at the New York Public Library

Moderated by: Gray Tuttle, Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University

Award-winning journalist Barbara Demick talks about her recent book, Eat the Buddha, and discusses the challenges of reporting on the Tibetan Plateau. In her latest book, she tells the story of the Tibetan town of Ngaba, one of the first places where the Tibetans and the Chinese Communists encountered one another. In the 1930s, Mao Zedong’s Red Army fled into the Tibetan plateau to escape their adversaries in the Chinese Civil War. By the time the soldiers reached Ngaba, they were so hungry that they looted monasteries and ate religious statues made of flour and butter—to Tibetans, it was as if they were eating the Buddha. Their experiences would make Ngaba one of the engines of Tibetan resistance for decades to come, culminating in shocking acts of self-immolation.

Barbara Demick is the former Beijing bureau chief for the LA Times and currently a Cullman fellow at the New York Public Library. Her reporting on North Korea won the Overseas Press Club’s award for human rights reporting as well as awards from the Asia Society and the American Academy of Diplomacy. Her coverage of Sarajevo for The Philadelphia Inquirer won the George Polk Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. Her previous book is Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood.
This event will be conducted via Zoom. Registration required. Please register here.

This event is organized by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and co-sponsored by the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia University.