Dalai Lama, My Son: A Mother's Autobiography

The Dalai Lama's mother was illiterate but was a natural storyteller. When her granddaughter asked her to talk about her life, the stories began to roll out. She told of her wedding at the age of 16, her state of virtual servitude as a married woman, murderous ghosts, and her two dead sons left for the birds. Then, after a three-year drought and other strange events preceding the birth of her fifth child, the lamas came from Lhasa, and her Cinderella future was cinched. With her son the Dalai Lama ensconced in his palace, this nondescript peasant woman whose 16 children yielded three incarnate lamas, strolled her garden estate and hobnobbed with the aristocracy. And yet the intrigue, the perils of domestic and international politics, would soon take her husband's life, drive her remaining children into exile, and have her yearning for the quiet drudgery of her former life. Diki Tsering speaks with the unadorned simplicity of an ordinary country girl about a life that was anything but ordinary. --Brian Bruya