ABSTRACT
At the beginning of 1966, Tashi Tsering was feeling quite comfortable and optimistic about his new life because things seemed to be working out more or less as he hoped, despite the physical difficulties. His classmates and he didn't become aware of the size and ferocity of the gathering storm until the summer of 1966, when he began to hear a great deal about a campaign called the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" in which students in Beijing were playing a major role. Sometimes individual students and sometimes entire schools packed up and went on the road. The most popular location for such trips was Beijing, where Mao himself occasionally gave mass audiences. Individual students who wished to make such "revolutionary trips" could do so quite readily in the new climate of the Cultural Revolution. Tibet was full of Tibetan Red Guards and revolutionary activists, and, to be perfectly honest, he was proud to be a part of that movement.
