I returned to Tibet for the first time in 1993, thirty-three years after my parents had carried me out. I had heard about my country my whole life — from my parents, from the teachers in the refugee schools, from the older monks and the lamas and everyone. When I arrived I did not know what I would find.

What I found was not the Tibet of my parents’ memory and not the Tibet of the Chinese announcements. It was a country in the middle of something — of being changed, of holding on, of new roads and old monasteries. I went back every year I could. I made pictures at Sera and Drepung and Ganden, at Lake Manasarovar, in Kham and Amdo, at the small villages where my parents’ generation had lived. These photographs are from that decade. Many of them have never been published. Some of them I have not looked at in years.