Adhe Tapontsang spoke yesterday evening about being tortured, raped and starved, and of watching the Chinese kill her friends and family during her 27 years in a Chinese prison as China consolidated its control over her Tibetan homeland.

Tapontsang is a Tibetan woman who was imprisoned for resisting the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Her speech, translated by Divinity School students Ngawang Jorden, was made in pointed opposition to the upcoming visit to Harvard by Jiang Zemin, China's president.

Jiang refuses to negotiate with the Dalai Lama for Tibetan independence.

China invaded Tibet in 1950. For the next six years, Tapontsang and her husband worked with other Tibetans to resist the Chinese. In 1956, Tapontsang said, she believes her husband was poisoned. Until her arrest in 1958, Tapontsang orga-

nized an underground women's movement to aid Tibetan guerrillas.

"I had two children when I was arrested." Tapontsang said. "My daughter was a year old. My son was four, and when he tried to hold onto me, the Chinese kicked him."

Trying to follow her, her son fell into a river and drowned. She has not seen her daughter since.

According to Tapontsang, who eventually lived in eight different prisons, her life ran the gamut from sexual exploitation to starvation.

"We were not allowed to wash ourselves in prison," Tapontsang said of one prison. "But most of the young women, including myself, were told by the commander to do the laundry and clean his quarters, were we were raped daily."

She recalled another prison where 12,019 prisoners died in three years.

"Starvation was so severe that people tried to eat dead people's flesh. But the corpses didn't have any flesh on them, only skin, which was very tough to eat. Some caught worms and ate them. I tried but decided I'd rather die," she said.

Tapontsang said she became one of only four women survivors of that camp. Tapontsang said that she was convinced she survived against great odds because of her continuing faith in the Dalai Lama and Buddhism.

According to fliers that organizers handed out at the talk, more than one million Tibetans have been killed since the Chinese invasion in 1950. About 120,000 Tibetans are now living as refugees in Nepal, India and the rest of the world. Five million Tibetans remain in Tibet.

When Tapontsang was released from prison in 1986, she said, she returned to Kham-her home region-in Tibet.

"I went back to my hometown, where I stayed for a year," she said. "But then I decided not to stay longer because in prison we promised each other that whoever would survive would go out and tell the world what was happening."

In 1987, Tapontsang left Tibet for India to report to the Dalai Lama, beginning her travels speaking for Tibetan independence. On the suggestion of the Dalai Lama, she detailed her prison life in her recently-published book Ama Adhe: The Voice That Remembers.