Sky Burial, An Epic Love Story of Tibet

by Xinran Xue

  The convoy was huge: several dozen trucks containing nearly a thousand men. Wen was overwhelmed by both the number of soldiers and the magnificence of the road. It was even more impressive than she had imagined. Endlessly twisting and turning, it took them through crowds of mountains. The weather was constantly evolving. One minute it was like a warm spring day with flowers in bloom, then suddenly white snow was flying around them. She felt as if she had entered a fairyland where a thousand years in the outside world passed in a single day.

  Most of the soldiers on the trucks were young men of about twenty. They laughed noisily and punched each other as they discussed what little they knew of Tibet-the lamas, hermits, and nomads; the legendary cruelty of the people. Wen could tell that, beneath their bravado, they were nervous. They knew nothing of the conflict they were entering and rumors of the brutal physical punishments that Tibetans meted out to their enemies abounded. Wen realized that most of these young soldiers were uneducated peasants, utterly incapable of understanding such a diverse, remote people. She thought of Kejun’s dedication to his Tibetan studies, his determination to master the language. She squashed herself into a corner of the truck and meditated on her goal: to find Kejun. Her thoughts were like a cocoon and she barely noticed the chatter of the other soldiers, the intense discomfort of the journey, the freezing cold nights, the extraordinary landscape. She was roused from her reverie only when, after days of traveling along the highway, the convoy of vehicles left the road and began driving over grassland that seemed to stretch endlessly in all directions. Wen had no idea where they were headed. She didn’t even know if they were driving north or south. She wondered if they would be going anywhere near the Bayan Har mountains. She hadn’t been prepared for a landscape that lacked any kind of landmark around which to orient oneself. They hadn’t yet seen a single sign of human habitation.

  The convoy was able to proceed only in stops and starts, and cases of altitude sickness began to increase. Some of the soldiers in the trucks cried out that their heads hurt, some couldn’t breathe properly, and some could hardly stand. As one of only three doctors in a convoy of more than a thousand soldiers, Wen had to rush back and forth with the portable oxygen tank on her back, teaching soldiers how to breathe, while feeding oxygen to those who were already semiconscious.

  Just as people were beginning to acclimatize, Wen realized that something worse was happening. The convoy was slowing down and they could hear scattered gunfire in the distance. Sometimes they thought they saw human figures hiding behind rocks and thickets. They began to fear an ambush. Within a few days, the difficult terrain forced the convoy to split up and Wen’s truck was left in a group of only seven vehicles. Although the area they were traveling through had allegedly already been “liberated” by the Liberation Army, there was hardly a local to be seen, no military units, and no signals accessible to the radio operators. Anxiety began to eat away at the soldiers on board the trucks as the emptiness of the mountains, the thinness of the air, and the violent changes in the weather enfolded them in a world of fear.

  During the daytime they derived some comfort from the extraordinary scenery and the living creatures they spotted along the way-the birds and animals. But at night, with the dramatic drop in temperature, the sounds of animals, and the moaning of the gales through the trees, Wen and her companions felt caught halfway between this world and the next. Nobody knew what was going to happen. They expected death to strike at any time. They huddled together around their campfires and tried desperately to sleep. Wen lay awake listening to the wind. She seemed to hear Kejun’s voice in the trees, warning her to be careful, not to get soaked by the dew or burned by the campfire, not to go off alone.

  One morning, as the company woke at the light of dawn, the rigid corpses of two soldiers were discovered, gleaming Tibetan knives protruding from their breasts. The soldiers on sentry duty confirmed to each other in whispers that they hadn’t heard a single thing all night long. The knives must have been thrown with incredible precision.

  The next day, and the day after that, exactly the same thing happened: no matter how many watchmen they stationed, or how many fires they lit, the weary soldiers were greeted at dawn by two corpses stabbed with Tibetan knives. There could be no further doubt: they were being hunted.

  Nobody could understand why only two soldiers were being killed each time. Whoever was doing this had chosen not to attack the whole convoy but to play a more dangerous game. Because two of the dead were drivers and no one else knew how to drive, they were forced to abandon two of the trucks and crowd into the remaining vehicles. A deathly silence fell over the convoy. Wen knew that everyone was contemplating the sudden, violent fate that might become theirs.

  Wen had no fear of death. She felt that she was drawing ever closer to Kejun. Sometimes she even hoped that she had entered the borderland between the living and the dead. If Kejun was already on the other side, she wanted to see him as soon as possible, no matter what manner of hellish underworld he was suffering in.

  One afternoon, someone on one of the trucks pointed off into the distance, shouting, “Look-something moving!” True enough, in the direction he indicated, there was something rolling about on the ground. Wen saw one soldier about to shoot, but hurried to stop him. “If it was anything dangerous, it would have already attacked us, or run away,” she reasoned. The company commander, who was on Wen’s truck, overheard her. He ordered the truck to stop and dispatched a few soldiers to go and investigate. Soon they returned carrying the thing on their backs: it was an unimaginably filthy Tibetan, of indeterminate gender, covered all over with bright and jangling jewelry.

  3 ZHUOMA

  Wen gently cleaned away the grime to reveal a face with a warm, terra-cotta-colored complexion and sun-scorched rosy cheeks. It was a typical Tibetan woman’s face, Wen realized-dark almond-shaped expressive eyes, a sensual mouth with a full lower and thin upper lip, and a straight, broad nose. But its youthful features seemed to have been ravaged by some terrible ordeal or illness-the eyes were bloodshot and listless, and from the sore and blistered mouth, the woman could only utter an exhausted slur of indecipherable sounds. She couldn’t possibly have been involved in the recent night killings-a thought that had crossed Wen’s mind-because she was barely alive.

  A soldier passed Wen a flask of water, and she poured its contents, drop by drop, into the woman’s mouth. Her thirst quenched, the woman muttered two words in Chinese: thank you.

  “She can speak Chinese!” a soldier yelled out to the assembled crowd of onlookers.

  Everyone was very excited: this was the nearest to a Tibetan they’d ever been, and she spoke Chinese too. Immediately they all began to wonder whether she’d be able to help them prevent any more attacks, maybe by offering protection of some kind. Wen spotted the company commander glancing over in her direction as he conferred with officers from the other trucks. She supposed they must be discussing what to do with the Tibetan woman.

  The commander walked over to Wen. “What’s the matter with her? Will she be any use to us?”

  Wen realized that the woman’s life was in her hands. After taking the woman’s pulse and using her stethoscope to listen carefully to her heart and chest, she turned back to the commander.

  “I’d say she’s just suffering from extreme exhaustion-she’ll soon recover.”

  It happened to be the truth, but Wen knew she would have said the same thing even if it weren’t. She didn’t want to see the Tibetan woman abandoned.

  “Get her onto the truck, then let’s go.” The commander climbed back on board without another word.

  Once on the road, the Tibetan woman fell into a dazed sleep and Wen explained to her fellow soldiers that she probably hadn’t eaten, drunk, or even slept for several days and nights. She could see that the soldiers didn’t really believe her, but still everyone squeezed up to give the Tibetan woman as much space as possible.

  Wen stared in fascination at the woman’s necklaces and amulets
rising and falling with her labored breathing. Her heavy gown, though coarse and covered with dust and dirt, was in places finely embroidered. This was no peasant woman, Wen thought. And then she smiled to herself as she suddenly realized that every soldier in the truck, some open-mouthed, couldn’t take their eyes off this exotic creature.

  WEN THOUGHT that day would never end. The road became increasingly rough and broken up as they slowly made their way through several precarious mountain passes. The wind gained so much strength that it rocked the trucks from side to side. At last they set up camp for the night in the shelter of a jutting rock. The commander suggested putting the woman close to one of the campfires-first, to give her the warmth she still needed but, more important, to deter the killers who had probably continued to follow them. They all settled down to a very uneasy sleep.

  In the middle of the night, Wen heard the Tibetan woman give out a low moan. She sat up.

  “What is it? Do you need something?”

  “Water… water.” The woman’s voice sounded desperately weak.

  Wen gave her some water as quickly as she could, then a generous portion of flour paste from the supplies. Earlier in the day, when they had first found the woman, Wen had only managed to give her a very small amount of food from her own rations, but now that they had set up camp and the provisions had been unpacked, she managed to put aside some more. Gradually the woman began to come back to life and was able to speak.

  “Thank you,” she said. “You are very kind.” Although the woman spoke Chinese clearly, her accent was strange.

  “I’m a doctor,” said Wen, searching her mind for the Tibetan word for “doctor,” which Kejun had once told her. “Menba. I can take care of you. Don’t talk. Wait until you feel better. You’re still very ill.”

  “There’s nothing seriously wrong with me, I’m just exhausted. I can talk.” With great effort, the woman shifted her limp body closer to Wen.

  “No, stay there, I can hear you. What is your name?”

  “Zhuoma,” the woman said weakly.

  “And where is your home?”

  “Nowhere. My home is gone.” The woman’s eyes filled with tears.

  Wen was utterly at a loss for words. After a brief silence, she asked, “Why can you speak such good Chinese?”

  “I learned Chinese as a child. I have visited Beijing and Shanghai.”

  Wen was amazed. “I come from Suzhou,” she said, excitedly, desperately hoping that the woman would know her hometown. But in an instant, Zhuoma’s face was animated and full of anger.

  “Then why have you left it to come and kill Tibetans?”

  Wen was about to protest when suddenly the woman cried out in Tibetan. The men, who were already on edge, leaped to their feet. But it was too late: yet another soldier was dead, stabbed through the heart with a Tibetan knife. Shots and shouts rang out as a temporary madness descended over the soldiers. Then a terrifying quiet returned, as if a hideous fate were hanging over the first person to produce the tiniest sound.

  Out of the silence, a soldier whipped around and pointed his gun at Zhuoma, who was still too weak to stand.

  “I’ll shoot you dead, Tibetan! Shoot-you-dead!” he screamed. He made as if to pull the trigger.

  With a courage she didn’t know she had, Wen threw herself between Zhuoma and the soldier.

  “No, wait, she hasn’t killed anyone, you can’t murder her!” Her voice was trembling but firm.

  “But it’s her people who are killing us. I-I don’t want to die!” The soldier looked as if he were about to explode with panic and fury.

  “Kill her, kill her!” More and more soldiers joined in the argument. They were all on the side of the man with the gun.

  Wen stared at the commander, hoping he’d come to her rescue, but his face remained stony.

  “Good menba,” Zhuoma said, “let them kill me. There’s so much hatred between the Chinese and the Tibetans, no one can make things right again now. If killing me will bring them some sort of peace, I’m happy to die here.”

  Wen turned to face the crowd. “You hear that? This woman would sacrifice herself to you. Yes, she is Tibetan, but she likes us, she likes our culture, she’s been to Beijing, to Shanghai. She can speak Chinese. She wants to help us. Why should we take her life just to make ourselves feel better? What would you think if people killed your loved ones for revenge? What would you do?” Wen was close to tears.

  “The Tibetans have killed us for revenge,” one soldier blustered.

  “They have reasons for resentment and so do we, but why must we make things worse and create new hatreds?” As soon as the words were out of Wen’s mouth, she thought how pointless it was talking to these uneducated soldiers who knew only love and hate. Wang Liang had been right: war drew clear lines of love and hate between people.

  “What do women know about enemies? Or hate?” shouted a voice from the crowd. “Just shoot the Tibetan.”

  Wen spun around to face the voice. “Who says I don’t know about enemies? Or hate? Do you know why I left Suzhou and traveled thousands of miles to this terrifying place? I came looking for my husband. We’d only been married three weeks when he went to war in Tibet and now he’s disappeared. My life is nothing without him.” Wen burst into tears.

  The soldiers fell silent. Wen’s weeping was accompanied only by the rustling and popping of burning wood. Dawn was beginning to break and a little extra light was illuminating the camp.

  “I know what it is to hate. If my husband is really dead, dead at the age of twenty-nine, I’m here for revenge, to find his murderers. But don’t you think the people here hate us too? Haven’t you wondered why we haven’t seen any people here? Don’t you think that perhaps it has something to do with us?”

  Wen looked around at her silenced audience, and continued more slowly and deliberately.

  “All this death over the last few days is a warning to us. I’ve been thinking about it a lot: I’m just as afraid, as full of hate as you are. But why are we here? Have the Tibetans welcomed us? We’ve come to liberate them, but why do they hate us?”

  “Company, fall in!”

  The commander interrupted Wen. As the soldiers got into line, the commander whispered to her, “I understand what you’re saying, but you can’t talk to the soldiers like that. We are a revolutionary army, not a force for oppression. Get into line and await orders.” The commander turned to the soldiers. “Comrades, we’ve found ourselves in a very complex and serious situation. We must remember the army’s Three Great Regulations and Eight Principles, and the Party’s policy on minorities. We forgive the misunderstandings of the Tibetan people, strive for their cooperation and understanding, and work as hard as we can for the liberation of Tibet.”

  The commander glanced over to Zhuoma and Wen.

  “If we want to liberate Tibet, we need the help of the Tibetan people, especially Tibetans who can speak Chinese. They can lead us out of danger, win over the locals, and resolve misunderstandings. They can help us find water and places to camp, and teach us about the culture and customs of the Tibetans. The leadership has decided to take Zhuoma on as our guide and interpreter.”

  Everyone was stunned by this unexpected announcement, none more so than Zhuoma. Confusion was written all over her face. She plainly found it difficult to understand the commander’s heavy Shanxi accent or what he meant by the army’s regulations and principles, but she realized that the soldiers had stopped looking at her with such fierce hatred. With no further explanation, the commander dispatched soldiers to bury their dead comrade, light the stoves for breakfast, put out the campfire, and check over the weapons store. Yet again the murdered man had been a driver, and so another truck had to be abandoned. The remaining trucks were now more crowded than ever. Before the convoy set off, the commander arranged for Zhuoma and Wen to sit together in the cab of the truck, where he usually sat. He said it was to allow the soldiers “a bit more room,” but Wen knew he wanted to give her and Zhuoma an opport
unity to rest safely.

  For the first part of the journey Zhuoma drifted into a long sleep, her head on Wen’s shoulder. When she woke up, Wen was pleased to see that life had begun to return to her eyes. Wen made her eat a little more flour paste, and as Zhuoma’s cheeks regained some color, she saw how young and beautiful she was.

  “Where is your family?” asked Wen. “Where were you going?”

  Zhuoma’s eyes were filled with sadness. As the truck jolted along, she quietly told Wen the story of her life.

  ZHUOMA WAS twenty-one. Her father had been the head of an important, landowning family in the Bam Co region, a fertile area just north of Lhasa that was one of the gateways through the mountains, providing access to the north of Tibet. He presided over a large household with extensive lands and many serfs. Zhuoma’s mother had died giving birth to her, and her father’s other two wives had not produced children, so she had been her father’s greatest treasure.

  When she was five years old, two Chinese men in military uniforms had come to stay in their household. Her father said that they had come to research Tibetan culture. It was only later that Zhuoma learned that they had been envoys sent by the Nationalist government in China to research the arts and customs of Tibet. The two Chinese had taken a great shine to her and, in their halting Tibetan, had told her many fascinating stories. The older of the two had preferred stories to do with Chinese history. He had told her about how five thousand years ago Da Yu had stopped the Yellow River from flooding by dividing it into two branches; how Wang Zhaojun, one of the Four Beauties of Chinese history, had brought peace to the north of China by marrying a barbarian king; how the principles of political power were contained in a book called The Three Kingdoms; and how Sun Yat-sen had founded the modern state of China. The younger man had entranced her with Chinese legends and stories of female daring. He talked of Nu Wa and how she had held a stone up to a hole in the sky when she saw it was broken, the Monkey King, who had challenged the authority of the heavens, and the young girl Mulan who had disguised herself as a man and joined the army in the place of her father, remaining undetected for many years.