THE HANDSOME MONK AND OTHER STORIES
WEATHERHEAD BOOKS ON ASIA
WEATHERHEAD BOOKS ON ASIA
WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
LITERATURE
DAVID DER-WEI WANG, EDITOR
Ye Zhaoyan, Nanjing 1937: A Love Story, translated by Michael Berry (2003)
Oda Makato, The Breaking Jewel, translated by Donald Keene (2003)
Han Shaogong, A Dictionary of Maqiao, translated by Julia Lovell (2003)
Takahashi Takako, Lonely Woman, translated by Maryellen Toman Mori (2004)
Chen Ran, A Private Life, translated by John Howard-Gibbon (2004)
Eileen Chang, Written on Water, translated by Andrew F. Jones (2004)
Writing Women in Modern China: The Revolutionary Years, 1936–1976, edited by Amy D. Dooling (2005)
Han Bangqing, The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai, first translated by Eileen Chang, revised and edited by Eva Hung (2005)
Loud Sparrows: Contemporary Chinese Short-Shorts, translated and edited by Aili Mu, Julie Chiu, and Howard Goldblatt (2006)
Hiratsuka Raichō, In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun, translated by Teruko Craig (2006)
Zhu Wen, I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China, translated by Julia Lovell (2007)
For a complete list of titles in this series, see page 203.
THE HANDSOME MONK AND OTHER STORIES
TSERING DÖNDRUP
Translated by Christopher Peacock
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Pushkin Fund in the publication of this book.
This publication has been supported by the Richard W. Weatherhead Publication Fund of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.
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E-ISBN 978-0-231-54878-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tshe-ring-don-grub, 1961– author. | Peacock, Christopher, 1986– translator.
Title: The handsome monk and other stories / Tsering Dondrup ; translated by Christopher Peacock.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2019. | Series: Weatherhead books on Asia | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018020462 (print) | LCCN 2018027037 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231190220 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231190237 (pbk.)
Classification: LCC PL3748.T776 (ebook) | LCC PL3748.T776 A2 2019 (print) | DDC 895/.43—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020462
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].
Cover design: Noah Arlow
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. The Disturbance in D— Camp
2. Piss and Pride
3. Ralo
4. A Show to Delight the Masses
5. One Mani
6. Mahjong
7. The Story of the Moon
8. A Formula
9. The Handsome Monk
10. Revenge
11. Nose Rings
12. Brothers
13. The Last Man to Care for His Parents
14. Black Fox Valley
15. Notes of a Volunteer AIDS Worker
Introduction
CORRUPT LAMAS, RELIABLE YAKS: THE FICTIONAL WORLD OF TSERING DÖNDRUP
“A monk and a prostitute. Aren’t we the perfect match?”
So says the protagonist of “The Handsome Monk” when he finds himself entangled in a relationship hardly appropriate for a man of his occupation. For the wayward monk the match may not be ideal, but as a juxtaposition that captures the unique fictional world contained in these pages, it couldn’t be more fitting. This is Tibet, where to this day monastic life remains commonplace and some form of religious devotion is the norm for most. But Tibet is also a place in the real world, where real problems exist and human motivations and failings are as applicable as anywhere else. The stories in this volume bring to life modern Tibet as imagined by the perceptive, critical, and humorous author Tsering Döndrup, a writer who has been a fixture on the Tibetan literary scene since his debut in the 1980s. His is a world where lamas drive expensive cars, where nomads consider committing murder to escape gambling debts, where corruption is rife and happy resolutions are hard to come by. Shangri-La it is not.
Tsering Döndrup’s first story appeared in 1983, and to date he has published two collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and four full-length novels. He was born in 1961 in Malho (Ch.: Henan) Mongolian Autonomous County in Qinghai province, China. To Tibetans, this broader region is known as Amdo, the easternmost part of the Tibetan-inhabited areas, which now spreads largely across China’s northwest provinces of Qinghai and Gansu. As a child, Tsering Döndrup helped his family tend their livestock and didn’t begin attending school until the age of thirteen. In 1982 he graduated from the Huangnan Teacher’s Training School, and he continued his studies at the Qinghai Nationalities Institute in Xining and the Northwest Nationalities Institute in Lanzhou (both since renamed as “universities”), two of the most prestigious institutions for the study of Tibetan culture. It is virtually impossible for modern Tibetan writers to live off the income from their art alone, and Tsering Döndrup is no exception: he has worked as a schoolteacher, a legal secretary, and an editor at the office of the Henan County Annals. In 2013, however, he retired to focus on his writing full-time, a promising indication that his career shows no signs of slowing down.
While he is widely considered to be a Tibetan author, Tsering Döndrup is, by ethnicity, Mongolian. The author’s home county of Malho (also referred to by Tibetans as sogpo, the Tibetan word for “Mongolian”) is a historically Mongolian county in a Tibetan region whose inhabitants trace their heritage to the arrival of Gushri Khan in the seventeenth century. Over time, however, its people gradually assimilated into Tibetan culture and adopted the Tibetan language, and today the people of Malho occupy something of an in-between space: ethnically Mongolian, culturally and linguistically Tibetan.1 Though this intermediate status has reportedly led some to question the extent of Tsering Döndrup’s “Tibetanness,” the vast majority of Tibetan readers have embraced him as their own, and his reputation as one of modern Tibet’s most talented, popular, and critically acclaimed authors is beyond question.
His identity as a Tibetan writer is reflected in his deep engagement with the long and rich traditions of Tibetan literature, which stretch all the way back to the glu and mgur poem-songs found in the caves of Dunhuang. Much premodern Tibetan writing relates in one form or another to the subject of Buddhism, and it comes in all shapes and sizes. In terms of poetry (and Tibetan belles lettres in general), one text above all looms large, and that is Daṇḍin’s Kāvyādarśa (The Mirror of Poetry). Translated into Tibetan from Sanskrit in the thirteenth century, Daṇḍin’s text had an impact that is hard to overstate, setting poetic guidelines for everything from metrics to specific synonyms. Narrative prose also existed (though more often than not it was interspersed with verse of various kinds, making many premodern Tibetan texts rather stylistically eclectic), particularly in the numerous examples of biography and autobiography.2 Lastly, there is the broad category of folk and oral literature, included in which is the Epic of King Gesar, sometimes said to be the longest epic in the wor
ld.
In the present collection, one need only read “A Show to Delight the Masses” to see how Tsering Döndrup has inherited key aspects of this legacy. The story borrows the traditional narrative form of mixed prose and poetry and updates it in a distinctly playful, modern fashion, and its subject matter references at least two kinds of traditional texts. It is a close relative of the genre of delok tales, which narrate the experiences of ordinary people who, like the story’s protagonist, Lozang Gyatso, take a brief trip to Hell and back (in Lozang Gyatso’s case, however, that return is short-lived).3 The story also recalls a famous episode from The Epic of King Gesar in which the king travels to Hell to rescue his wife, who has been put on trial before the Lord of Death.
But it will be immediately clear to the reader that these are no traditional Tibetan texts. They are composed as modern short stories, and in that sense are perfectly legible to a contemporary global audience. At times, Tsering Döndrup even plays with narrative style in a way that pushes his work into the territory of avant-garde experimentation: “A Formula,” for example, leaps through time in a manner disorienting for reader and protagonist alike. A recent study has cautioned us not to see a gulf between Tibet’s rich writing traditions and its modern literature, and there is certainly a case to be made for continuity, be it in terms of kāvya poetics or the influence of oral storytelling on modern narrative.4 But for all the ways the Tibetan literature we now call modern may be building on its past, there are countless more ways it is forging ahead to create new and unexplored possibilities. The introduction of short stories and novels, never before recognized forms in Tibetan literature, is but one example of these revolutionary developments (the eighteenth-century Tale of the Incomparable Prince, a Buddhist-themed retelling of the Ramayana, is somewhat exceptional for having an overtly fictional plot, but it possesses all the traits of an epic and none of the modern novel).
Modern Tibetan literature has also undergone a transformation in content. There are still stories or poems about religion—Buddhism remains an integral part of Tibetan life—but they are likely to be about the practice or the effects of religion in the everyday world; no longer is this literature that we would call explicitly “religious.” Moreover, this everyday life is that of Tibetans in modern China, which brings us to an entirely different literary landscape that Tsering Döndrup also inhabits.
The very fact of Tibet’s inclusion in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has necessarily produced an enormous shift in its literature, as writing that reflects the experiences of modern Tibetans must now reflect a life colored and conditioned by the experience of existing in contemporary China. In addition, Tibetans now find themselves labeled a “minority nationality”—along with China’s fifty-four officially designated others—and their literature therefore also labeled a “minority literature.” In terms of production, Tibetan creative writing is entirely integrated into China’s state and private literary systems. Tibetan authors publish through journals and publishers organized under Chinese state practices, and likewise, online literature is largely circulated on websites and platforms hosted in China. Unlike the multifaceted heritage of belles lettres described previously, these developments are all recent. It was, by and large, in the political thaw that followed the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) that this new kind of literature began to emerge. Two journals in particular, Tibetan Art and Literature, launched in Lhasa in 1980, and Light Rain, launched in Xining in 1981, helped to foment a virtual explosion of new Tibetan writing (many of Tsering Döndrup’s stories have been published in both over the years).
In 1983, the latter journal published a free-verse poem, often said to be the first of its kind in Tibetan, called “Waterfall of Youth.” This freewheeling, impassioned call for a progressive renewal of Tibetan culture to be led by a new generation was a revelation for Tibetan readers. Its author, Döndrup Gyel, has since been enshrined as the “father” of modern Tibetan literature.5 Though his career was short (Döndrup Gyel committed suicide in 1985), his influence can hardly be exaggerated. His work is still read today at poetry recitations held in his honor; a growing body of “Döndrup Gyel research” examines his work from all angles; and his six-volume collected works is a constant presence in Tibetan bookshops. While Döndrup Gyel’s legacy remains a dominant force in Tibetan literature, a number of talented authors with diverse styles have emerged in the years since his time, and along with them numerous other journals of fiction, poetry, and essayistic writing. There is now a robust publishing industry and a market for novels and book-length collections of poetry and short stories, and in recent years online literary journals and self-publishing through new media have soared in popularity. In the West, a gradual response to this new literary activity has occurred in the form of academic studies and translations that, though few, are increasing in number.6
One more of Tsering Döndrup’s literary circles deserves mention: that of world literature. Like many modern Tibetan writers, Tsering Döndrup has encountered foreign literature primarily through Chinese translations. While he admires select modern Chinese authors (Lu Xun, for example), Tsering Döndrup is most of all interested in global literary currents beyond China’s borders. He counts George Orwell as one of his favorite writers and is particularly fond of a number of nineteenth-century Russian authors: Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Goncharov, and Mikhail Lermontov, among others. While foreign literature in translation has been influencing Tibetan writers in new and unexpected ways, Tsering Döndrup’s work itself has begun to enter into global conversations, having already been translated into English, French, German, Chinese, Mongolian, Japanese, and other languages. Through these multidirectional engagements, his writing is beginning to find the audiences it merits and helping to create a space for modern Tibetan literature on a global stage from which it has too long been absent.
English-language readers experiencing Tsering Döndrup’s stories for the first time will discover a vivid fictional world that repeatedly returns to the same settings, the same themes, the same issues, and sometimes even the same characters. Almost all of the stories take place in the fictional county of Tsezhung, a rural nomad locale that lies along the real-life Tsechu River in his home region of Malho, Qinghai. The author’s creation of a consistent setting for his fictional world immediately calls to mind illustrious counterparts such as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or, slightly closer to home, Mo Yan’s Northeast Gaomi Township, but the reader will never have encountered a setting quite like Tsezhung, a quintessential Tibetan nomadic landscape where small communities of herders shepherd their flocks across vast, open grasslands thousands of feet above sea level. The characters subsist on a diet of staple nomad fare—meat, butter, cheese, tsampa (a doughlike ball of roasted barely flour mixed with other ingredients)—and go about their daily business to the ever-present rhythms of Tibetan religious life.
But the briefest dip into “Brothers” or “Revenge,” both of which portray violent feuds between nomad clans, will be enough to show that Tsering Döndrup hardly presents an idealized or idyllic picture of this striking setting. Tsering Döndrup’s fiction is unflaggingly critical, reflective, and above all, satirical. There is also a practical reason for his invention of a fictional county: to insulate himself against the potential for readers to see in his stories reflections of real-life events or people, not entirely unlikely given that the author has lived his entire life in a relatively close-knit community. For example, Alak Drong is a recurring character whose unscrupulous ways will quickly become all too familiar to the reader. In the Amdo dialect of Tibetan, “Alak” is the equivalent of “Rinpoché,” a term used in Central Tibet and in exile as a respectful form of address for a senior religious teacher. This could be a lama (a term for various types of Buddhist teacher) or a trülku (a reincarnated lama). “Drong” is the Tibetan word for a wild yak, a particularly fierce and untamable ancestor of Tibet’s emblematic animal. This is a comically improbable name for a revered master of the Buddha Dharma,
and it was a very conscious choice on Tsering Döndrup’s part, as any name that inadvertently resembled that of an actual lama or trülku could have brought down unwanted troubles on the author’s head.
Alak Drong is the foremost symbol of Tsering Döndrup’s wide-ranging and unflinching critique of corruption and hypocrisy in the modern-day practice of Tibetan Buddhism. This comes in the form of an excessive alms-giving campaign that reduces an already impoverished community to virtual destitution in “The Disturbance in D–– Camp,” the protagonist’s various naïve misadventures in “Ralo,” and the profane hypocrisies of Gendün Gyatso in “The Handsome Monk.” But we must also be cautious not to read his work oversimplistically as being somehow “antireligious.” The last story is a case in point. Like the best of authors, Tsering Döndrup is not didactic but explorative and, while critical, empathetic. “The Handsome Monk” does not condemn its protagonist; rather, it paints a brutally honest picture of the psychological traumas and dilemmas faced by a man who, while he may be a monk, is also a person, complete with the flaws, desires, and contradictions of all human beings. We might even say that “The Handsome Monk” could be read as a deft fictional rendering of Buddhist philosophical concerns about the insignificance of the mundane world, not unlike a tale about the worldly temptations of a Catholic priest. In general, readers looking for modern-day reflections of Tibetan Buddhist practice in these pages will find them in abundance. “Revenge,” for instance, is an exploration of karmic cause and effect executed with a conciseness and poignancy that is particular to the short story form. Unlike the great corpus of Tibetan literature that precedes his work, however, Tsering Döndrup’s fiction does not advocate any particular solution to the problems he poses; we are not told that the cycle of samsaric suffering can only end through Buddhist practice leading to liberation. Perhaps the answer does lie in the cultivation of compassion and merit, or in very real-world laws and policies, or both: his stories, tantalizingly ambiguous, give readers room to consider these problems for themselves.
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