Religious figures are by no means the only target of the author’s satire. Again and again we witness the corruption of insatiable officials in a socialist system whose raison d’être is supposedly to “serve the people”—the very people they end up exploiting. These are officials of the Chinese government bureaucracy, but more often than not they are corrupt and callous Tibetan cadres, such as the farcically devious Lozang Gyatso in “A Show to Delight the Masses,” the red-haired woman in “Black Fox Valley,” and the unnamed narrator of “Notes of a Volunteer AIDS Worker.” In fact, virtually no one emerges unscathed from the author’s barbed pen, bar the ever-reliable yak. In “Ralo,” we are even treated to a skewering of naïve Western tourists with their romantic preconceptions of an untainted Tibetan “pure land.” Beyond his critiques of individual and institutional failings, Tsering Döndrup is often at his best when examining the social consequences that China’s unchecked drive to modernization has brought to the Tibetan highlands: gambling, prostitution, and alcoholism are just some of the social ills in “Mahjong,” “Nose Rings,” “The Handsome Monk,” and “Notes of a Volunteer AIDS Worker” (gambling also brings with it a dimension of ethnic politics, as it most often comes in the form of an addiction to the Chinese game of mahjong). But no matter what the context, Tsering Döndrup is above all concerned with the hardships faced by ordinary Tibetans in a world that is both rapidly changing and yet somehow immutable. With knowledge acquired through a lifetime of firsthand experience, he presents his nomad characters in countless guises: hardworking, lazy, clever, gullible, strong, vulnerable—but never idealized and never demonized.
The setting for Tsering Döndrup’s fiction also plays a role that goes beyond mere backdrop. The author has exhibited a consistent concern with environmental issues, and in the case of Tibet—home to numerous endangered species and a vast repository of fresh water resources (many of Asia’s largest rivers originate on the Tibetan plateau)—these are problems with global repercussions. In recent decades Tibetan Buddhism has become closely aligned in many quarters with environmental awareness and activism, but Tsering Döndrup’s approach to the question as a writer is perhaps more resonant with the global environmental justice movement, particularly in his concern for the traditional relationship between people and land (in that sense, not unlike the way many Native American groups have been prominent in environmental justice efforts in the United States).
In Tsering Döndrup’s fiction, the degradation of Tibet’s environment goes hand in hand with the decline of traditional nomad life brought about by industrialization and China’s rapid charge to modernity. “The Story of the Moon,” a dystopian sci-fi vignette, casts a pessimistic eye over the consequences of humanity embracing reckless technological development as its guiding ethos. “Black Fox Valley,” meanwhile, shows this process on a much more human scale. The story opens with a description of the Edenic valley, filled with an abundance of natural riches that even “an expert in botany would be hard pressed to identify.” When Sangyé’s family leaves Black Fox Valley, they become mired in the realities of modern industrial and consumer life, every example of which turns out to be a pale and impractical imitation of their tried-and-tested traditional ways. Finally, they give up on this new world and return home only to discover, in a tragic inversion of the story’s introduction, that the idyllic valley has been turned into one giant coal mine (rampant strip mining is one of the gravest threats to Tibet’s pastoral lands). Tsering Döndrup’s story illustrates that Tibetan nomads, who have lived in harmony with their environment for centuries, have a lot more to tell us about modernity than we might think.
Of the stories collected here, “Ralo” also deserves particular mention, as it is one of the most well-known works of fiction in the burgeoning canon of modern Tibetan literature. Just as the introduction to the second part of the story says, it was first published in Light Rain magazine in 1991, and a longer “sequel” arrived in 1997, thus turning it into a novella. The anecdote related by the narrator at the start of part 2 is true: the editorial department of Light Rain really did request that Tsering Döndrup concoct an optimistic conclusion to his story and turn Ralo into a successful and inspirational character. The self-reflective anxiety that Ralo prompted among Tibetan readers was by no means limited to these literary editors. In a landmark article first published in 2001, the noted critic Dülha Gyel set out a detailed analysis of Ralo, concluding that he represents no less than a crystallization of all the ills of the Tibetan character. Foremost among Ralo’s faults, he argued, are his particularly “Tibetan” reliance on superstition and faith to guide him through life and his absorption of a Buddhist conviction in the absence of the self, making Ralo lazy and incapable of applying himself to progress in the real world. To readers of Chinese literature this will sound familiar, and for good reason, as Dülha Gyel’s analysis consciously built on the discourse of national character that was so prominent at the birth of modern Chinese writing. “The True Story of Ah Q,” by modern China’s most renowned author, Lu Xun, caused countless readers, writers, and scholars to plunge into considerations of what was wrong with the Chinese “national character,” with many people even fretting that the story’s titular character somehow reflected or represented them. In the years since the publication of “Ralo,” a number of articles about the story have been published and have gradually coalesced into a similar debate about Ralo’s personality flaws and the deep-seated cultural factors that may lie behind them.
Quite what the reader unfamiliar with or indifferent to such a reading will make of the story is another matter. While Tsering Döndrup is a great admirer of Lu Xun’s work, he remains ambivalent about the comparisons elicited by his story. And indeed, “Ralo” is teasing, ambiguous, and hard to pin a single reading upon. Ralo may be lazy and foolish, but he is also talented (initially, at least) at a number of endeavors. He may be gullible and absurd, but he is also the victim of social forces far beyond his control. However we might read “Ralo,” it is not a stretch to say that it has had an influence on modern Tibetan literature that is almost comparable to Ah Q’s influence on its Chinese counterpart. Ralo’s presence even extends beyond the literary realm: there are cafés scattered throughout China’s Tibetan regions named after the (in)famous character where one can order a “Ralo milk tea.”
The issues faced by nomads (and indeed all Tibetans) in modern China are also embedded in the very language of these stories. The Chinese language has had a huge impact on modern Tibetan, from numerous loanwords that have slipped into everyday speech to the many political and administrative terms phonetically borrowed from Mandarin. Tsering Döndrup treats this linguistic crisis quite unlike any other contemporary Tibetan author. “Piss and Pride” sketches the social and linguistic misadventures of one elderly nomad who must take a trip to the city to see his son (along the way providing a wry send-up of the discourse of “national pride,” ubiquitous in Tibetan intellectual circles since the time of Döndrup Gyel), but it is in “Black Fox Valley” that the linguistic crisis of modern Tibetan is dealt with most poignantly.
As his career has progressed, Tsering Döndrup has continued to refine his style while pushing new boundaries, and “Black Fox Valley” is the most outstanding example of his more recent work. The immediate context for the piece is a government campaign to “Return the Pastures and Restore the Grasslands,” part of the broader “Open up the West” campaign launched in 1999 to promote economic development in China’s western regions, some of the poorest in the country. As part of the plan to “retire” grazing pastures, large numbers of nomad communities have been taken off the land they traditionally used and resettled in newly constructed towns.7 In “Black Fox Valley,” we see what happens to one family that undergoes this relocation. As shown in the story, the monumental shift in lifestyle has had dire consequences for many. In addition to the problems caused by shoddy housing construction, many resettled nomads have had to wrestle with alcoholism, gambling, and prostitut
ion—all perennial concerns of Tsering Döndrup’s penetrating stories about Tibetan society.
But the story is much more than a mere critique of a specific government policy. Tibetan nomadic life is the heartbeat of Tsering Döndrup’s fiction, and “Black Fox Valley” charts not only the forced decline of an entire way of existence that has persisted uninterrupted for centuries but also the cultural and linguistic alienation inherent in this process. Through its liberal use of Chinese vocabulary (rendered phonetically in Tibetan in the original), the story shows that the nomads must not only confront unfamiliar settings but also experience them through an unfamiliar language. In his native environment, the father, Sangyé, is a respected member of the community, quick-witted and adept at verbal sparring. After their move to the town, however, his inability to speak Chinese and his inexperience with settled, “modern” life quickly turn him into a figure of ridicule, an ignorant bumpkin scorned by the Chinese-speaking local official. We see also just how quickly nomad life can be erased through the family’s generational differences: while Jamyang, the grandfather, is incapable of adapting to this new lifestyle, the granddaughter, Lhari Kyi, adjusts quite happily, nowhere more so than in her speech, which becomes peppered with Chinese phrases. In a sense, “Black Fox Valley” represents a microcosm of Tsering Döndrup’s most closely held literary concerns, crystallized into a virtuosic and deeply empathetic narrative: the corruption of both religion and officialdom, the degradation of traditional nomad life and its attendant social issues, the linguistic invasion of the Chinese language, and the threat to Tibet’s environment from industrial modernity.
These stories will provide a fresh experience for readers of every stripe. For those interested in Tibetan culture, there is a keen inquiry into how it persists in a modernizing world that threatens its very existence. For those interested in contemporary China, there is a depiction of its ethnic and linguistic politics that brings to light a greatly overlooked dimension of the PRC. And for readers seeking new perspectives in contemporary fiction, they are here in abundance. Modern Tibetan literature may still be an unknown quantity to English-speaking audiences, but for an introduction to its vibrancy and vitality, we could ask for no better guide than Tsering Döndrup.
A NOTE ON ROMANIZATION
Tibetan personal and place names, as well as other instances of Tibetan vocabulary in the text, are rendered, with minor deviations, using David Germano and Nicolas Tournadre’s “Simplified Phonetic Transcription of Standard Tibetan,” developed by the Tibetan and Himalayan Library. Chinese terms are rendered according to the Hanyu Pinyin romanization system.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
All translations in this volume are my own, with the exception of “A Show to Delight the Masses,” which was translated by Lauran Hartley and appeared previously in Persimmon magazine. I would like to thank Lauran not only for allowing me to include her excellent translation but also for her unfailingly selfless assistance with the project as a whole. Part 1 of “Ralo” was previously published in Old Demons, New Deities (OR Books, 2017), and benefited from the editorial suggestions of Tenzin Dickie. I would like to thank Christine Dunbar at Columbia University Press for providing expert guidance throughout the publishing process, as well as Chloe Estep and Max Berwald, who gave invaluable suggestions on the translations. Several Tibetan friends helped me with linguistic queries, in particular Tsering Samdrup, who was extremely generous with his time and his wealth of knowledge. None of this would have been possible without the loving and unwavering support of my wife, Jennie Chow, who has been my constant companion in several homes around the world and has always been my first and most dedicated reader as well as a wonderfully perceptive editor. Lastly, I owe a great debt of gratitude to the author. From the very beginning he has encouraged and assisted this project in every way he can, not least by patiently responding to my interminable questions. I hope this book can go some way toward helping earn his work the wider audience it so richly deserves.
* * *
1. Yangdon Dhondup, “Writers at the Crossroads: The Mongolian-Tibetan Authors Tsering Dondup and Jangbu,” Inner Asia 4, no. 2 (2002): 225–240.
2. For more on Tibet’s various traditional poetic forms and the influence of The Mirror of Poetry, see Roger R. Jackson, “‘Poetry’ in Tibet: Glu, mGur, sNyan ngag and ‘Songs of Experience’,” and Leonard W. J. van der Kuijp, “Tibetan Belles-Lettres: The Influence of Daṇḍin and Kṣemendra,” in Tibetan Literature: Studies in Genre, ed. José Ignacio Cabezón and Roger R. Jackson (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 1996), 368–392 and 393–410. Janet Gyatso’s Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998) provides an excellent introduction to Tibetan biographical writing.
3. Bryan Cuevas has examined this genre in detail in Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the Afterlife in Tibet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
4. Lama Jabb, Oral and Literary Continuities in Modern Tibetan Literature: The Inescapable Nation (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015).
5. There are numerous studies of Döndrup Gyel’s work in the Tibetan language, and several articles in English. For an overview of the author and this poem in particular, see Lauran R. Hartley, “The Advent of Modern Tibetan Free-Verse Poetry in the Tibetan Language,” in A New Literary History of Modern China, ed. David Der-wei Wang (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2017), 765–771.
6. The most significant publication in English remains Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), edited by Lauran R. Hartley and Patricia Schiaffini-Vedani.
7. For more on these campaigns, see Emily T. Yeh, “Green Governmentality and Pastoralism in Western China: ‘Converting Pastures to Grasslands’,” Nomadic Peoples 9, no. 1/2 (2005): 9–30.
1
THE DISTURBANCE IN D— CAMP
ONE
Something like this really did happen. As soon as it took place I wrote a report and sent it to the county government, who, after marking it with the words “situation verified” and affixing an official seal, sent it on to some Tibetan newspaper. About a year passed, and there was still no response. Later, I found out from a friend of mine that the editor of the paper had buried my report in a corner of the office, muttering, “We’ve been hearing a lot about this sort of thing lately; got to be careful, have to be careful.” For this reason I decided to change the names of the people and places involved and write it up as a story.
TWO
Sökyab, the head of D— Camp, was up early. Riding a black yak, he passed by every family’s door. “Soon as you’ve put the cattle out, the head of each family get to my place for a meeting!” he called out as he went. The yak’s lips had turned completely white from the frost, and it was panting heavily. From a distance, it looked like two columns of white smoke were spouting from its nostrils.
Sökyab took a silver-plated snuffbox from the pocket of his chuba, tipped a little bit onto the nail of his left thumb, and snorted it up into two nostrils that were so small it was hard to tell whether or not they existed. Wiping his thumb on the inside of his chuba, he took a look around. “Right, everyone’s here, we can make a start. I’ll keep it brief today. It won’t be long until the monastery puts up the pillar in the assembly hall. Our camp needs to contribute one hundred yuan per person to begin with, and if you’ve no money you can give a good-quality ram.” He put the snuffbox away and retrieved a greasy notebook from his chuba. “In my family, for example, there are five people, so that would be five hundred yuan, or if it was rams, five rams. In Akhu Tamdrin’s family there are eight people. If he gives cash then it’s eight hundred yuan, if he gives rams then it’s eight rams. In Akhu Zöpa’s family there are eleven people. If he gives cash then it’s one thousand one hundred yuan, if he gives rams then it’s eleven rams …”
The attendees of the meeting, eyes wide and mouths agape, began to whisper among themselves. Sökyab snapped his notebook
shut and raised his voice. “You all know how many people are in each of your families, so I don’t need to list them all individually. You ought to know that the building of the assembly hall is for the benefit of all sentient beings, and it’s for your own benefit too. Whoever fails to contribute will be kicked out of the camp. No one in the camp will be allowed to speak to that family, and they won’t be allowed to pitch their tents with us, either. Oh, and one more thing: counting from today, all the money needs to be handed over within a month.”
Everyone was left even more wide-eyed and agape than before. Thus concluded the meeting, the first of its kind since the founding of New China.
THREE
The men of D— Camp had been gathering money for about twenty days. Most of the families had counted up the cash according to the family head count and handed it over to Sökyab, but Akhu Zöpa’s family had only managed to save up two hundred and thirty yuan.
“We still need eight hundred and seventy yuan,” he sighed. “Where on earth are we going to get it?” Old Zöpa was so worried that he even lost his appetite. In the past, his family had been one of the more prosperous in the camp, but recently they’d taken two trips to Lhasa, and, more seriously, the previous summer their flock of sheep had been carried away by a flood. Since then they’d fallen into destitution.
There was also Ama Drölkar and her daughter, who every year relied on the government to get them through the hard times. Normally they couldn’t even afford to buy tea and salt, so how were they going to scrape up a two hundred-yuan donation?
Every day Sökyab did a circuit around the camp, yelling, “Time to pay up!”
When a month had passed, Sökyab got all the family heads together and convened another meeting. He took a good pinch of snuff before beginning. “Right, most of the families with cash have now handed over the cash, and those without have handed over the rams. Yes indeed, very good. If you’re a black-headed Tibetan then that’s what you ought to do. However—,” and here, he raised his voice, “Yes, some families—have not paid up. Yes indeed, very good. Haha! And where will those people end up when they die? Have a think about that. I’ll keep it brief today. What we talked about before—I’m sure you all remember. When we move to the spring camp, those two families will be out on their own.”
The Handsome Monk and Other Stories Page 2