A Blighted Flower and Other Stories

"When we read literature about Tibet in English we don’t hear many actual Tibetan voices, besides those from exile; it has been relatively rare to hear from Tibetans inside Tibet. Tibetans who have been brought up under China, and who know China and its language well, don’t necessarily have any animosity towards its culture or its peoples, whatever they think of its policies. Or, even if the pain they have undergone is unimaginably great, they may not consider that such a view needs to be displayed in public – a balancing of considerations that deserves to be taken seriously. There are so few books in translation which offer us that kind of voice, but they are increasing, luckily, thanks mainly to young Tibetologists who are translating such works into western languages. This is a translation by a Finnish scholar, Riika Virtanen, of four short stories by leading Tibetan writers inside Tibet written in the 1980s or shortly after. They’re not political stories – they’re published inside Tibet and they don’t necessarily have strong political agendas. Even if they had, the authors couldn’t have written openly about them. Maybe they don’t think in binary or polar ways about their situation, which after all was infinitely better for them at that time than what they had lived through in the sixties and seventies. Instead, these stories are about everyday life. One, by the famous eastern Tibetan writer Dondrup Gyal, is about marriage in Tibetan villages in the countryside, where culture and social behaviour has remained very traditional in many ways. Should Tibetan village society still be forcing women to have arranged marriages, or should they be allowed love marriages? It’s a tragedy about a woman forced to marry someone she doesn’t want. Another, by the Lhasa writer Tashi Palden, is much more contemporary. It describes a young Tibetan girl from the countryside who has been brought into a modern, wealthy Tibetan house in the city as a domestic maid, made to work inhuman hours and then seduced by the man of the house. It’s a kind of Tibetan Tess of the D’Urbervilles in miniature, but entirely contemporary. The exploitation of young women from the rural areas is an important issue in Tibet today, as one of the major Chinese policies in Tibet has been to make the urban Tibetan middle class far wealthier than before, presumably in the hope of increasing their loyalty to the state, at the same time as encouraging rural youth to look for work in towns. The enrichment of the middle class is not a policy that anyone involved in objects to, of course, but the social side-effects and the exploitation that it has nurtured have rarely been discussed. So although these stories don’t discuss politics directly, it’s immediately clear how important they are and how they raise major moral questions about what it means to be a Tibetan in modern, evolving and inwardly conflicted Tibetan society. When we look at novelists and filmmakers coming from inside Tibet, the less they talk about politics – which most of them can’t safely do – the more we see nuance, depth and complexity in their articulation of the issues around developing a modern Tibetan identity. There’s a huge and important discussion going on among Tibetans about how much they have to trade in of their traditions and cultural norms in order to be effective as a people in the modern world. That debate is as or more important than the one over who’s going to be their political ruler, a debate they’re basically doomed to lose. And in Tibetan literature we can see some of the details of that debate over identity and modernity – how much has to be given up and how much can be retained. Among the intellectuals – especially those educated in Tibetan but also among many of those educated in Chinese – there is a very rich sense of Tibetan identity and cultural commitment. I would guess there are more poets per population in north-eastern Tibet than perhaps anywhere else in the world. So there is a thriving commitment to expression, to working out ideas through verse, literature, art and film. Although aspects of Tibetan culture have been targeted by the Chinese state for serious containment and repression, these areas have flourished. But can these intellectuals convey that kind of vision to Tibetans who have much less education, and who are struggling to survive, caught up in either consumer society or in the bureaucratic job market, or just struggling to work in construction or as farmers or traders? That is the question: What’s going to happen when the whole of Tibetan society faces modernity? Will it be able to find the subtle answers that the intellectuals are exploring? There’s not enough discussion about that, whereas an awful lot gets lost, at least in exile, in discussion of the big political issues like protest, imprisonment and attempts to resist Chinese rule. That fight often doesn’t allow for the detailed study that could be given to these larger cultural questions, which all Tibetans have to deal with every day. Well, perhaps we could sum this up by saying that when Westerners and outsiders talk about Tibet, we tend to be speaking in shorthand about China’s right to run it, because the ability of nations and states to persist is fundamental to our deep and necessary anxieties about the viability of the international system. We sense that principles have to be urgently maintained to avert the Hobbesian outcome. But we can also gain by recognising the value of more quotidian discussions about Tibet, which may have little or no immediate impact on our own countries. These we can encounter through conversation with Tibetans, Chinese, Muslims and other people inside Tibet, and even more so through their books, that allow us to follow their discussions among themselves. Then I think we can gradually become familiar with other questions, ones that might perhaps be even larger for them. Language, religion and education are probably key issues for most Tibetans. Debates over the meaning of “development” and “modernity” are crucial too, just as they are for us. If they can work out those issues, they can work out the other questions too, if only China will allow them to do so. But of course it’s difficult just now to see that happening. ——————————————————"