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 world.
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.
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 prostitution—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.