Stories of Tibet

In “The Doctor,” the final and perhaps most experimental short story of the late Pema Tseden’s collection, Enticement: Stories of Tibet, Man A and Woman A face an apocalyptic contagion. Discussing the absurdity of life, Woman A says: “When one thinks about it, human life is totally absurd.” Man A responds with a heavy sigh: “It is completely absurd.” Woman A also sighs: “The world and samsara are utterly meaningless.”

Like a chorus, they echo each other’s words, as though by mere repetition, truth itself emerges.

The narrator doesn’t disclose their names or their relationship. Are they husband and wife? Brother and sister? Two strangers who just met? Descriptions of the setting, like stage directions of a play, are bare. There is a riverbank. It is spring. The leaves of a recently planted tree are beginning to grow.

Enticement: Stories of Tibet
by Pema Tseden
State University of New York Press, September 2018, 160 pp., $19.95, paper

The man and woman are in a double bind: To escape the contagion, they can either traverse the dangerous river or wait for a doctor to arrive with a cure. Both options threaten death; they choose to wait. As time passes, events occur and recur in an endless loop. The seasons change. They age and wrinkle. Others trying to escape appear and disappear. Some die crossing the river. Prospects of the doctor’s arrival appear increasingly bleak. To buffer themselves against the absurdity of their new reality and the inevitability of their suffering, the man and woman repeatedly invoke and insist on their faith in the three jewels.

Characters in the rest of Tseden’s sprawling and experimental anthology—his first in English—also confront and cycle through a samsara of suffering. They brush against the alienating forces of the state or the whims of nature, faith, and their bare human desires. Few emerge with their innocence and morality intact, their sense of the world irreparably ruptured.

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If stories by exiled Tibetan writers begin with the separation from and fixation on the homeland they knew, writings from inside Tibet are about witnessing and chronicling its changing landscape.

Born during the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution in a nomadic region in Trika County in Qinghai Province, Tseden grew up in a family of herders and farmers. At an early age, he cultivated an appreciation for Tibetan language and culture from his grandfather, who would make the school-aged Tseden copy Buddhist scriptures by hand.

Before earning a reputation as a pioneer and auteur of Tibetan New Wave cinema, Tseden was first a writer and a translator. In the 1980s, as Tibetan and Chinese literature emerged from the twilight of the Cultural Revolution, Tseden attended Northwest University for Nationalities in Lanzhou, where he wrote and translated stories.

If exiled writers read like caricatures as they “shout, trying to underscore our exile,” as the writer-translator-editor Tenzin Dickie writes in her introduction to The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays, writings from Tibet are like code that must be deciphered. “There is so much they can’t say,” writes Dickie, “so little that can be said.”

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In the more realist and contemporary stories of Enticement, Tseden’s critique of the Chinese colonial state can be decoded in his focus on the quiet absurdity and alienation of modern Tibetan life. In “Tharlo,” the titular protagonist, a shepherd-orphan affectionately known by local villagers as “Little Braid,” travels to the city to obtain a new government-issued identity card. On his journey, Tharlo meets several people: the district police chief behind the local campaign to register villagers for IDs; a photographer who tells him his hair is too messy; and a young, attractive hairdresser. They gently mock Tharlo’s small braid, and when he recites the number of sheep he owns or a speech from Mao, they express surprise at his excellent memory. Mostly, they find his pastoral innocence and guilelessness amusing, as though he has just emerged from a cave.

As he spends more time in the city, Tharlo starts drinking. He falls for the hairdresser who persuades him to sell his sheep, the main source of his livelihood. In one heartbreaking scene, he cuts off his braid, lopping off a part of his old self.

In an ironic and absurd twist, when Tharlo visits the police station to collect his identity card, the chief tells him he now looks different from his photograph, and orders him to make a new one. So Tharlo ends up right where we encounter him at the beginning of the story, off to the city to take a new photo. But this time, his innocence is irrevocably lost. The temptations of city life, his carnal desires, and the interests of the state prove to be forces too powerful for Tharlo to overcome.

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Despite the decades-long trend of Han Chinese migration into the Tibetan plateau, Chinese characters are noticeably absent from Tseden’s depiction of contemporary Tibetan life. If they appear, it is only in marginal roles, like the Chinese tourist in “Tharlo,” who, upon seeing the wild-haired Tharlo smoking a cigarette, exoticizes him and tells him he looks like an artist. By erasing or minimizing Chinese presence from the worlds he has built, Tseden’s stories are radical exercises in fantasy, underscoring that his concerns as an artist are foremost of Tibetans.

The lives of his characters are of those undeniably touched by the colonial state.

Nonetheless, the lives of his characters are of those undeniably touched by the colonial state. In “Eight Sheep,” a young shepherd grieves the loss of his mother and grassland that has been in “disarray” since the government decided to enclose it with a fence. Or in “Gang,” a magical-realist tale about two siblings named Gang with translucent bodies that shimmer in the light. After snowstorms and failed crops beset their village, the male Gang decides to exhibit his body to the public to help generate economic prosperity.

But to the dismay of the foreign researchers who want to study their glowing bodies, the journalists who flock to the town for a good story, and the desperate villagers who hope to profit from the tourism, the siblings refuse to be photographed together.

By removing Chinese perspectives, Tseden also avoids making his stories about the pure, innocent Tibetan pitted against the bad-faith Chinese actor. Instead, his work shows how Tibetans—the women who try to civilize Tharlo or the desperate villagers in “Gang”—are also complicit in feeding systems of exploitation and profit. Each is caught in complex calculations of what it means to be a modern Tibetan subject.

It is nearly impossible for the characters in Tseden’s stories to retain moral purity. Only the siblings in “Gang” manage to. But they can do so only by abandoning society and its totalizing and cannibalistic urges.

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To confine Tseden’s literary concerns to a primarily political project, however, would be a disservice to his range as a writer. Tseden’s satirical and humorous treatment of Tibetan life also extends to Buddhism and the seemingly irrational nature of faith.

The delightful and charming “Orgyan’s Teeth” begins with the death of the narrator’s childhood friend Orgyan, a reincarnate lama, who many believe has “passed into nirvana.” But the narrator is skeptical. The story occurs mostly in flashbacks, as the narrator, like a detective, exhumes old memories of Orgyan, searching for any evidence that he was or wasn’t a holy being.

He remembers how Orgyan, who wasn’t an especially bright student, struggled with math and often copied his homework. But there’s an equal impulse in the narrator to believe that his friend is special. He recalls one memory of Orgyan resuscitating a fish back to life, or the times when Orgyan, despite his special religious status, treated him as an equal. The story, told through memories in which the narrator seesaws between belief and disbelief, reads like a catalog of faith. The narrator never arrives at a clear answer. But it’s his attempt that matters.

While “Orgyan’s Teeth” is about one man’s ambivalence toward faith, “Enticement,” the collection’s centerpiece, is about the extreme, even violent, measures one can take in the name of devotion. In this dreamlike story, a young man is transfixed by a silkbound book of scriptures that sends him into violent, uncontrollable fits that he can’t remember.

In the meta-narrative “A Golden Corpse Tale: Gun,” Tseden’s twist on a Tibetan folktale, a man named Dega, to repent for his sins of killing, must bring a golden, talking corpse out of the grave to his master. He cannot speak to the corpse, or else he’ll lose possession of it. But the corpse is cunning. To trick Dega into speaking, he tells him a tragic story about two generations of a family stuck in a loop of suffering. Like the people in the story, Dega keeps repeating his error. He remains stuck in transit with the corpse, never reaching his goal—and never atoning for his sins.

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In one of the first scenes of “Tharlo,” when asked by the police chief why he never bothered to make a government-issued card, Tharlo poignantly responds, “Isn’t it enough that I know myself?” Of the stories in Tseden’s anthology, this statement feels like his most pointed rebuke of the Chinese state, its insistence that only by being absorbed into its bureaucratic machine and control do people like Tharlo and Tibetans across the plateau matter. Tseden’s stories can thus be interpreted as an intervention against the fate that befalls people like Tharlo, who, in the face of sweeping political and economic changes, become unrecognizable.

Yet to earmark modernity as specifically Chinese and tradition as Tibetan is too facile. It’s a tragedy that Tseden, who passed away just a year ago at the age of 53, is no longer here to contend with this conundrum imposed by colonialism. His work—the ten stories in this collection and his extensive and celebrated filmography—also does not provide an easy fix. But it does give Tibetans a template to interrogate and better know themselves, so they don’t, as Tharlo does, completely self-obliterate in the face of larger structural changes.

In Enticement, just as Chinese characters are notably missing from Tseden’s stories, so are contextualizing landmarks. There is a village, a town, a river, but they remain unnamed. There are no mentions of Tibet’s traditional regions—like Amdo (where Tseden was from), Kham, and U-Tsang. There is no mention of dialects. But there are vivid descriptions of the grasslands, the mountains, the snow—topographies synonymous with Tibet.

In the introduction to her anthology of Tibetan essays, Dickie writes, “To speak as Tibetans, and to write as Tibetans, is to continually recreate the nation.” By creating specific but unspecified landscapes, Tseden extends to his Tibetan readers a wide and generous terrain where they can map their own stories; he offers a Tibet they can recognize and claim as their own.