Old Demons, New Deities: Twenty-One Short Stories from Tibet

Introduction © 2017 Tenzin Dickie; Wink © 2017 Pema Bhum. Translation © 2017 Tenzin Dickie; The Silence © 2017 Jamyang Norbu; Ralo© ٢٠١٧ Tsering Dondrup. Translation © 2017 Christopher Peacock; Under the Shadow © 2017 Bhuchung D. Sonam; The Agate and the Singer© ٢٠١٧ Kyabchen Dedrol. Translation © 2017 Tenzin Dickie; The New Road Controversy © 2017 Takbum Gyal. Translation © 2017 Laura Hartley; Nyima Tsering’s Tears © 2017 Woeser. Translation © 2017 Jampa, Bhuchung D. Sonam, Tenzin Tsundue, Jane Perkins ; Hunter’s Moon © 2017 Jamyang Norbu; The Flight of the Wind Horse © 2017 Pema Tsewang Shastri. Translation © 2017 Pema Tsewang Shastri, Tenzin Dickie; Letter for Love © ٢٠١٧ Tsering Wangmo Dhompa; The Connection © 2017 Bhuchung D. Sonam; Light © 2017 Tsering Lama; The Season of Retreats © 2017 Tsering Namgyal Khortsa; The Dream of a Wandering Minstrel © 2017 Pema Tseden. Translation © 2017 Tenzin Dickie; The Fifth Man © 2017 Tenzin Dorjee; Winter in Patlikuhl © 2017 Tenzin Dickie; Snow Pilgrimage © 2017 Kyabchen Dedrol. Translation © 2017 Tenzin Dickie, Catherine Tsuji, Dhondup Tashi Rekjong; Zumki’s Snowlion © 2017 Tenzin Tsundue; Dolma © 2017 Dhondup Tashi Rekjong; Tips © ٢٠١٧ Pema Bhum; The Valley of the Black Foxes" © 2017 Tsering Dondrup. Translation © 2017 Tenzin Dickie, Pema Tsewang Shastri.

Wink by Pema Bhum first appeared in Words Without Borders, reprinted by permission of the publisher. The Silence by Jamyang Norbu first appeared in The Tibet Journal, reprinted by permission of the author. The Agate and the Singer by Kyabchen Dedrol first appeared in Words Without Borders, reprinted by permission of the publisher. Nyima Tsering’s Tears by Woeser first appeared in Manoa Journal, reprinted by permission of the author. Hunter’s Moon by Jamyang Norbu first appeared in The Hindustan Times Weekly, reprinted by permission of the author. Letter for Love by Tsering Wangmo Dhompa first appeared in Caravan Magazine, reprinted by permission of the author. Light by Tsering Lama first appeared in Lalit Magazine, reprinted by permission of the author. The Dream of a Wandering Minstrel by Pema Tseden first appeared in Words Without Borders, reprinted by permission of the publisher. Winter in Patlikuhl by Tenzin Dickie first appeared in Himal SouthAsian, reprinted by permission of the author.

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.

First printing 2017.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-944869-51-9

Text design by Under|Over. Typeset by AarkMany Media, Chennai, India.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my parents, who told me the first stories

Table of Contents

Introduction

Wink | Pema Bhum

The Silence | Jamyang Norbu

Ralo | Tsering Dondrup

Under the Shadow | Bhuchung D. Sonam

The Agate and the Singer | Kyabchen Dedrol

The New Road Controversy | Takbum Gyal

Nyima Tsering’s Tears | Woeser

Hunter’s Moon | Jamyang Norbu

The Flight of the Wind Horse | Pema Tsewang Shastri

Letter for Love | Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

The Connection | Bhuchung D. Sonam

Light | Tsering Lama

The Season of Retreats | Tsering Namgyal Khortsa

The Dream of a Wandering Minstrel | Pema Tseden

The Fifth Man | Tenzin Dorjee

Winter in Patlikuhl | Tenzin Dickie

Snow Pilgrimage | Kyabchen Dedrol

Zumki’s Snow Lion | Tenzin Tsundue

Dolma | Dhondup Tashi Rekjong

Tips | Pema Bhum

The Valley of the Black Foxes | Tsering Dondrup

Contributor Biographies

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I was around twelve when I saw my first Tibetan film. I had no idea what I was seeing.

This was at my Tibetan boarding school in Dharamsala, the capital of Tibet-in-exile. One night our usual evening study session was canceled. The school monitors herded us into the main hall. A white sheet hung onstage, and we watched the images projected onto it.

A Tibetan man wearing army fatigues gets off a bus. With his crew cut and military physique, he is clearly a soldier in the Tibetan unit of the Indian army, a soldier retired and returning home to his Tibetan settlement in the Indian South. Carrying an oversized duffel bag and with a stereo blaring Bollywood music on his shoulder, he saunters into the alleys of the settlement as kids watch him admiringly. He learns English from a Tibetan woman in a scene that causes the hall to ring with delighted laughter, as my classmates and I see mirrored on the screen our own struggles with foreign languages, Hindi and English. She tells him he’s an idiot and he annoys her by saying things like, If P-U-T is ‘poot’, then why isn’t C-U-T ‘coot’? At the end of half an hour, the man and the woman run into the fields and chase each other around a tree in the leitmotif of all Hindi filmi prem kahaniya.

I watched the whole thing, entranced and bewildered. It was only at the very end of the half hour, when the couple circled the tree in the recurring Indian cinematic trope of romantic love, that I finally realized with a jolt what I was watching: this was a Tibetan film, a Tibetan romantic comedy. I had never seen a Tibetan film before. There were none. There were no Tibetan films, no Tibetan short stories, no Tibetan novels. Junot Díaz says, You know how vampires have no reflections in the mirror? If you want to make a human being a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. We grew up, those of us who grew up in exile but also those of us who grew up in Tibet, all of us, without reflections.

Why was that? Why did we grow up as, to use Edwidge Danticat’s phrase, literary orphans?

I

Tibetan literature has a millennia-long history. The Tibetan writing system was invented in the seventh century by grammarian and savant Tonmi Sambhota, sent by his king, Songtsen Gampo, to study in India for expressly this purpose. Since then, the Tibetan literary canon has grown into one of the largest in the world. In fact, the epic of King Gesar, a living epic that is still sung today by bards across the Tibetan plateau as it was a thousand years ago, is considered by scholars to be the longest literary work in the world.

The great oral epic of Gesar aside, the majority of Tibet’s literary canon contained Buddhist works, tracts on ethics, metaphysics, medicine, epistemology, and the like. Beginning with the establishment of the first monastery of Samye in the eighth century, the Tibetan centers of learning were all religious institutions. Tibet’s great universities were monastic universities. Tibet’s great figures were Buddhist masters. The Tibetan literary arts as such were only one sub-branch of knowledge taught in monastic institutions by monks to other monks.

And the Buddhist ideal had always been the elimination of desire. The ultimate Buddhist hero was the enlightened one, beyond desire. Desire, or attachment, was one of the three poisons that obscured the ultimate nature of reality. Fiction, of course, begins with desire. Fiction begins with a character wanting something. It is this desire that animates character, incites plot and seeks resolution. So did the Tibetan national fascination with Buddhism, and the attendant demonization of desire, delay the organic evolution of Tibetan fiction? After all, the great disenchantment with religion and the rise of secularism in the West correlates with the gradual rise of the novel.

But perhaps more important than any potential philosophical or ideological constraints imposed by Buddhist culture on Tibetan literary arts was a material one. Tibetan printing was done in the form of traditional woodblock printing, a very laborious and expensive process that needed the resources of a major monastery or estate. Each page of a manuscript had to be hand-carved on a piece of wood, which was not easily available in many parts of Tibet. Even Shol Parkhang, the printing house of the Potala Palace, could not get enough wood at one point, and needed it to be supplied from the Kingdom of Bhutan.

Professor Tsering Shakya, the premier historian of modern Tibet, notes that the Thirteenth Dalai Lama would certainly have known of the printing press from his travels in Russia and India in the early years of the twentieth century. It would have been natural for him to adopt the innovation for Shol Printing House. But the strictures of Buddhist prejudice would not allow him to do so. Metal-working was considered a contamination, and metal-workers were polluters. It was unthinkable that the Kangyur and Tengyur, the canonical collection of the Buddha’s Teachings and the Commentaries, should be contaminated by metal type. So Tibetans held fast to woodblock printing and publishing remained a luxury, reserved only for the most meritorious of books—these were of course the ones that explored the path to nirvana, never the ones that searched for meaning in samsara—and only with the resources of a major monastery or the wealthiest landed estates.

In this historical context, it is not surprising that the evolution of modern Tibetan literature was uneven and delayed. Nor is it suprising that the first Tibetan novel should come from Dokhar Tsering Wangyal, inheritor of one of Tibet’s greatest estates and a minister of the cabinet, whose colleague facilitated the printing of at least one of his books from Shol Printing House at the foot of the Potala Palace. Polymath and politician, Dokhar was not only the first novelist—he also wrote the first political biography and the first secular autobiography. Finished in the 1720s, Zhonnu Damed kyi Tamgyud (The Tale of the Incomparable Prince) is based on the life of the Buddha, and draws from the usual corpus of Bodhisattva biographies, the Jataka Tales, and the Ramayana as well as the Gesar epic. A rather heroic pastiche, it’s more properly called Tibet’s first pre-modern novel.

The arrival of modern Tibetan literature as we know it took another two hundred and fifty years and is crystalized in the towering, tragic figure of Dhondup Gyal in the 1980s. But before Dhondup Gyal, there was Gendun Chopel, Tibet’s first great modernist and early twentieth-century poet, writer, artist, and historian. A one-time monk scholar who left the monastery behind for a secular life, he travelled widely both on the Tibetan plateau and in the Indian subcontinent, and bridged the gap between nineteenth and twentieth-century Tibet, between Tibet and the outside world. His friend and contemporary was Babu Tharchin, a Christian of Tibetan descent from the Kinnaur region of northern India, and publisher of the first-ever Tibetan language newspaper, The Mirror of the World. Tharchin operated out of Kalimpong in India, the cosmopolitan hill station known as the Paris of the East, and a hub for the international Tibetan elite, and sent his newspapers into Tibet on the backs of yaks. Around this time, formal schools for lay students were established for the first time in Lhasa and elsewhere in Tibet. The stage was finally set for an organic evolution of Tibetan literary arts.

But it was not to be. Instead of continuity and evolution, there was rupture—first a backlash by the conservative and monastic elements of Tibetan society, leading to a closing of the modern schools, followed by foreign invasion. Mao sent his army into Tibet in 1949. By 1959, the brutal Chinese military takeover was complete and Tibetan society was upended. The young Dalai Lama escaped into exile in India, followed by tens of thousands of Tibetans.

From 1966-1976, the Chinese Cultural Revolution swept through Tibet. Monasteries were destroyed, books were burned and Tibetan identity suppressed. Except in pockets here and there, the teaching of Tibetan language stopped entirely. It was only with Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution that Tibetan language was allowed to revive again by the Communist state. Dhondup Gyal, poet, writer and historian, was the great figure of this revival. As he began publishing in the late 1970s, his writings electrified the Tibetan world. In 1980 and 1981, the first Tibetan language literary journals, Tibetan Art and Literature and Light Rain, began publishing. In January 1981, Dhondup Gyal published The Dawn of Clear and Simple Writing, a selection of sixteen of his best poems, essays, and short stories published over the previous years. Brilliant and troubled, Dhondup Gyal committed suicide three years later at the age of thirty-two. His legacy endures.

I

My family on both sides left Tibet when the Chinese came and followed the Dalai Lama into exile. I was born and raised in one of the Tibetan refugee settlements of north India. As a function of growing up in Tibet-in-India, a young society, an exile community trying to re-root itself in foreign soil, we were cut off from our historical past, from our historical literature and culture. Of course, for Tibetans growing up on the other side of the mountains, this break from history was imposed by the Chinese state. This separation from our literary past was compounded by the fact that modern Tibetan literature was still in its infancy. Thus, on both sides of the Himalayas, we grew up orphaned from our literature. We were missing the point of departure, the runway from which to lift off.

For a young reader, this meant a peculiar kind of abandonment and isolation—the lack of one’s reflection in the surfaces, and the depths, around oneself—an insular isolation that only makes itself known when something finally pierces it. For me, that moment was when I read Tenzin Tsundue’s beautiful poem When It Rains In Dharamsala. I read it, electrified, and began to write a poem. It was not just that I knew the rain in Dharamsala, it was that I knew Tsundue and he was like me. I had always been a reader, but that was the first time I thought that perhaps I could be a writer as well.

Pema Bhum, Woeser, Jamyang Norbu, Tsering Dondrup, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Pema Tseden, Kyabchen Dedrol, Takbum Gyal, Pema Tsewang Shastri, Tenzin Tsundue, Bhuchung D. Sonam—these are our writers now. Their works fill our shelves and their words echo our lives. Every now and then, I can catch a glimpse of myself, or someone who looks very like me, in the looking glass. It’s not a small thing that these writers—and filmmakers and artists and musicians—have given us. It’s only when art gives us entry into the lives of people like ourselves, with our loves and losses, our joys and sorrows, our hope and our despair, that we can begin to make sense of our own lives—to understand, to cherish, and to glory in our own humanity—to find divinity in it.

These writers come from Tibet, China, India, Nepal, the United States, and Canada, and they write in multiple languages. Pema Bhum, Tsering Dondrup, Pema Tsewang Shastri, Kyabchen Dedrol, Pema Tseden, Takbum Gyal and Dhondup Tashi Rekjong write in Tibetan. Jamyang Norbu, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Tenzin Tsundue, Bhuchung D. Sonam, Tsering Lama, Tenzin Dorjee and Tsering Namgyal Khortsa write in English. Woeser writes in Chinese. They work in multiple genres. They write memoirs, novels, essays, poems, but whatever else they do, they also write short stories. Short stories have become one of the primary modern Tibetan art forms.

But the non-Tibetan world is completely unaware that Tibetans even write short stories. So I like to think of this book as the coming-out of the Tibetan short story. And coming-outs are fraught with danger, power, and possibility. Through these sometimes absurd, sometimes strange, and always moving stories, the writers give the English-reading audience a more authentic look at the lives of ordinary Tibetans navigating the space between tradition and modernity, occupation and exile, the national and the personal. For Tibetans, they do something a great deal more. They examine and explain our heartbreak—the heartbreak of our occupation, our exile, our diaspora—and in doing so, they give us comfort, clarity, and a measure of belonging.

Tenzin Dickie

New York City

March 2017

Wink

Pema Bhum Translated by Tenzin Dickie

1.

It seemed that even the birds nestling atop the rafters of Tenpa’s house were tiring of the rain. They sat perched in a line along a wooden beam and watched the rain drizzling down. Cocking their heads this way and that, the birds crooned softly. A steady drip of water fell gently and steadily from the eaves of the house, and the sound carried throughout the courtyard.

Tenpa entered the gate carrying Darmar in the folds of his chupa. The birds resting atop the gate fled into the courtyard, flapping their wings. Tenpa was wearing trousers that he had folded up to his knees. He was barefoot. Raising first one leg and then the other, he washed the mud off his feet under the water dropping from his roof.

Did the doctor look at the child? said Lhamo, who was picking out stones from a spill of grains on the balcony.

Oh, oh. Darmar is throwing up. Without answering Lhamo’s question, Tenpa hurried out into the courtyard as fast as he could. He had a limp.

Lhamo understood that Tenpa had no good answer. She picked up Darmar from out of Tenpa’s robes, cleaned up the bits of vomit from Darmar’s mouth and chin with the end of her kera, and then propped him up on the floor among the folds of some sheepskin chupas. Lhamo gave Darmar a kiss on the blue veins of his forehead and said, Poor darling, Aba and Ama will take you to see the doctor very soon. And the doctor will give you a sweet candy pill.

Tenpa took out a needle from his right collar and, using it to pull out a thorn embedded in the heel of his right foot, said, When I said Darmar’s name, the doctor almost took a look at him but when he heard my name he withdrew his hands.

When Darmar gave a small cry, Lhamo placed in front of him Quotations of Chairman Mao Tse-tung and a button with Chairman Mao’s face on it, both of which he had been playing with earlier. But Darmar continued to cry and raise his hands to her, so Lhamo opened the book and showed him the picture of Chairman Mao, whereupon Darmar instantly stopped crying. Darmar grabbed the book with his hand and brought it to his drooling mouth.

Lhamo said, If we sell these goatskins, it might be enough to buy his medicine. That old cleft-lipped Chinese buyer doesn’t come here anymore. Can’t we take them somewhere else to sell them?

Heeding the proverb that a chewed up thorn will not prick one again, Tenpa chewed at the thorn he had pulled out of his foot as he said, Who knows where in China they sell these goatskins? And here I am, from one of the four bad elements, without the freedom to even go to the lower valley— He broke off as someone opened their door. It was Gonpo, the leader of the work brigade.

Today he has an important message to relay, Tenpa thought to himself. During holidays and special occasions, as well as on days when work had to be halted because of rain or snow, it was the duty of the people that belonged to the four bad elements to relay messages between the production team and the people. But this was the first time that the leader of the work brigade himself had come to Tenpa’s house.

Leader Gonpo was wearing a greenish raincoat and a pair of shining black rain boots. He entered the balcony and unbuttoned his raincoat as he said, Looks like the skies have been torn apart. If we get two more days of rain like this, there is danger of the harvest going to rot. The sheaves of grain are already starting to heat up. He took off his raincoat and put it on the balcony wall.

It seemed impossible that the leader of the work brigade should be at the home of a bad element like Tenpa, but Gonpo was not only in their home, he was speaking so kindly to Tenpa and Lhamo that they couldn’t believe it was happening. They just looked at each other, without the faintest idea of how to respond to him. In fact, it didn’t even occur to them to offer him their welcome and greetings.

Are your walls alright? Because of the rain, Aku Namgyal’s back wall has collapsed in one corner, Leader Gonpo of the work brigade said, trying once again to strike up a conversation.

Aku Namgyal was Lhamo’s father. To ensure that Tenpa’s own status of being a bad element wouldn’t harm Lhamo’s family, Tenpa never visited Aku Namgyal’s house. Tenpa stuttered, trying to reply, Oh. Oh. That’s . . . that’s fine then.

Then he said to his wife, Won’t you offer even a cup of tea to Leader Gonpo? He pulled out a rug and insisted that Leader Gonpo sit on the rug.

The weather may be very bad but I have some very good news to give you, said Leader Gonpo as he lit up a cigarette. From today onward, you are a comrade of our revolutionary ranks. We have decided to take off your black hat of the four bad elements. He patted the floor next to him in a signal for Tenpa to sit down.

Tenpa had never even imagined that the taint of his crime—using torn pages from Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung as kindling for fire—might dissolve like this within a few short years. Uneasy as he sat down, now shoulder to shoulder with Leader Gonpo, he kept only half his butt on the rug. There was a pause but he could not even think of what to say in order to thank Leader Gonpo.

Leader Gonpo did not wait for Tenpa’s response. He continued, The political re-education work team came here and for six months we examined your behavior and your thoughts.

Leader Gonpo coughed up a piece of phlegm, which he spat out into the courtyard before continuing. When we first heard that your son’s name was Darmar, Red Flag, we felt that you were atoning for your crime—

Tenpa felt that now was a chance to ask for some medicine for Darmar. My son has been sick for some days now. He didn’t even realize that he had interrupted Leader Gonpo as he said in a trembling voice, We couldn’t take him to the doctor because we don’t have the money. But maybe now I can request some medicine for my son?

But Leader Gonpo, it seemed, just wanted to finish what he had to say. Without answering Tenpa’s question, he said, But just your son’s name alone wasn’t enough to take off this black hat of yours, that I don’t even have to tell you. As you well know, your ancestors’ crime of exploiting the poor masses was no small crime. We struggled with you and re-educated you, as you will remember well. He fixed his gaze on a scar on the right side of Tenpa’s head. This was a scar from when he was wounded during a struggle session.

Tenpa felt his scar beginning to itch. He found nothing to say in response to Leader Gonpo. The rain still fell steadily in the courtyard and rainwater drained continually from the roof.

Comrade Tenpa, thus Leader Gonpo addressed Tenpa. Don’t sit there with that long face. Tomorrow we’ll announce the good news at the village assembly.

Tenpa thought again about his son needing a doctor and said, Mr. Leader . . . uh . . . uh . . . My son has been sick for three days . . .

I see, I see. Your son needs medicine . . . Leader Gonpo started to say. But then another thought struck him. Oh, no, when we take off your bad hat of the four black elements, then you will be just like anyone else. You won’t need to pay for medicine when you go to the hospital, will you? he said, looking at the sky. The rain had stopped and the sky was just clearing.

Lhamo came out of the kitchen to pour some tea for Leader Gonpo and her husband. She had Darmar strapped on her back and she carried a thermos in her right hand and two cups in her left. From the kitchen, she must have heard what Leader Gonpo said. Her eyes were red at the edges. Darmar held a wet piece of paper in his hand, which he put into his mouth. He gurgled.

Lhamo bent down to pour some black tea for the leader of the work brigade. In a low voice, she said, "We don’t have any cows or dris, apologizing for the lack of butter for the tea, but Leader Gonpo interrupted her before she had finished. Not at all,