Author Archives: Joel

Wangdu went with his father to pay a courtesy call on two local officials, one Chinese, one Tibetan.

The officials had a proposition, communicated gradually over several cups of tea in a squat government block off the muddy main street. Wangdu would be given a senior position in the tourism department if he returned from exile. There were great new opportunities coming up. Tourism was booming, with the forests and lakes of northern Sichuan already attracting the adventurous new rich from cities like Chengdu. The trouble was that local people lacked knowledge of the outside world. Wangdu was an educated man. He spoke English. He knew what tourists would enjoy, and would be able to improve the town’s commercial prospects. He should return to the place of his birth, where he would be honoured as a favoured son.

Wangdu was dismayed by what he heard. He had a good clerical post in a bank in Seattle. The idea that he might abandon the life he had worked so long and hard to create in order to live in such a backwater was inconceivable. Returnees were known dismissively by the exiles as “gyal tshong pa,” or “country-sellers.” His wife, Pema, also a Tibetan although from another part of Tibet, had a job selling white goods in a department store in the suburb of Maple Leaf. Their children, one still in college, the other two just starting out on their careers, would laugh at the idea of migrating to Communist China. They knew the plight of their homeland; even the official statistics looked bad. According to a recent report from CPIRC, China’s state body on population, 60 per cent of people in the Tibet Autonomous Region were illiterate, against a national average of 16 per cent. It had the lowest rural per capita income of any province, and was the only one where life expectancy dropped below sixty years of age, against a national average of sixty-nine. Infant mortality towered at ninety-six per thousand, eleven times the rate in Beijing. Here in the ethnically mixed borderlands the situation was a little better, but the underlying privation was the same.

Wangdu tried to explain all this to the officials as politely as he could. They were not convinced. Naturally, he should bring his wife and children with him; the paperwork would be arranged. The town needed people like him. The pitch continued, and it became apparent that Wangdu’s father, a strong and resolute old man, conscious of the respect that was being shown to his son, was in favour of the plan. He told Wangdu that he should take up the post, but not join the Party. There were several young Tibetans in influential positions in the town who would look out for him; the days had long gone when Tibetan officials were mere stooges, with Chinese “secretaries” controlling their every move.

Repeating a refusal became embarrassing, so Wangdu left the meeting, saying he would think it over. He let the matter drift for a few days, hoping it would go away, despite frequent remarks from his father. He had his return air ticket. His daughter Sonam was keen to get home. I knew that he found it awkward and painful to be put under pressure in this way, and that he would never be persuaded. He was displaced, an exile; it would not be possible for him to feel a true sense of belonging in his ancestral land—or not until Tibet was free.

Wangdu’s dilemma struck me. A Tibetan was being sought for a prominent post in a Chinese province. According to the material put out by Western pro-Tibet groups, much of which I had read and some of which I had written, the authorities discriminated systematically against Tibetans. Words like apartheid, racism and genocide cropped up. Yet from what I had seen so far, the regime was far from homogeneous. Most officials in China seemed to be unsophisticated, poorly educated and badly paid, and envious of those who had made lives abroad. Local people paid fortunes to criminal gangs to smuggle them to Australia, Europe and North America. Although the top Party jobs were occupied by Han Chinese, who make up more than 90 per cent of China’s population, the middle and lower ranks of the bureaucracy in these border regions included many Tibetans, Hui and other minorities. The official newspaper the People’s Daily said that nearly three-quarters of the officials in the Tibet Autonomous Region were ethnically Tibetan.

I asked Wangdu why his father was so keen for him to move back to Amdo: Surely he understood that his future lay in America?

“I guess he doesn’t see it like that. He was in prison for eighteen years,” said Wangdu, in an offhand way, “and he wants the family to be reunited before he passes away.”

SOURCE: Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land, by Patrick French (Vintage, 2004), pp. 41-42

Pemba spoke good English and fluent Chinese. She still used Tibetan at home, but saw Chinese, pragmatically, as the language of progress and communication. Even when speaking in Tibetan, she would break into Chinese to transmit a piece of data, such as a telephone number. Like the younger generation of Tibetan fiction writers, she felt that the Chinese language offered a way to reach out and speak to a larger audience. Pemba had no view on this; unless you used the tongue of the dominant power, you would go nowhere. Many of her friends were Chinese. She avoided discussing Tibet’s political status with them, but otherwise they had similar views on the need for change in China, and matching scorn for the corruption within the Communist hierarchy. “It’s not the Chinese that are the problem,” Pemba had said, “it’s the Communists.”

SOURCE: Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land, by Patrick French (Vintage, 2004), p. 50

From verifiable sources, you can learn much about the Tibetan empire of the seventh and eighth centuries, or the history of particular monasteries, rulers or Buddhist lineages. What has disappeared for those inside Tibet is the link between the past and the present. This link has been broken systematically by the imposition of an alien political ideology, exported from industrial Europe, and the physical destruction of texts and objects. The effect of the period of mental cleansing—which was at its most intrusive in the 1950s and sixties—has been to kill the processes of thought and memory that define a society, and enable the people within it to communicate and interact. This rupture has left those in Tibet, both Tibetans and Chinese, in a state of something like atrophy. As Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote in Hope Against Hope, her memoir of Stalin’s terror, “An existence like this leaves its mark. We all became slightly unbalanced mentally—not exactly ill, but not normal either: suspicious, mendacious, confused and inhibited.”

It was only towards the end of my time in Tibet in the fall of 1999 that I came to understand the extent of the abnormality. The Lhasa hotel I was staying in, the Raidi, was under surveillance. There was nothing peculiar about that. I had been in the Tibet Autonomous Region for too long, and try as I might, the places I went to and the people I met prevented me from seeming the tourist I claimed to be. So there were men, Chinese men in double-breasted suits, who came to the hotel each day and asked questions and examined my room when I was not there. A man with a wide-brimmed hat sat in the window of the shop opposite, watching people going in and out of the hotel.

All this I could accept, although it made me sick with tension. What shocked me was the discovery, a little later, that the smiling, joking Tibetan receptionist, barely out of her teens, with whom I chatted casually most days, was working for the PSB, the Public Security Bureau. I was told that she was required to report foreign tourists who behaved suspiciously: if they met the wrong sort of people, if they spoke Tibetan, if they had professional-standard film cameras, if they knew too much. She did not want the job. Her father had been compromised by the PSB over a minor irregularity; she had no choice but to do it.

To Tibetans in Lhasa, none of this seemed strange. It was how things worked. Anyone, even a member of your family, might be betraying you. Most of the betrayers betrayed not for political or financial gain, but because they felt they had no alternative.

SOURCE: Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land, by Patrick French (Vintage, 2004), pp. 9-10

Sounds like the Romania I experienced in 1983–84.

POSTSCRIPT: French’s acknowledgments (p. 295) reveal a writer’s subtle revenge.

I owe a great and lasting debt to the friends, interpreters, contacts and facilitators in Tibet and China who helped me when I was doing the research and interviews for this book. Since they cannot be identified, I felt it would be wrong to name the many people elsewhere who, while often extremely generous with their knowledge, did not risk their livelihood or their safety to assist me. I would however like to mention the Public Security Bureau chiefs serving at county level in the Tibet Autonomous Region in 1992 (as listed in Conner and Barnett, pp. 68-83) who have, without being asked, lent their names to several people in these pages, enabling them to remain anonymous.

During Tibet’s brief period of de facto independence between the First World War and 1950, the Tibetan government controlled territory roughly corresponding to the borders of today’s Tibet Autonomous Region. Like the Balkans, Tibet’s fringes have long been inhabited by a patchwork of different ethnic groups: a Han Chinese village, a Hui Muslim village, a Qiang village and a Tibetan village may sit side by side. In the Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan—which border Tibet—there has for many years been a substantial ethnic Tibetan population, living on untamed land that was often under no clear external control. In modern times, Beijing’s response to this diversity has been to carve out nominally autonomous Tibetan counties and prefectures within the four border provinces. More Tibetans now live there than in the Tibet Autonomous Region itself.

According to official Chinese census statistics (which are regarded by demographers as wanting but usable) there are 2.5 million Tibetans in the Tibet Autonomous Region and 2.9 million in Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan. But if you take the province of Qinghai, for instance, which has almost all of its land under “autonomous prefecture” designations, you find there are approximately 838,000 Tibetans and 619,000 Chinese living in Tibetan prefectures, and another 141,000 Tibetans and 799,000 Chinese living in non-Tibetan autonomous areas. In Sichuan, a large province of eighty-five million people, there are 1.2 million Tibetans living in Tibetan prefectures, but the same areas also contain 780,000 non-Tibetans. So although the autonomy of these prefectures and counties is largely fictional and their boundaries are often inept, it is apparent that the different ethnic groups within them could never be easily disentangled.

The exiled Tibetan government in Dharamsala (“by far the most serious” government-in-exile in the world, according to the Economist magazine) has responded to this complex, historic demographic problem in a dramatic way. To keep things simple, it lays claim to all land inhabited by Tibetans, covering a total of 2.5 million square kilometres, more than twice the area of the Tibet Autonomous Region. Astonishingly, this territorial sleight has been swallowed and endorsed by most foreign supporters of the Tibetan cause, despite much of the land, especially in the north and east, never having been administered from Lhasa.

I had tried asking the Dalai Lama’s foreign minister, T. C. Tethong, why the exiled government maintained a claim over territory that it did not control before 1950. Surely this position weakened its chances of ever reaching an accommodation with the Chinese government? His response was loose: they were “still looking into it.” The border was based on “ancient claims,” as well as on oral history and the demands of different Tibetan exile groups. “We made our map so as not to leave out any Tibetans,” he said, “so that they didn’t feel isolated. We are going for the whole of Tibet. But I accept there will have to be give and take. His Holiness the Dalai Lama wants a fair compromise.”

The demand for a greater Tibet is rooted in the politics of displacement. In order to maintain the unity of the emigre community after the Dalai Lama’s flight across the Himalayas in 1959, his exiled administration developed the idea of a giant, theoretical Tibet. In the early 1960s, with the arrival in India, Nepal and Bhutan of large numbers of Tibetan refugees (many of them from the border areas close to China, who had endured the worst of the reforms and suppression), it became necessary to develop a pan-Tibetan identity. Its focus was the idea of “Po Cholkha Sum,” the unity of the three historic regions of ethnic Tibet: Amdo, Kham and U-Tsang. People who had previously identified themselves with a particular region now became consciously Tibetan.

A sense of Tibetan nationhood was created deliberately, in exile. The Lhasa dialect served as the basis of a shared refugee language; a regimental banner devised in the 1920s by a wandering Japanese man (which had been displayed at the Asian Relations Conference in India in 1947), featuring red and blue stripes and a pair of snow lions, became the Tibetan national flag; a song written by the Dalai Lama’s tutor Trijang Rinpoche (himself a reincarnation of the Buddha’s chariot-driver) was adopted as Tibet’s national anthem; the Dalai Lama’s birthday became a day of popular celebration; and an invocation used at the new year festival of Losar, “tashi delek” or “good luck,” was promoted as a versatile greeting, which could be picked up easily by foreign helpers.

SOURCE: Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land, by Patrick French (Vintage, 2004), pp. 13-15

Sheila Melvin, writing in the Spring 2006 issue of Wilson Quarterly, chronicles the ups and downs of Pearl Buck’s reputation in both the U.S. and China.

Although she had been born in West Virginia in 1892 while her missionary parents were home on leave, China was the country where she had grown up, first married, and written her most famous novel, The Good Earth (1931). Chinese was her first language, the one in which she mentally composed sentences before putting them to paper in English. China had provided much of the material for many of her 70-odd books, mostly novels but also plays, short fiction, children’s stories, biographies of her parents, essays, and poetry. China had inspired her humanitarian work. And it was in China that her adored mother, her father, two brothers, and two sisters lay buried….

Her most popular work, The Good Earth, was the best-selling novel of both 1931 and 1932. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, was made into an acclaimed Hollywood movie in 1937, and was instrumental in leading the Swedish Academy to award her the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938, making her the first American woman to be so honored. The book became so influential in the United States that some scholars credit it with contributing to the 1943 repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which had barred virtually all Chinese emigration to the United States since 1882.

Other scholars go even further, claiming that Buck’s writings so changed the average American’s impression of Chinese people in the years before World War II that Americans became eager supporters of China in its war against Japan. As the Chinese scholar Kang Liao wrote in 1997, Pearl Buck “single-handedly changed the distorted image of the Chinese people in the American mind through literature. Chinese people were no longer seen as cheap, dirty, ridiculous coolies or sneaky, vicious, insidious devils. The majority of Chinese were seen for the first time in literature as honest, kindhearted, frugal-living, hard-working, gods-fearing peasants who are much the same as American farmers.” In 1992, historian James C. Thomson Jr. called Buck “the most influential Westerner to write about China since 13th-century Marco Polo.”

Although she was an intellectual educated in both the Chinese and Western classics, Buck took up her pen with a populist approach, one that was phenomenally successful with the public even as it earned her the derision of the literary elite, many of whom considered her writing too lacking in stylistic complexity and irony, too didactic and moralistic, and—perhaps most important—too extraordinarily popular to be awarded the Nobel Prize. William Faulkner, who won the Nobel himself 11 years after she did, wrote to a friend that he would rather not win it than be in the company of “Mrs. Chinahand Buck.” …

Early antipathy of critics in the United States toward Buck has had a lasting influence, as have Buck’s prolific output and her popularity with readers, either of which is often reason enough within the American academy to regard an author with slight contempt. Perhaps more critical to her legacy is that as a consequence of her rejection by the critical establishment, she has not been included in college syllabuses, though she remains a perennial favorite on high school reading lists. And at a time when critics and academics seek to add diverse authors writing about their own cultures to the literary canon, a white American writing about China can’t compete with the likes of Chinese author Maxine Hong Kingston, as critic Edmund White maintained in The New York Times in 1993. But while Buck remains largely ignored in America, she is finally finding a home in China.

As China has grown stronger and more confident during the past two decades, the old sensitivities have gradually receded. “The Party has done a 180-degree turn on Pearl Buck,” says the author’s son, Edgar Walsh. “They now see her as a friend of China and someone who has always been supportive of the Chinese people.” …

Another powerful source of interest in the rehabilitation of Pearl Buck’s reputation in China is the local elites in the places where she once lived. Foremost among these former homes is her childhood home of Zhenjiang, a city on the Yangtze River about an hour’s drive from Shanghai, where she is now regarded as something of a patron saint, or at least as the city’s best hope for enticing foreigners to visit and invest. Buck lived in Zhenjiang for nearly 20 years as a girl and young woman, mostly in her family’s nondescript Western-style house in the city’s rural outskirts.

In 1992, the Zhenjiang government renovated the house, which miraculously had survived the chaos of the 20th century, and opened it to the public, with financial assistance from Zhenjiang’s sister city of Tempe, Arizona. In 2002, Zhenjiang marked the 110th anniversary of Buck’s birth by convincing the provincial government to declare her former residence a historic landmark. And in 2004, it unveiled a monument to Buck and even renamed a city park “Pearl Square” in her honor, a rare distinction in a nation of “People’s Squares.” …

Buck’s rehabilitation in Chinese academic circles and at the grass-roots level finally led to a reevaluation of her work by the government. In the early 1990s, cultural officials refused to let a PBS affiliate from Buck’s home state of West Virginia film a documentary about her, but in 1999, when the U.S.-based Chinese actress Luo Yan sought permission to film an adaptation of Buck’s novel Pavilion of Women, it was easily granted. The script—about an unhappily married Chinese woman who falls in love with a Western priest—raised no hackles, and the makers were allowed to film in protected historic sites. The movie attracted large crowds and considerable publicity in China, where it fared much better than in the United States.

Since then, China’s Central Television network has produced several documentaries and docudramas about Buck, including one that aired this past summer in which she is played, rather fittingly, by an American expatriate named Aly Rose who learned fluent Chinese while living among Chinese peasants. And events related to Buck are regularly covered in the national press. When Oprah Winfrey chose The Good Earth for her book club in autumn 2004, the English-language newspaper China Daily reported on the selection, noting that “the Pearl S. Buck phenomenon used to be controversial and rejected by both the Chinese and American literary worlds,” but that it has recently become “a friendly cultural bridge between the East and the West.”

via Arts & Letters Daily