Book Report: Sky Burial

50. Xinran, Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet (2004) (10/8/21)

This book, by the Chinese-British author Xinran, is billed as fiction, though it is apparently based on a true story. I believe it is called fiction because so many of the details of daily life and of conversation rely on research or imagination, but the bare bones of the story—those, I guess, actually happened. But... maybe not. Maybe the introductory note is also fiction. It's impossible to say.

Here's the intro:

In 1994 I was working as a journalist in Nanjing. During the week, I presented a nightly radio program that discussed various aspects of Chinese women's lives. One of my listeners called me from Suzhou to say that he had met a strange woman in the street. They had both been buying rice soup from a street vendor and started talking. The woman had just come back from Tibet. He thought that I might find it interesting to interview her. She was called Shu Wen. He gave me the name of the small hotel where she was staying.
     My curiosity awakened, I made the four-hour bus journey from Nanjing to the busy town of Suzhou, which despite modern redevelopment still retains its beauty—its canals, its pretty courtyard houses with their moon gates and decorated eaves, its water gardens, and its ancient tradition of silk making. There, in a teahouse belonging to the small hotel next door, I found an old woman dressed in Tibetan clothing, smelling strongly of old leather, rancid milk, and animal dung. Her gray hair hung in two untidy plaits and her skin was lined and weather-beaten. Yet, although she seemed so Tibetan, she had the facial characteristics of a Chinese woman—a small, slightly snub nose, an "apricot mouth." When she began to speak, her accent immediately confirmed to me that she was indeed Chinese. What, then explained her Tibetan appearance?
     For two days, I listened to her story. When I returned to Nanjing my head was reeling. I realized that I had just met one of the most exceptional women I would ever know.
     I never saw her again, but her story did not leave my mind, so finally I felt I must share it with others.

The story begins in 1956, when Shu Wen is newly—three weeks—married, she and her husband both medical doctors. Abruptly, though not unexpectedly, her husband is called to service in the army: in Tibet. Two years later, she receives word that he "died in an incident." And she resolves to go find him.

The rest of the book recounts her thirty-plus years living with a nomadic Tibetan family who rescue her and a Tibetan woman, Zhuoma, after her army unit is attacked. Zhuoma, eventually, is kidnapped, and so Wen's task becomes twofold: find both her husband and this woman who became a friend. In the meantime, we learn something about the pastoral Tibetan way of life and spirituality.

It's a spare, straightforward book, nothing especially lyric about the writing. One might even say, flat? At one point it seems to try to explore the politics of the Dalai Lama leaving Tibet, and the aggression of the Chinese on Tibet, but it felt ambivalent (aka without judgment?). The title refers to the ceremony that sends dead people on to their next stage in the reincarnation cycle. It involves vultures.

And spoiler: Wen does find Zhuoma. She also learns what happened to her husband. The last we see of her, she is eating rice soup and talking with a street vendor in Suzhou, a city completely transformed from the one she left thirty-plus years before. I found the resolution, such as it is, unsettling. I wished she would return to the grasslands of Tibet and find the family that had taken her in so many years ago, and allow herself to be reabsorbed.