Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet

by Xinran

  Could he, nevertheless, give them a permit to travel to China? Wen asked him. The officer explained that he needed to confirm their story before he could do so, but he would certainly get in touch with headquarters in Beijing and see what he could find out. He warned her not to be too hopeful: during the Cultural Revolution, many files had been lost or burned.

  “What do you mean by the ‘Cultural Revolution’?” Wen asked, bemused.

  The officer looked at her.

  “If you can stay a little longer,” he said, “I will try to explain to you what has happened in China over the past thirty years.”

  Wen and Zhuoma listened in bewilderment as the officer talked of the “Famine” in the 1960s, the “Cultural Revolution” in the 1970s, Deng Xiaoping’s “Reform and Opening” in the 1980s, and the “current economic reforms.” Tiananmen sat cross-legged in a corner, telling his rosary beads and reciting the scriptures.

  Wen had to wait several days before she was summoned by letter to return to the military headquarters. This time she alone was allowed to enter the compound, since Tiananmen and Zhuoma were not named in the letter. There she was greeted by the officer she had met before, along with an older man. The older man apologized that her friends had had to be left outside and promised they would be well looked after. He introduced himself as one of the generals in charge of the troops stationed in Lhasa and told Wen that they had checked all the names and the unit number she had given them. Sadly, there were too many people with the name Wang Liang to be able to trace the particular officer she was talking about, especially since many of the records had been lost and information about that time was so unreliable. However, they had been able to verify that there was indeed a unit with the number she had given based in Chengdu. The records stated, though, that all its members had been killed.

  At these words, a pain of disappointment stabbed at Wen’s heart.

  Seeing the sadness in her face, the general tried to comfort her. He assured her they would continue to look for new information and would look as far afield as possible.

  “I do not believe that you will lose heart,” he said. “No ordinary person could have spent half a lifetime searching for a husband—only true love can produce determination like that.” His words brought tears to Wen’s eyes. He suggested that Wen and her two friends move to the guesthouse of the military headquarters, which would be more comfortable for them.

  Suddenly Wen was overwhelmed by a physical exhaustion unlike any she had known before. She struggled to her feet.

  “Are you all right?” the general asked in concern.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” she replied. “Just so very tired…”

  “Please believe me,” said the general. “I understand your weariness.”

  THE MILITARY guesthouse was equipped with all manner of strange modern devices. There were television sets, electric kettles, flushing toilets, and hot running water. Tiananmen was particularly unsettled by their surroundings. Wen sensed that, had they not been treated with such great warmth by Chinese and Tibetans alike, he would not have wanted to stay.

  In the days that followed, Wen sat and waited for news. In all her years of living with Gela’s family and wandering with Zhuoma and Tiananmen she had learned to renounce desire—to let come what would come.

  While she waited, Tiananmen talked to the Tibetan soldiers stationed at the headquarters. They regarded him as a walking bible of horsemanship and would come and ask his advice about how to handle their animals. One of them even invited Tiananmen to visit his parents, who lived in Lhasa. That evening, when Tiananmen returned to the strange guesthouse that so bemused him with its televisions and kettles, he told Wen about how the couple he had met spent their day. In the morning they attended to the family shrine, placing fresh yak butter and water on the altar in the courtyard. Then they climbed onto the flat roof of their house, where they burned scented juniper wood, dedicating the smoke to the spirits of the mountains, waters, and home, and asking for protection. After that, they joined their neighbors to walk the “scripture circuits.” Residents of Lhasa and pilgrims from all over Tibet would walk these holy routes, telling their rosary beads and praying. The outer circuit took them around the whole city and was walked early in the morning; the inner circuit took the worshippers around the Hall of the Buddha inside Jokhang Temple, another of Lhasa’s imposing and sacred buildings. Tiananmen had been told that you could accumulate several times more merit from walking a scripture circuit than from reading the scriptures elsewhere.

  During their stay at the guesthouse, Wen had further opportunities to talk to the general about what had happened to her. She was particularly adamant that Zhuoma and Tiananmen should be allowed to travel with her to China. She explained to him that Zhuoma was the head of an important Tibetan family. She showed him some of Zhuoma’s family jewelry as proof of her story. The general promised to do what he could to find documentary evidence of Zhuoma’s identity. One afternoon, he came to Wen and Zhuoma in a state of excitement, saying that he had found written records of Zhuoma’s clan.

  “I’m afraid I have some bad news, though,” he said hesitantly. “I have been told that their estate burned down many years ago.”

  Zhuoma didn’t explain to him that she had witnessed the burning of her house. Wen looked at her, but said nothing. She knew that Zhuoma’s former home had long ceased to exist for her in any meaningful sense.

  Two days later, the general came looking for them again. This time his face was wreathed in smiles.

  “Someone in Beijing remembers reading a report that described Kejun’s death exactly as you have told it to me,” he said, “and one of them recalled that there was mention of a wife who lived in Suzhou. I think this is enough evidence for us to confirm your identity and grant you permission to travel to Beijing. There you can apply for resettlement and an army pension. As for Zhuoma, we have learned that there was indeed a female heir to your clan’s estate, and the uniqueness of your jewelry proves that you are her.”

  Wen and Zhuoma were filled with happiness, as if for the first time in decades they had been told who they really were. But there was still something that troubled Wen.

  “If there were records of Kejun’s death,” she asked, “why then didn’t his death notice mention how he had died, or accord him the status of a revolutionary martyr?”

  The general looked at her gravely. “I cannot answer that,” he said.

  WITHIN A week, Wen, Zhuoma, and Tiananmen found themselves on an airplane to Beijing, equipped with all the paperwork they needed. Zhuoma had been given an official letter of introduction that would allow her to find teaching work at the Minorities Institute in Beijing should she wish it. Tiananmen possessed a document which said that he was on an official visit to China and would then return to his monastery.

  Wen didn’t say a single word during the flight. Before her eyes passed scene after scene of her life in Tibet. The faces of Gela’s family filled her mind. She took out Kejun’s creased photograph and battered diaries, and poured a silent stream of tears over them. Kejun would never see his wife again, her face now deeply etched with the spirit of Tibet. He would remain forever on the plateau, beneath the blue sky and white clouds.

  Her heart was full of trepidation. Would her parents be alive? Where was her sister? Would her family recognize her?

  She unfolded the paper crane, kept prisoner for so many years inside her book, and gently smoothed out her sister’s letter. Time had erased all trace of the characters. Her half book of essays felt heavy, as if weighted down with the water and soil of the plateau.

  Wen was shaken out of her reveries by the voice of a child asking her mother in Chinese, “Mummy, why does that Tibetan lady smell so bad?”

  “Shh, don’t be rude,” her mother said. “Chinese and Tibetans have very different ways of life. You shouldn’t say thoughtless things like that.”

  Wen looked down at her threadbare and faded clothes. If she was no longer Chinese, who w
as she? But perhaps that question did not matter. What was important was that her soul had been born. Wang Liang had been right: just staying alive was a victory.

  THERE COULD be no comparison between Wen’s first-class sleeper compartment on the journey from Beijing to Suzhou and the stuffy sardine can of a train that had carried her to Chengdu all those years ago. It was like the difference between heaven and hell, not to be mentioned in the same breath. In contrast to the Tibetan plateau, the scenes that flew past her window were full of life. She sat and watched the red-brick and gray-tiled houses of Beijing give way to the familiar white houses of the Yangtze delta.

  Zhuoma and Tiananmen had not accompanied Wen on her return to Suzhou. She had asked them to wait for her in Beijing. She wished to see her family alone.

  Throughout the journey, Wen’s tears fell in a constant stream over her robe. Whenever the train guards or her fellow passengers asked what was wrong, she just shook her head. So concerned was one of the guards that he made a request on the train’s loudspeaker for someone who knew sign language or Tibetan to come forward and help.

  When the train pulled into Suzhou, the station bore no relation to Wen’s memory of it. She assumed it was a new station and began asking directions to Suzhou’s old train station. It had been pulled down, she was told. She hailed a taxi, but the driver hadn’t heard of the place she wanted. After much discussion, he worked out that she was referring to a street in the suburbs that had been demolished ten years ago. He kept looking at her as if she were some kind of monster and she had to plead with him to drive her there.

  When they arrived, she was stunned by the scene that greeted her.

  Her sister’s courtyard home with its moon gates and the beautiful little garden by the river had disappeared, replaced by row upon row of high-rise buildings. She stood there, dazed, not knowing what to do or whom to ask for help. She approached some construction workers mending a road, but couldn’t understand a word any of them said. She finally worked out that they were from the south of Anhui Province and had no idea what had happened in Suzhou in the last three decades. Wen felt utterly lost.

  As evening drew in, Wen gathered herself together and found a hotel not far from where her sister’s house used to be. A sign with two small stars on it hung above the reception desk, although Wen didn’t have a clue as to what that meant. At the desk, she was asked for her identity card but had no idea what that was. Instead, she produced the letter of introduction the Tibetan Military Department had given her. Unwilling to make a decision on her own about whether to let Wen register, the hotel receptionist asked her to wait a moment and disappeared. When she finally returned, she told Wen that she could have a room, but she should go and register at the police station as well.

  THAT NIGHT, Wen dreamed she had returned to Tibet with Kejun to look for her parents and sister on the holy mountains. She was woken before daybreak by the roar of traffic. She sat watching it from her window until she fell into a daze. Her eyes were used to the endlessly rolling grasslands. Everything here seemed so crowded that she could make nothing of it. The hometown she had dreamed of had vanished without a trace.

  At that moment, she heard the rattle of bamboo clappers below her window. Her heart leaped at the memories the sound awakened: when she was a little girl in Nanjing, the itinerant rice sellers carried such clappers and, when they passed her house, her mother would always buy her a little bowl of sweet fermented rice. Wen rushed out of her room, toward the sound. Outside she saw a familiar sight: a rice seller carrying two buckets suspended from a long pole on his shoulders. In one of the buckets the hot water used to cook the food steamed, heated by a small charcoal-burning stove built in beneath; from the other rose the old intoxicating aroma of fermented rice. Nothing had changed: even the waistcoat the man wore was the same as she remembered.

  Wen hurried over to the peddler. He stopped banging his clappers.

  “Eat here or take away?” he asked.

  “Here,” she replied.

  She watched him deftly pour a ladle of boiling water into a bowl, then scoop out two lumps of fermented rice with a bamboo spatula.

  “Do you want egg?” he asked her. “A sprinkle of osmanthus flowers? How much sugar?”

  “Everything, please, and one spoonful of sugar,” Wen replied. As he handed her the bowl, she burst into tears.

  “Family problems?” the peddler asked her. “Don’t be sad. Just take life a day at a time, and the days will pass quickly enough.”

  Drinking the sweet rice soup, now mixed with her tears, Wen struggled to compose herself.

  “How long have you lived here?” she asked in a trembling voice.

  “I came here ten years ago,” the peddler said. “I was no good for anything else so it was the bamboo clappers for me. But it’s not bad work and every day there’s something new. Even the road I walk down is different every year.”

  Wen asked him if he knew her sister and her parents and described to him the house they used to live in. The peddler gave it some thought.

  “I’m afraid not,” he said. “In the ten years I’ve lived here, this area has been knocked down and rebuilt three times. The first time was during the ‘Three Constructions,’ or whatever it was. Then they built a road and a bridge, only to pull them down again. After that they sold a big chunk of land to Singapore. Many people have come and gone around here. These days you hear fewer and fewer local accents.”

  He went back to banging his clappers.

  Wen stood in the middle of the street, paralyzed by the strangeness of her hometown. She was so absorbed in thought that she heard neither the sound of the clappers nor the noise of the cars and bicycles rushing past her only inches away. All she had now were her memories. Would she have the courage to embark on a second search so late in her life? If not, where should she go?

  She put her hand into the pocket of her robe where she kept the photograph of Kejun. Laying her fingers on the image that had shared the sweetness, the bitterness, and the sweeping changes of her life for so many years, she whispered, “Om mani padme hum.”

  Up above, a family of geese flew toward home.

  Here, there were neither sacred vultures nor sky burials.

  A LETTER TO SHU WEN

  Most respected Shu Wen,

  Where are you?

  For ten years this book has been in my heart, maturing like wine. Now, at last, I can present it to you.

  I hope that, sometime, you will be able to hear the gasps of admiration that the beauty of your story inspires.

  I hope that, sometime, you will be able to answer the countless questions that I have for you. At the very least, I would like to know what has become of Zhuoma and Tiananmen, of Saierbao and her family.

  I have spent many years searching for you, hoping that we might sit together again in the tea-scented Yangtze delta so that you can tell me the story of your life after Sky Burial.

  Dear Shu Wen, if you see this book and this letter, I earnestly beg you to contact me through my publisher as soon as possible.

  Xinran

  London, 2004

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Sky Burial is the result of years spent learning how to understand and feel Shu Wen’s love, the spiritual life of Tibetans, and how different culture, time, life, and death can be for different people.

  I don’t know how to thank the following people enough: Julia Lovell (who carried a “football player” in her body) and Esther Tyldesley, whose translation allowed Sky Burial to be read in English; my editor at Chatto & Windus for helping this book find its readers; Mr. Hao-chong Liu, who spent months helping me with my research and fact-checking in China; Toby Eady, my “bossy” husband with his professional mind and lover’s heart; and Random House, booksellers, and you.

  I cannot say thanks enough to you who have taken the time to read my books with your interest in and love of China and Chinese women. I have received responses to The Good Women of China from all over the world, so full of open h
earts and personal memories that I should now have a book called The Good Women of the World.

  No one likes crying, but tears water our souls. So perhaps my thanks should be to allow you to cry for the Chinese women in my books …

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JULY 2006

  Copyright © 2004 by The Good Women of China Ltd.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Chatto and Windus in 2004. Subsequently published in hardcover in the United States by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2005.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered

  trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Library of Congress has catalogued

  the Nan A. Talese/Doubleday edition as follows:

  Xinran, 1958–

  Sky burial: an epic love story of Tibet / Xinran;

  translated from the Chinese by Julia Lovell & Esther Tyldesley.

  p. cm.

  Chinese uniform title not available.

  1. Xinran, 1958– —Translations into English. 2. Tibet (China)—

  Description and travel—Fiction. I. Title.

  PL2968.5.N73S69 2004

  895.1′352—dc22

  2004062075

  eISBN: 978-0-307-49789-5

  www.anchorbooks.com

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  About the Author