Sky Burial - Xinran

...again.

Sky Burial is a translation from the original Chinese version and we’re told it is slightly different. Xinran “worked closely with her translators and editor to make sure all elements of the book were accessible to non-Chinese readers”. I wonder what the differences are, and whether they matter. I also wonder, as always when reading translations, whether the style reflects the original. I hope so…because it works so well. The ...
...the telling of it. There is no complicated imagery, no “graphic detail” and yet it is graphic in a literal sense. You can feel the very bleakness of the land, and the contrasting warmth of its people, smell the animals and taste the sweet butter tea, purely through them becoming familiar.

Kejun’s story, which we discover at the end, has the nobility required to turn Wen’s journey from folly into a real quest and the discovery of the ... more

“The Tibetans cut his body into a thousand pieces and fed it to the vultures”.

That was a sentence Xinran overheard on a Beijing street when she was five years old. A rumour was circulating that a Chinese soldier had been hacked and fed to the birds by the Tibetans…it’s not clear whether that rumour included the speculation that reason for his death was the slaughter of a vulture, or whether that is an association Xinran made later. The year was 1963 and Tibet was still the great unknown for most Chinese. They scarcely knew where it was, much less who its people were and how different from even the myriad races of China. Certainly, they knew nothing about ‘sky burial’.

For any Chinese that sentence at that time would echo, how much more so then for a child? Perhaps it was one of the small things that burrowed into her mind and, in time and in combination, turned Xinran into a journalist. For by 1994 that’s what she was: a radio journalist, bringing a small light to shine on the ordinary lives of women in and around Nanjing ~ a programme which would eventually lead to her first book “The Good Women of China”.

It seems to we mere mortals that being a recognised journalist gives you the keys ~ if not to the gates of heaven, at least to the garden of serendipity. People bring people to you. To Xinran was brought a chance to meet Shu Wen, a woman who had just come back from Tibet.

“Sky Burial” is Shu Wen’s story as learned by Xinran. It is a story of immeasurable faith, of human love, great hardship, simplicity. It is a story that could make you believe in every quest tale (the successful and the doomed) that you have ever read.

Back in 1958, the year that Xinran was born, Shu Wen, married for less than a hundred days, received notification that her husband was missing in action, presumed dead. As a doctor, he had joined the army to bring Chinese medicine to the remote hills and plains of the northern lands, to Tibet. The official notice did not testify that he had died a revolutionary martyr, merely that he had been lost in “an incident”. No-one could tell her anything more. They admitted that reports from the front were sketchy.

In the passion of grief, Shu Wen found a hope: perhaps he had not been killed, but merely separated from his unit. It did happen. “Perhaps he was in danger, or had fallen ill. She couldn’t leave him in Tibet, alone.”

So she determined to leave. Travel for ordinary Chinese over such great distances was, I imagine, not easy at that time…and it was maybe for that reason that Shu Wen decides to literally follow Kejun. She joins the army. An army desperately short of doctors would not try too hard to dissuade her…her specialisation in dermatology even made it more likely that she’d be despatched to Tibet, where the altitude was causing widespread cases of severe sunburn among the soldiers. So a journey begins.

A journey that will last a lifetime. A journey that will change her view of life, and of time. Tibet is even now a country apart. Little has changed for thousands of years, and the reading of Shu Wen’s years there – the people she meets, the friends she makes, and loses, and some of whom she finds again – the disasters and the miracles – makes me offer out a hope that it will continue so. They are a people with more to lose than to gain.

It is a powerful story ~ simply told. Becoming separated from her army unit, Wen finds herself lost an alien world. A vast expanse of the unknown in every sense. Yet she survives, and continues in her love for her lost husband. For much of Wen’s time in Tibet, life went on day after day, for how could it do otherwise? That is part of the beauty of the book. Xinran does not try to bring drama to the mundane. She simply grants us a glimpse into the private lives of a very few people, and through them into a national psyche unlike any other. It is a picture which links the people to the land and the land to faith and back again.

Sky Burial is a translation from the original Chinese version and we’re told it is slightly different. Xinran “worked closely with her translators and editor to make sure all elements of the book were accessible to non-Chinese readers”. I wonder what the differences are, and whether they matter. I also wonder, as always when reading translations, whether the style reflects the original. I hope so…because it works so well. The simplicity of the life is reflected in the simplicity of the telling of it. There is no complicated imagery, no “graphic detail” and yet it is graphic in a literal sense. You can feel the very bleakness of the land, and the contrasting warmth of its people, smell the animals and taste the sweet butter tea, purely through them becoming familiar.

Kejun’s story, which we discover at the end, has the nobility required to turn Wen’s journey from folly into a real quest and the discovery of the truth justifies all endured to find it. Yet the story doesn’t end there…for there is then the return to China.

If Tibet has moved slowly over the last millenia ~ China during the years of Wen’s absence rushed headlong into an uncertain future, changed and changed again. In her home-coming we see those changes through the eyes of one who should understand, and that was for me the most moving part of the book.

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I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the ways of the world out there, to anyone with a romantic soul, or a simple curiosity about life as it is lived at the extremes.

For those preferring their adventures full of thrills and spills, no.

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Paperback edition published by the Chatto & Windus imprint of Random House
pp164
ISBN 0-7011-7684-9
No cover price: my copy £9.99 through WorldBooks, Amazon are quoting £14.76 for the paperback, but hardback from £9.11
Sample read on the publisher’s website at: http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/catalog/extract.htm?command=search&db=main.txt&eqisbndata=0701176229

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hiker@Ciao
6.2.05

 

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