Banned Tibetan writer publishes in Taiwan

By June Tsai

It has been 40 years since the beginning of the euphemistically named Cultural Revolution in China. Hundreds of books have been published about that time of chaos and upheaval, yet comparatively few have been penned about the sad fate of Tibet, whose exiles recently marked the 47th year since the Tibetan uprising, which attempted to free the country from Chinese occupation, or about the cultural genocide that followed. Of those accounts that have been written on the subject, almost none have been from the perspective of Tibetans themselves.
Taiwan's Locus Publishing Co. recently released three books in the Chinese language by the same author, offering a rare glimpse of life in Tibet during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Tibetan author Woeser, born 1966 in Lhasa, spent six years conducting research and writing about Tibet, an effort that has resulted in her three volumes, "Forbidden Memory: Tibet During the Cultural Revolution," "Remembering Tibet" and "Notes on Tibet." The first two are brand new, while the third was banned in China in 2003 and is now in print in Taiwan under the title "A Poem Named Tibet." "Forbidden Memory" contains hundreds of photographs taken between 1966 and 1970 by Woeser's father, Tsering Dorje. In addition to being an ardent amateur photographer, he was also a member of the People's Liberation Army, despite being ethnically Tibetan. Her father was stationed outside of Tibet after 1970 owing to partisan conflicts within the military. He died in 1991 in Tibet, leaving behind a collection of photos. In the preface to her book, Woeser wrote that it was not until 1999 that she decided to rediscover the stories and memories hidden behind those pictures, which she sent to Wang Lixiong, a Chinese expert on Tibet, to get his impression of their importance. Wang returned the photos to her, insisting that they bear witnesses to an age that has been wiped out by force and needs to be rediscovered.
Although Woeser had not met Wang at the time she asked for his advice on the photos, the two got to know each other quite well and later married. Wang wrote in an introduction to the book that Tibet is a lacuna in any study, either official or private, of the Cultural Revolution. There are only three documents about the Tibet of those years available in the official Archive in the "Tibet autonomous region." These documents exist, but they are classified and strictly guarded by the Chinese military. It is as if, he wrote, there were no Tibet between 1966 and 1976. Wang urged his Tibetan wife to shoulder the responsibility of recovering the memories from that time period by hearing and retelling the stories of her people.
Thus in 1999, Woeser, with photos in hand, began visiting and interviewing people who had lived through that period. Most of her interview subjects--more than 70 people in all--were Tibetan, though some were Chinese or Muslim. The result is "Remembering Tibet," a collection of oral histories.
If photos congeal the truth of historic moments, then names tell an even harder truth. The Chinese title for "Forbidden Memory" sounds like the Tibetan word for revolution. According to Woeser, when the Chinese army marched into Tibet in the 1950s, there existed no such word for revolution in the Tibetan language. In Chinese, the Tibetan word that was coined sounds, appropriately enough, like the word for "holocaust." Woeser's attention to a period of history that is embarrassing to the authorities in Beijing no doubt came as a disappointment to them. For all intents and purposes, she was expected to become a model Tibetan that the communist government could show to the world to demonstrate its success in civilizing Tibet. She attended the Chinese Department of South-West Nationalities Institute in Chengdu where she studied Chinese literature, and was employed as an editor at Tibetan Literature, a Chinese-language journal based in Lhasa. With her talent, background and education, she was to have been one of the leading luminaries of China's "New Tibet." These plans changed in 2003, however, after Woeser published a compilation of 38 short travel stories called "Notes on Tibet," which deviated from the official line. Nine months after the book was published, it was banned, and Woeser was fired by her work unit and driven out of Tibet. The government confiscated her home and deprived her of health and retirement benefits.
The strict state censorship on literature that takes place today, she now believes, is an example of the same government-imposed controls over thought that were employed during the Cultural Revolution. She therefore decided to publish the book of photos under her real name on the 40th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, but pragmatically chose to do so through a Taiwanese publisher. She and Wang now live in Beijing.
Wang, an author himself, was in Taipei last month to promote his new book. While there, he also took the opportunity to boost Woeser's three books, since she herself was not able to travel to the country.
Meanwhile, Tibetans living in Taiwan took to the streets of Taipei March 10 to commemorate the Tibetan uprising against China's occupation in 1959, the year when their spiritual leader His Holiness the Dalai Lama was driven into exile. Taiwanese human rights groups as well as several politicians took part in the march to show their support for a free Tibet. Human rights groups asked the ROC government to designate March 10 Tibet Day, and to dissolve the Cabinet-level Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission, which represents the ROC's claim of sovereignty over Tibet and Mongolia. Instead, the ROC government should respect the will of the people of Tibet to choose their own destiny, protesters urged.
Tsegyam Ngaba, head of the Tibet Religious Foundation of H.H. the Dalai Lama and de facto ambassador of Tibet's government-in-exile to Taiwan, said in a telephone interview that he greatly appreciated the sense of mission demonstrated by the publisher for supporting such books that, despite their importance to Tibetans, are unlikely to become bestsellers. He expressed his hope that the books, though they represent only a tiny portion of Tibet's plight, would allow Taiwanese people to learn more about Tibet than its religious aspects, which is inseparable from Tibet's overall situation.

This article is published in Taiwan Journal March 31, 2006