Book review: My Tibetan Childhood, by Naktsang Nulo
Released in 2007 in China, My Tibetan Childhood was a bestseller before Beijing banned it three years later. The tragic memoir by an invasion survivor who became a Chinese government official is touted as the most reprinted modern Tibetan literary work.
by Naktsang Nulo
Duke University Press
Released in 2007 in China, My Tibetan Childhood was a bestseller before Beijing banned it three years later. The tragic memoir by an invasion survivor who became a Chinese government official is touted as the most reprinted modern Tibetan literary work.
This English translation begins in hauntingly pacifist fashion. "'Nukho,' my father told me often, 'if you want to be a real man, do not kill fish, frogs, birds, insects, and other weak animals but have compassion for them.' His words stayed in my mind. Even small animals felt joy, sadness, and tears, and each of them had parents and children. I believed I shouldn't kill them needlessly'," Naktsang Nulo recounts.
His story centres on his upbringing in Tibet's eastern plateau during the 1950s. The early chapters, which read like a warm-up with ominous overtones, recall pilgrimages to monasteries, including a 2,000-kilometre horseback trek his nomadic clan makes to and from Lhasa.
One year on, his family retraces its steps in flight from advancing Chinese troops. Next, Nulo's father joins the 1958 Amdo uprising but is slain; Nulo and his brother are detained in a cramped camp wracked by hunger. In plain style, Nulo documents the squalor and the starvation; wolf is in their diet.
Despite the romantic title, Nulo's take on China's increasingly forgotten invasion is harrowing. One source he cites reports that the Chinese kill people by day and dogs at night. "If you surrender, they will cut off your head, and if you run away to the mountains, they cut off your legs."