Book Reviews

British-based Chinese author Xinran squeezes an epic true story into a surprisingly thin book, Sky Burial (2004, Chatto and Windus, London, 164 pages). Partly love story, travel adventure and historical account, it tells of a remarkable woman's unusual quest.

The book came from a 1994 encounter and two-day-long interview with Shu Wen, someone the author never will forget.

“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 tea house 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 grey 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.”

After 30-plus years in Tibet, Wen had returned home. “ ‘But why did you go there?' I asked. ‘For what?'
‘For love,’ she answered simply, again looking far beyond me at the empty sky outside.”

Wen had spent three decades searching for her husband, Kejun, a military doctor like herself, who earlier vanished in Tibet. Both idealistic, they met at medical school. “In war, medicine was the only lifeline: whatever the rights and wrongs of combat, saving the dying and helping the wounded were heroic.”

Evasive military reports implied that Kejun had died in an unusual “incident”. Wen didn't entirely believe it. Even if she couldn't find her loved one alive, she still wanted to know much more.

Doggedly, Wen seeks truth, one of modern China's most elusive, yet precious, commodities. When the Chinese government routinely tries to hide facts, reality can vanish forever. How can a persistent woman stop that from happening?

Unsure what to expect, Wen starts the journey of a lifetime. “The convoy was huge: several dozen trucks containing nearly a thousand men. Wen was overwhelmed both by the number of soldiers and the magnificence of the road. It was even more impressive than she had imagined. Endlessly twisting and turning, it took them through crowds of mountains. The weather was constantly evolving. One minute it was like a warm spring day with flowers in bloom, then suddenly white snow was flying around them. She felt as if she had entered a fairyland where a thousand years in the outside world passed in a single day.”

The heroine reaches Tibet as a young woman, part of an occupying Chinese army. Not everyone survives the journey? “All this death over the last few days is a warning to us. I've been thinking about it a lot: I'm just as afraid, as full of hate as you are. But why are we here? Have the Tibetans welcomed us? We've come to liberate them, but why do they hate us?”

Everything about the remarkable region, its altitude, open spaces, grazing animals and spiritually motivated, tent-dwelling people, contrast greatly with everything she knew before. “Wen recalled her mother telling her that an educated young Chinese woman should have a thorough grounding in six things: music, chess, calligraphy, painting, needlework and cookery. A Tibetan woman was valued for her very different set of accomplishments.”

Soon Wen gets lost, separated from her regiment. How can she survive?

Some wise words that she heard from a fellow soldier serve her well. She never forgets them:
-- “War gives you no time to study and no chance to adapt.”
-- “Whatever happens..., just staying alive is a victory.”

A warm-hearted Tibetan family gives Wen shelter from the cold and the hostilities. “Excluded from all conversation, Wen sometimes felt like one of the family's animals: protected, gently treated, watered and fed, but set apart from the human world.”

The folly of Beijing's military mission looks obvious. “Storms forced them to stop and they had to huddle among the yak herd. At night, they slept in the open air sheltered from the snow and wind by mountain rocks. They did not see another soul. Wen couldn't imagine who the ‘bandits’ were that the Liberation Army had been hunting in this deserted area.”

Gradually she better comprehends Tibetans and their ways. “Increasingly, she was coming to understand that the whole of Tibet was one great monastery. Everyone was infused with the same religious spirit, whether they wore religious robes or not.”

By the time that a transformed and more-frail Wen satisfies her quest and leaves Tibet, her hometown (indeed, the nation) also has changed nearly beyond recognition. Worse, her parents and sister no longer live where she last saw them. By tracking her husband, did she lose the rest of her family?

The book's title comes from a Tibetan habit of chopping corpses into small pieces and leaving them on a mountain altar for vultures and other birds of prey to eat. Theoretically, the birds then carry the dead people's spirits into the clouds. Does this unusual custom have something to do with Wen's missing man?

Simple and honest, Sky Burial tells an impressive, inspiring story. “There seemed no way to communicate to these people the kind of isolated life she had experienced. They knew next to nothing about the empty plains of Qinghai or the nomadic way of life.... How could she tell them that she had been living in a place where there was no politics, no war, only the calm, self-sufficiency of a communal life where everything was shared – and limitless space, where time stretched out endlessly.”

The book's greatest flaw results from the author losing touch with Wen. So she can't reveal what happened to the heroine in the decade between her return to Suzhou and its publication.

Born in Beijing, Xinran saw the Cultural Revolution separate her family. Much later, she became a radio-host. On a popular talk-show, Words On the Night Breeze, she invited women to call and share their life stories.

In 1997, Xinran arrived in London, where she now lives with her husband, literary agent Toby Eady. There, she began to write down the stories she'd heard, leading to her first book, The Good Women of China, published in 30-plus languages.