Chinese writer’s journey of love in Tibet

Tibet is a striking place, with its mountainous desert and its passionate Buddhism and, during the last half-century, with its extraordinary suffering at the hands of the Chinese. As invaders, colonizers and oppressors, the Chinese generally look down on Tibetans as uneducated and unwashed. You can imagine what Tibetans think of the Chinese.

“Sky Burial,” a new novel set in Tibet, offers a perspective Western readers rarely get: a Chinese person who sympathizes with Tibetans. It’s a compelling story about a woman from Suzhou who goes to Tibet to search for her lost husband. She encounters danger and hides with a nomadic family in the vast openness of the Tibetan plateau, only to drift for 30 years and become thoroughly immersed in Tibetan culture before she can complete her goal.

The author, Xinran, is a Chinese journalist and columnist for the Guardian who distinguished herself as a radio host, teasing out personal stories from late-night callers in Nanjing during the 1990s, which she recounted in her 2001 book, “The Good Women of China.” During her time as an interviewer, Xinran met Shu Wen, an unusual Chinese woman who dressed in Tibetan garb and smelled of old leather and animals. Xinran listened for two days as Wen told her story of lost love and fruitless searching, describing Tibet’s boundless sky and magical vistas. A few days later, Xinran learned that Wen had left the small hotel in the city of Suzhou where they had talked.

Struck by the poetry and bitterness of Wen’s life, Xinran mulled over the story, then explored Tibet herself and ultimately decided to let her imagination evoke the poignant and tragic elements of the woman’s story.

“I tried to re-live her journey from 1950s China to Tibet -- to see what she saw, to feel what she felt, to think what she thought,” she writes. “I deeply regretted having allowed Wen to leave without telling me how I could find her again. Her disappearance continues to haunt me.”

Xinran opens the story with the one-sentence telegram informing Wen that her husband of three months, Wang Kejun, a doctor in China’s army, has been killed in Tibet. No explanation, no description of the circumstances. It was the 1950s, a period of hope and promise for many urban Chinese such as Wen, and she is devastated by the news.

In shock, she refuses to believe it. She tries to learn more but gets nowhere. She decides to find her husband. Her relatives, worried about the treacherous conditions in Tibet, try to dissuade her, but her mind is set.

Also trained as a doctor, Wen volunteers in the Chinese army and travels with a military unit into the mountains along Tibet’s eastern border. Unaware that the army was in the process of taking over Tibet, she is surprised to be met with hostility from Tibetan villagers. In an attack on her unit, Wen is saved by a generous Tibetan woman, and the two of them escape with a family of nomadic herders heading toward Tibet’s northern highlands.

Without seeing a town or even a village for many years, Wen gradually becomes accustomed to life on the mountainous plains, with their deep silences, the opposite of the urban life of China she once knew.

Time is uncertain in “Sky Burial,” which lends a mesmerizing, floating quality to the narrative. I felt lulled into a sense of timelessness, aware of the connectedness of all things, as one may experience in visits to Tibet.

The title, “Sky Burial,” refers to a Tibetan ceremony, when a corpse is taken to a mountaintop and chopped into small pieces, to be consumed by vultures. It is considered the ultimate manifestation of harmony between heaven and Earth.

One paradox of modern China is that many urban Chinese, who struggled so hard to leave communism and poverty behind, are now finding that affluence leaves them feeling empty and rootless. Many turn to Falun Gong or Christianity or another spiritual pursuit.

Many Chinese think they have little to learn from Tibet. Yet those who spend time there, Wen’s story suggests, can see that the deepest truths are the eternal ones, found in the quiet of a mountainside.

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Seth Faison, a former China correspondent for the New York Times, is the author of “South of the Clouds: Exploring the Hidden Realms of China.”