By Roger Stitson
XINRAN’S Sky Burial is not only the non-fiction biography of a Chinese woman’s decades-long journey through Tibet in search of her husband. It is also the story, constructed from interviews, of a journey conveying Shu Wen from ignorance to knowledge, and further, towards a state of grace, into which both author and reader are drawn and educated.
As such, it may be argued that, within the narrative technique, Sky Burial is an example of what has come to be known, loosely, as “new journalism”, a form of “creative” non-fiction.
For most of its length, except for the introduction, conclusion, and two brief interludes, the story of Wen’s experiences are presented in the third-person narrative style, where the author’s viewpoint appears to be marginalised. We are witness to the direct dialogue of many characters, to Wen’s impressions, reactions, thoughts, fears and desires – as in a work of fiction – and to the over-arching plot questions of dramatic fiction: what will happen next and how will it all be resolved? To emphasise this dramatic fictionalising and questing, and the development of the theme of spiritual growth through more than 30 years of physical and emotional adversity, Xinran the interviewer anticipates the reader’s reactions, the need for denouement, in one of her first-person interludes: “I longed to draw her (Shu Wen) into an intimacy that would enable me to ask the torrent of questions I had been storing up. Never had I met someone who had lost contact so completely with the world. ‘How would that change you?’ I thought as I tossed and turned. ‘Who would you become?’ ”
Xinran’s responses, here, are in marked contrast to her first impressions of Wen only hours earlier: “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 weatherbeaten.”
This repellent imagery dovetails neatly with Xinran’s childhood memories of a conversation among fellow Chinese concerning their mutual disgust at the Tibetan practice of “sky burials”: “The Tibetans cut his body into a thousand pieces and fed it to the vultures.” We are being presented with a traditionally standard Chinese attitude towards Tibet and its people as not only being alien but inferior, uncultured, brutal and uncivilised.
The essential imagery of Sky Burial is now in place, further emphasised a few pages later. A young doctor in 1958, married less than 100 days, Wen has joined the People’s Liberation Army to find Kejun, her husband, a surgeon whom she refuses to believe has died “in an incident” during the military campaign to subjugate eastern Tibet.
The trepidation of what Tibet holds in store is paramount. Wang Liang, an experienced commander tells her, “Whatever happens, remember one thing: just staying alive is a victory.”
On the troop train she listens to the conversation of young soldiers discussing “what little they knew of Tibet – the lamas, hermits and nomads, the legendary cruelty of the people”. The grasslands “stretch endlessly”, without “any kind of landmark around which to orient oneself”. Then altitude sickness comes upon them, and they begin to see “human figures hiding behind rocks and thickets”, and to fear an ambush.
Rare beauty, terror and nightmare intertwine: “The sounds of animals and the moaning of the gales through the trees, Wen and her companions felt caught halfway between this world and the next; the rigid corpses of two soldiers were discovered, gleaming Tibetan knives protruding from their breasts.”
These awe-inspiring and dreadful scenes represent the beginning of Shu Wen’s spiritual journey. Soon separated from her companions, and accompanied by Zhuoma, a destitute, highly educated young Tibetan woman whom she has saved from death, Wen is taken in by a family of nomadic herdsmen.
Those disgusting sensory images assailing us in the opening paragraphs of Sky Burial are re-enacted anew; we soon learn to appreciate them as intrinsic elements of extraordinarily difficult lives that are dependent on natural forces, the seasons, landscape and the livelihood derived from the tending of livestock: “the peculiar odour of dung, sweat and animal hide”.
And in the huge, windswept open spaces through which Gela and his family move and travail, Wen loses track of calendar time: “Had it not been for Zhuoma, she could never have begun to understand this family who, with their deep spirituality and carefree self-sufficiency, were as different from the Chinese as heaven and earth.”
By degrees, we see Wen changing, learning the language and the cultural values, shedding her Chinese army uniform and her sense of identity for traditional and functional Tibetan clothes, and drawing yet closer into the sphere and concept of universal Tibet as “one enormous monastery” where daily life, every moment of it, every action, deed, thought and feeling, every element in nature, is bound by the sacred: “Religion is the lifeblood of the Tibetan people.”
Yet through years of traversing the Tibetan landscape, Wen has never lost sight of her purpose. Observing Wang Liang’s dictum that “writing can be a source of strength”, she has penned, scratched, and engraved her sorrows, desires, dreams and love for Kejun into a massive nightly flow of narrative drowned in tears, destroyed over and over to make room for more words, to remind herself to keep going, to fulfil her vow to find him.
And so we discover the true purpose of the sky burial on the mountain plateau – the release by birds, “sacred scavengers”, of the human soul to heaven – and of Kejun’s self-sacrifice to it: “We arrive in the world naturally and we leave it naturally. Life and death are part of a wheel of reincarnation. Death is not to be feared.”
On returning to China in “threadbare and faded” Tibetan clothes, Shu Wen realises, when a small boy is offended by the rancid smell she exudes, that she is not who she once was long ago: “If she was no longer Chinese, who was she? What was important was that her soul had been borne up above, a flock of geese flew towards home. Here, there were neither sacred vultures nor sky burials.”
It is as though she has joined the geese in spirit for the journey back home to Tibet, for at this moment she recedes from Xinran’s narrative, passing again into obscurity, anonymity and now legend, leaving the author distraught, calling her name.
