Fran: X is for Xinran

I discovered the short read, Sky Burial, by the Chinese journalist and novelist Xinran, while (obviously) searching for an X.

Shu Wen is a Chinese woman who loves and marries another Chinese doctor, Kejun.  It is the 1950s and the People's Liberation Army is off to Tibet to liberate the territory for China.  Her husband is sent to care for soldiers and soon she receives a notice of his death.  Irregularities in the notice and her grief compel her to trace his path, in hopes of finding him (or greater news of his death).  The path is not smooth however and she finds herself apart from the soldiers, meeting a Tibetan woman Zhouma who also speaks Chinese who becomes a friend and counselor, living for years with a Tibetan nomadic family, and--eventually--finding news of Kejun decades after the end of the war.

The book is clearly balanced on several themes--straight up love/romance of a woman drawn to her husband even past death, women's class/social place in both China and Tibet, belief and experience of other cultures.  The friction and misunderstanding Mao's China has and creates during the Cultural Revolution is replaced for Wen by living in Buddhist Tibet for 40 years but the story is punctuated by smaller incidents of confusion.  The sky burial referenced in the title is the Tibetan practice of allowing vultures and scavenger birds to eat the corpse, a practice that the "modern" Chinese find abhorrent; it is that misunderstanding that causes the tragedy of Kejun's life and death, the hermit Qiangba's "death" and salvation.

But it seems to me that this is also framed in the context of storytelling--Wen tells her story to Xinran (who tells it to us).  The (lack of ) story of Kejun motivates Wen to go to Tibet and to spend her life searching for it.  The story of Zhouma and her lost love, a groom dubbed Tienanmen, interleaves with Wen's.  The inability to share her story past language and cultural boundaries drives much of the actual plot.  And it is a story at the end--when Qiangba tells her what happened to Kejun--that resolves the crisis.

An interesting and quick read.  As a Westerner though, I wondered how much of my suspicion (shared by this reviewer) of narrators (Xinran herself most particularly for telling us this remarkable story--how could it be true? what is she leaving out?) and the experience of Wen living in nomadic Tibet for 30+ years (how could she not learn of the outside world sometimes? how could she bear this isolation?  what's missing in Wen's story?) is founded on cultural misunderstandings of storytelling and translation.