Reading
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa's A Home in Tibet, Portrait of a Lama, one of the ending
chapters, said as the 'maiden' literature work by a Tibetan woman, and doing so
with the suspended breaths as to have the utmost effect in being able to
reconstruct a glimpse of the notorious Cultural Revolution's pallor marked by
intensive adversity, starvation, struggle sessions to re-education sessions, I
came to this conclusion despite her surviving oldest relative, the uncle monk's
taciturnity to virtually slipping away into yonder thought-world: George
Orwell's 1984, published in 1949, could be reckoned now and then through his
terse narration over days in terms of telling again and again that the world
outside is 'evanescent' despite seemingly well-ordered, the sudden
commissioning to excavate trench after Mao's death for an impending unknown
enemy to the mode of keeping every head in a reeling mania by secondly
galvanizing into a desperate spree that one yields to when in desperation. Then
their means of Socialist Transformation was just borrowed one, a copycat's game
tested on the mass of Chinese and Tibetan. And the question arises naturally
who was the real sinner in the first place to lay out such monstrously cruel
examples for torturing human by human—ranging from the sterilization of female
reproductive organ to the systematic overpowering mode of racial assimilation
in keeping the figure down to down?
Though
physical adversity was far worse than in 1984, the effects of psychological
electrification bears resemblances going through such inhuman atrocities in
subduing an individual's dignity over years on daily basis. For being an
ordained one he had gone longer and more intensive sessions and hard labors
instead of Collective Farming. But for being an ordained with the firm ground
of monastic learning he had survived sane. The silver lining had proven for
him, our pride, in coming out so despite being reluctant and seemingly carried
away like the still existing effects of the inexplicable tortures.
But my
romance with the book is for the love between the mother and her only daughter.
Finding of her mother losing a twin back in Tibet came as a jolt to me as my
own late mother had lost a twin (sons) in Tibet. Brooding over them was
similarly so complex and private. I love the book by which I can see a streak
of light arching afar.
