A Streak of Light

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.