AHP 17: A Zorgay Tibetan Childhood and the Swedish translation by Katrin Goldstein-Kyaga as Min tibetanska barndom i Zorgay

2012·7.2 MB·English

by  Asian Highlands Perspectives

A Z T
ORGAY IBETAN

C
HILDHOOD
ISSN (print): 1835-7741
ISSN (electronic): 1925-6329
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008944256

Call number: DS1.A4739
Subjects: Uplands-Asia-Periodicals
Tibet, Plateau of-Periodicals

©2012 by Asian Highlands Perspectives

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without
express written permission from the publisher.

Front Cover: Men and boys visit lab rtse above Lhacar Village
on the seventeenth day of the third lunar month according to the
Tibetan calendar (photo by Shes rab, 2012).

Back Cover: Kondro Tsering (photo by CK Stuart, 2007).

Citation: Kondro Tsering. 2012. A Zorgay Tibetan Childhood
and the Swedish translation by Katrin Goldstein-Kyaga as Min
tibetanska barndom i Zorgay. Asian Highlands Perspectives 17.

Note: This is an edited version of Kondro Tsering. 2007. A
Zorgay Tibetan Childhood. Plateau Publications: Xining City.
EDITORIAL ASSISTANCE
____________________________________

CK Stuart
Ramona Johnson
Fred Richardson
Meredith Champlin
Gerald Roche
Steve Frediani
Brook Hefright
Timothy Thurston
Elizabeth Reynolds

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ACCLAIM
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K
ondro Tsering's simple, lively, and rich narrative
manages to capture his childhood in a fresh, touching,
and naive manner, while describing accurately daily
life in an ordinary Tibetan village. Relationships between elders
and children, teachers and pupils, humans and animals, men and
women, Buddhism and folk religion and culture, past traditions
and present mores, the spiritual and the material, and ensuing
contradictions, are honestly presented in a series of short
chapters covering such diverse topics as harvest, education,
death, traditional folk stories and beliefs, impact of television in
a remote Tibetan village, and environmental concerns.
Altogether, Kondro Tsering's unassuming autobiographic A
Zorgay Tibetan Childhood is a good and instructive read, to be
recommended to anybody interested in today's Tibetan way of
life in larger China." Françoise Robin, Institut National des
Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris

"Writing in a Tibetan modern literature tradition of English-
language autobiography that has recently been taken up in
Xining, Kondro Tsering has produced an extraordinarily heart-
warming and insightful account of his young yet eventful life.
Kondro Tsering's narrative of his childhood in a Tibetan
agricultural village in Ngawa Prefecture showcases his writing
skills honed in the Xining English Language Training Program
(ETP). That program is now producing a pool of remarkably
talented young Tibetan creative writers and scholars and
Kondro Tsering is one of its rising stars. From his early
socialization experiences with nakedness to comedic interludes
in folk stories to accounts of mountain deity worship and his
experiences in Chinese state-sponsored schools, Kondro
Tsering's account contributes to a growing body of English
language literature written by Tibetans that provides an
unprecedented glimpse of the everyday humor and pathos of
modernizing lifeways in the PRC." Charlene Makley, Reed
College

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"From the perspectives of a small child and youth, the narrator
relates experiences from his formative years in a community in
eastern Tibet. The book unfolds in a series of vivid, delicately
crafted anecdotes that are informed by a keen knowledge of
local customs and folklore." Mark Bender, Ohio State
University

"This young Ngawa Tibetan's remarkable, revealing life stories,
related in an entertaining fashion, provide a wealth of
information about true Tibetan childhood that transported me
back to my own childhood in a powerful, poignant way."
Haudan Zhaxi, Humbolt University, Berlin

"Kondro Tsering's book is a brutally honest, first-person tale of
growing up in an agricultural family in northeastern Tibet. This
insider's view will upset myths about the daily lives of Tibetans,
while the narrator's passion for family, fun and, most of all,
stories, creates insight and excitement for the reader."
Keith Dede, Lewis & Clark

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PREFACE

K
ondro Tsering's A Zorgay Tibetan Childhood follows
the life of the narrator and author from his birth through
junior middle school in a remote farming village in
Zorgay County, Sichuan. Like other books published as part of
the Chronicles of Tibetan Childhood series, Kondro Tsering
provides a deeply personal, biographical account mixed with
keen ethnographic observations about Tibetan social and
cultural life, and critical social commentary from his
perspective now as an English-speaking resident in the large
mostly-Chinese city of Xining. The intimate details of
childhood in the eastern Tibetan countryside painted by the
book include playful pranks, poignant dreams, and painful
memories of the deaths of the author's mother and brother.
Throughout this vivid account are also revealed important and
rapidly changing elements of Tibetan cultural life, particularly
the key role played by the grand epic of King Gesar. In the early
part of the book, we see Kondro Tsering's grandmother
interacting with him through the idiom of Milarepa, and passing
the days with the feats of King Gesar. By the time he is in
junior middle school, television enters the village and, in
Kondro Tsering's humorous telling, nearly colonizes the
imaginative life-world of the villagers; he recounts village
elders saying "In comparison with Chinese actors, our King
Gesar is absolutely nothing at all."
There is much else of interest about contemporary
farming life in the Amdo Ngawa region as well. Nomads, we
learn, are still much looked down upon by farmers,
transportation infrastructure connecting villages to townships
and county towns remains poor; and the quality and
accessibility of hospital medical care is abysmal. The Sloping
Land Conversion Project has transformed some barley fields to
forests in this region, but the importance of water for the
unconverted field remains and thus so too do various methods
of beseeching rain, including prayers to nagas and carrying the
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Kanjur and Tanjur1while circumambulating the village and
fields. Though the televised Journey to the West 2 now
apparently trumps King Gesar in popularity, ghost stories are
still told, and the mountain deity still causes hail and bad
harvests if villagers harm the deer.
These observations will be of great interest to students
of contemporary Tibet, as will the author's sometimes ironic,
reflexive commentaries on the village and his own past. He
notes, for example, that though Tibetans are often represented
as compassionate, they mistreat their dogs that are, like people,
"members of the Animal Kingdom," and "we are worse than
dogs, for we are egocentric." Similarly, he writes that his
grandmother told him stories extolling the virtues of not killing,
all the while picking out and killing lice on his head. The author
also notes matter-of-factly that as schoolchildren they were
never taught about famous Tibetan writers and thinkers, and had
no opportunity to study Tibetan writing until fourth grade; at the
same time, though, his Chinese teachers were in his view much
better and more dedicated to their students' learning than the
Tibetan ones.
All in all, this beautifully written, intensely observed,
and skillfully narrated book will no doubt be read and enjoyed
by many.

Emily Yeh
University of Colorado

1 The Tibetan Buddhist canon recognized by various schools
of Tibetan Buddhism includes the Kanjur ('The Translation of
the Word') and the Tanjur ('Translation of Treatises'). The
former is considred the spoken teachings and precepts of the
Buddha and the latter is the collection of Indian commentaries
on the Buddha's teachings.
2 Journey to the West is a Chinese television series adaptation
of Wu Cheng'en's Chinese classical novel with the same title. It
was first broadcast on CCTV in China on 1 October 1982 and
became an immediate classic in China. Unadapted portions of
the original story were later dealt with in a second series
released in 1999.
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