By Tenzin Nyinjey
TORONTO, Canada, 14 March 2021
I would like to thank publisher and poet Bhuchung D Sonam for sending me the novel Another Place by the late Tsering Wangyal, the former editor of Tibetan Review. In this age of the Internet and digital technology, made worse by the pandemic lockdown, what a joy it is to receive books through the postal service from India!
Topden Tsering already wrote a brilliant review of the novel, so lest I repeat his narratives, I will try to focus on the aspects of the novel that he left untouched in his review. First of all, this is potentially an excellent novel for Tibetan urbane intellectuals alienated from the mainstream Tibetan world, for two reasons: 1) It’s a novel written in English; 2) The lead character is an Anglophone Tibetan educated in a convent school in Kalimpong.
The lead character is a ‘savvy’ young man called Frank Lee aka Ngawang Tsultrim, who comes to Dharamshala to serve the Tibetan government in exile. As someone with a decent English education, he gets posted to the Department of Information and International Relations; this is the department where supposedly the ‘best and brightest’ young civil servants aspire to serve. It has an office building designed not unlike Capitol Hill of Washington DC, and hence officials serving in this department have ample opportunities to travel abroad to campaign for and attend meetings on the Tibetan struggle.
Frank Lee’s job is to work as a coordinator with foreign Tibet support groups and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the International Campaign for Tibet. Like most young diplomats and journalists working in the department, Frank Lee aspires to and succeeds in getting a Fulbright [’half-bright’] scholarship in the United States. Like most Fulbright Tibetan scholars in the West, Frank Lee pursues a one-year diploma degree course. This basically means he doesn’t have to write papers!
The main plot of the novel is Frank Lee’s loss of his expensive computer notebook that he brought from the US [the only one that’s available in the whole of India then] and how he and his friend, Tony (an Englishman who’s in Dharamshala to write a thesis on Tibetan democracy), using investigative insights from Sherlock Holmes, make sure they recover the expensive item in such a way that the man who ‘stole’ it, a friend, doesn’t lose face!
To me, this is a metaphor for Tibetans using their creative genius to regain their lost homeland from China in such a way that genuine reconciliation between the two neighbouring nations is once again restored. But such a reconciliation — a true restoration of Tibetan and Chinese freedom — is being undermined by many factors that the Tibetan population, including the Dharamshala establishment, has to overcome. These are the massive dumbing down of Tibetan intelligence caused by cheap, sensationalist Bollywood films and TV soap operas, the tendency of Tibetans to spread rumours without really checking out the sources, the typical orthodoxy and lack of innovation and dictatorial nature of Dharamshala bureaucrats as depicted by the character playing the role of secretary of the Department of Information and International Relations — in short, lack of democratic culture and consciousness.
Another plot is the missed love story between Frank Lee and the lead heroine of the novel, Pema, a daughter of a pompous former Tibetan aristocrat named Jangsur. Pema too gets educated in a convent school, but thanks to her father she’s transferred to TCV School where she is brought up in a Tibetan environment. Apart from this, her father arranges two tutors who provide Tibetan lessons to her daughter at his home. This rare opportunity to have access to the best of English and Tibetan education, plus economic wealth thanks to Jangsur running a bunch of taxi services, is the reason why Pema grows up into a powerful, sophisticated, cosmopolitan (she is most comfortable speaking in English, Nepali, or Hindi, although she learns to speak Tibetan relatively well), and out-and-out Tibetan femi-nationalist. The way she knocks off her Afghan boyfriend in Delhi who tries to humiliate her is just breathtaking!
While Frank Lee is a savvy, interesting character who does succeed in recovering his precious computer notebook, while he does have the courage to suggest in front of all the junior staffs during a meeting that the dictatorial secretary of the Department of Information and International Relations (behind his back staffs call him Idi Amin) to cut down on his foreign trips to save office expenditure — he lacks the ‘killer instinct’ that Pema possesses.
This lack of ‘killer instinct’ causes his exile from Dharamshala to the US, for he’s easily bullied into submission by the unjust authority exerted by pompous government bureaucrats. Just before he leaves for the US, however, a proto-consciousness of sort begins to dawn in Frank Lee’s mind about the need to gain political power. He expresses for the first time his spontaneous, genuine outrage at CTA’s Middle Way video propaganda. While packing his clothes into his suitcase to leave for the US to rejoin his wife in Colorado, for the first time Frank Lee also looks at and packs up the political science texts from his school in the US — texts he had never read!
Will Frank Lee read the political texts in the US and return to Dharamshala to help lead a democratic and Rang-tsen revolution? Or like the rest of ‘half-brighters’ settled in the US and Canada, will he get lost in his own world trying to build a professional career? The novel ends without answering these questions.
PS: In the novel, we have no idea about Frank Lee’s parents, his regional background — whether he’s from Central Tibet, Kham or Amdo. He’s simply Frank Lee.
Another Place: A Novel
by Tsering Wangyal
Pages 298, Rs 200
Blackneck Books, Dharamshala, 2021
Tsering Wangyal, called Editor by friends, was of Tibetans in Kalimpong which was a Tibetan enclave even before Tibet lost Rangzen.
As one of the brightest and best educated Tibetans in England he chose not to accept a good job in UK but serve the Tibetan cause.
What was remarkable about him was his high ideals, his ability to engage in the highest intellectual conversations and the latest modern trends but also relate to fellow Tibetans without putting on any scholarly airs. He traveled with all his luggage in a jola and slept on a bed or floor of any friend without fuss. But his mind was always sharp and of the noblest ideals.
A Tibetan with remarkable intellectual depth, deep compassion and total disdain for pretensions and material possessions is a gem, a rose in a desert.
This novel shouldn’t be glamourized as a ‘Tibetan novel’ as it deals with a group of expats outside Tibet proper who are detached from the reality of real Tibet.
The tone and tenor and themes of the novel misses the big picture of Tibet, but appears to see Dharamshala as Tibet, which is something I have noticed amongst Tibetan shichaks or Indian-born-Tibetans. This novel lacks the nuances of real proper novel, and is devoid of a cathartic climax which Aristotle in Poetics noted as the key function of art and literature.
The scope of this novel deals with the experiences and aspirations a fringe group of 150,000 Tibetan expats whose sentiments and worldview lies in a liminal space – they have moved away from the behavior and dialects of real Tibetans inside Tibet and have embraced Bollywood culture. Alai’s Red Poppies is not strictly considered a Tibetan novel, nor would this be added to the canon of Tibetan literature. This book is Tibetan Born-Refugee novel, the experience of which is researched in the book ‘Re-writing Shangrila’ where the power dynamics in the sharing of social space between three communities of Tibetan refugees – Born Refugees (shichak), Semi-Orphans (child escapees), and Newcomer sanjors (adult escapees) is extensively researched.
Meanwhile, Topden Tsering (whoever that is) review betrays the parochial view of Born-Refugees where Tibet is Dharamshala, and the aspiration of Tibetans is propitiating Dalai Lama. Clue – ‘He spared no one from scissors of criticism except Dalai Lama.’ Why except Dalai lama? A literary critic will suspect that Dalai Lama is a tyrant who doesn’t welcome criticism, as the Queen of England regularly does, from the left-wing Labour Party.
The plot is mediocre, and pacing of events amateurish – and…
That’s why the title ‘Another Place’.