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- [00:02]
A
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Welcome to the New Books Network welcome back to New Books Network. My name is Sarah Bramau Ramos and I am one of the hosts on the channel and I'm here today with Christopher Peacock to talk about his new translation, the Red Wind Howls, a novel by the Tibetan author Tsering Dondrup. This novel is deeply rooted in history. It is vivid, it is darkly bleakly funny, and it is also darkly bleakly gripping. I read it in one sitting, closed the book and immediately went back to read it again. So I am particularly excited to be talking about this book with its translator. Chris, welcome back to the podcast.
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A
Thanks so much for having me. Wow, I'm really happy to hear that you read it twice. I didn't know that.
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B
Oh, I had a great time with it, but we will get into that. So I said welcome back because this is not the first time you've been on new books. So where do we find you now?
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A
I'm currently in my office at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania where I'm an assistant professor of East Asian Studies. I teach Chinese language here and classes on literature, including a class on modern Tibetan literature.
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B
Nice. And so this is also not your first time translating the work of this author, Tsering Dorndrup. As I' heard you describe before, this author is one of the most prominent writers writing in Tibetan. His work is very popular and also critically respected. But this book in particular, as you sort of outlined in the introduction of this book, it covers all of Mao Zedong's rule, including encounters between Tibetans and Communist China, the AMDO uprising of 1958, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution. So some pretty sensitive material. So given all this, could you outline where does this book fit within this author's work as a whole and what kind of overall is the reputation of this book?
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A
Yeah, so he's definitely one of the most respected, one of the most well known authors in Tibet. I was in Xining last summer and you go to Tibet bookstores and you can always find his books in Tibetan bookstores. And this is one of four soon to be five novels he's written. He's got another novel and historical novel coming out really soon, as well as numerous short stories. He's got collections of short stories, collections of novellas. He's also, by I think, Tibetan standards, very prolific. He began in the 80s. He's still writing now. And this work is something of an exception or an outlier in a way, because he wrote this around 2006, where it came out around 2006. And in some ways I would say it's his most important or one of his most important pieces of work. But it's an exception in that you cannot buy this in a Tibetan bookstore. Most of his other work is published, still published today, but this is not and was never formally published because its content is just simply far too sensitive.
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B
So what was it about this book that made you decide to translate it and then I guess to translate and also publish it in English by a university press? Right.
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A
Well, I think, as I said, it's one of his standout works. I think it's really one of his most remarkable pieces of literature. And it deals with this history that is there's very little written about it and very little even known about it. Not just Mao's rule in Tibet, but especially the AMDO rebellion of 1950. So this is when Tibetans in Ando, which is what Tibetans call this region that covers mainly Tsinghai Province, Gansu provinces, rose up in armed rebellion against the reforms that were being imposed on them. And there was very short lived rebellion. It was very violently, very bloodily quelled. And after there was this horrible range of punishments, people were rounded up and taken away to labor camps. And partly because so many people died, so many, there was almost very little was able to be passed on about this history. There are a few books here and there, some also available in English. I point people also towards Ben Weiner's book about this, which is excellent. So it tells this very, very important suppressed history as well, which I think deserve to be told. And when you think about the level of scrutiny, the level of repression that Tibetans, Tibetan writers face in the prc, to write a book like this is really remarkable. And I think it just simply deserves to be translated. It deserves to have a wider audience. Really important piece of work. And I also, I think worth worth pointing out that unlike a lot of banned books, this is one that still has a real meaning to Tibetan readers. It is certainly banned, but the author printed up a number of copies himself and distributed these. And these still kind of circulate underground. So many Tibetans have still read this Book are very much aware of this book. Book, even though you can't go and buy it in a bookstore, still very meaningful to Tibetan readers.
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B
So on that what was. I'm curious about the kind of the context around which you yourself first read it. Was the process similar of sort of just getting a hold of a copy somehow, some way or what? In what way did you first encounter it?
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A
I mean I had been working on the author's work and also both writing about it in my own research as well as trends translating it for a while. By the time I came around to this project, I translated his short stories before, so I was very aware of the book even when I first began to research him. And then I read the book and it was difficult to find a copy of. But there's one in the Columbia University Library. My own copy, which is now very dog eared and falling apart, was given to me by the author himself. Has a few lying around, but it is tricky to find one, which is another good reason to translate it right? To almost preserve it.
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B
I will say, unlike the experience you're outlining there, this book can be easily found and purchased. So I'll just flag that right at the start. But you mentioned there that you've translated this author's other works and in particular some of his short stories. What was it like translating this book compared to those other projects?
- [07:48]
A
Quite similar in a lot of ways because I think he has a very consistent voice, he has a very consistent style. He doesn't radically change his style from one piece to another. He has a very notable sense of humor and sense of satire. And so in this novel we find that same sense of humor and even similar perhaps types of characters, similar settings. He has a lot of the same kinds of settings in his work. So a lot of familiar material. There's. But certainly a lot. I had to take a lot of care with the history in this novel. I think because most of his work is set in the present day or the present day when it was written, whether that was the 80s or the 90s or 2000s. This novel's a bit different in that it's a historical novel. And also over the span of a novel you have to be more careful to keep track of details. If there's a phrase or a reference to something that comes up early in the novel that is then brought back much later in the novel, you have to maintain consistency over that long narrative, which is a bit challenging sometimes. But stylistically I think very, very similar to translating short fiction.
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B
As you were mentioning There are things you have to take care with. I was thinking that I don't feel that the author has really made that task any easier. He's chosen a narrative structure that I imagine would make that task quite diffic. So as you say in the introduction, this book is divided into part one and part two, and the narrative moves back and forth, jumping through different moments. And I guess as a reader, I felt that most acutely in part one. I'll just say part one, I really you. Really you. The shifts are not telegraphed to you, but you sort of notice when you're in one. I'll put it that way. But I'm doing a very poor job of explaining it. Could you say a little bit more about some of the narrative choice here? What's, what is. What is going on with the non sequential storytelling and what kind of work is that, that doing here?
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A
Yeah, it is very challenging. That was challenging as well to translate. And I will say that, I mean, there are times I tried to slip an extra word in here and there which might ease that transition a little bit. But the transitions are very sudden, very jarring, and like you say, you're often halfway through a paragraph or a section before you realize that you're 20 years in the future. So the novel begins at the start in the early 80s, so after all these events had happened. And then it goes back to the beginning, which that's not that jarring, not that unfamiliar. You see this kind of technique in films all the time. But then from then on, it jumps back and forth all over the place constantly with very little signposting. There's a really excellent analysis of the novel by the Lamar Jap, who's a literary scholar, and he points out that this mimics these oral accounts that the novel is based on. So this is one of the really remarkable things about the novel as well, that yes, it's fiction, but the author's very keen to, to underscore the historical veracity of it in a way because he conducted countless interviews with people from his community about this period of history. And he, you know, anonymized it and then used these details in, in the book. So Islamic points out these, the way people tell these, these oral stories, that's what they do when they're recounting a story. They, they jump about from one thing to another, say, oh, this happened. Oh, but before this happened. And then later this happened. So the novel actually mimics that in a way, which when translated into fiction, almost gives you this avant garde quality, which I think is interesting. But the other thing, the important thing to point out is that this is also very common, I think, in trauma narratives or narratives of historical trauma globally. You'll find this in Holocaust narratives or Holocaust memoirs, for example, I gave this one example in the introduction of the book from the Gate, which is a memoir about the Khmer Rouge, which begins in the exact same way where he sort of launches into it and then a couple of pages later stops and says where I need to, I need to organize my thoughts. Because I'm telling you one thing here and narrating these huge traumatic events, you can't necessarily proceed the simple linear ABC kind of fashion.
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B
And also I imagine helps in some ways to emphasize. To emphasize sort of key recurring things, key recurring themes. And I mean for me, the one, the grouping, I guess, of things that stood out to be most were those related to food, hunger. When hunger is brought up, it jumps to a different episode, a different year, and moves and you just. You get this sense of this unrelenting wave of hunger or the unrelenting wave of the terrible soup that they are served, that they are given and then. And you flip to when they first got met it, when they were first given it and nobody want. And then you flip to when it was precious and then you, you sort of see it builds in that way.
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A
Yeah, and I think it captures that. Like you said, you pick moments out of what is otherwise a whirlwind of events and you know, is thinking things in a very scholarly historical way. We would say PRC was founded in 1949 and then came the reforms, then came the great leak forward, then came the Cultural Revolution. But the way you experience that, especially as a Tibetan, when these things come out of nowhere, it's all just kind of mixed up together. And it feels like this big 20 year period when all these things happen together. And all of a sudden, since the 1980s, there's limited restoration of traditional ways of life and people are recollecting these things as they happened. They don't necessarily just go from one thing to another simply. So the novel really captures that as well, I think in this sort of interesting, challenging way that it's told.
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B
When you were talking about some of the things that are similar between this book and others, you mentioned the characters and I'll just flag that. Part one follows a character who I learned is a recurring character in this author's fiction. But I was meeting him for the first time, so could you introduce him? Who is he? What do we need to know about him? Both as he appears here and as he appears in other stories.
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A
So this is a character called Alacton. He is a lama reincarnate llama. So reincarnation lineage. He's the reincarnation previous llama who's also electron. He comes up again and again in Tang's fiction and he's a comedic villain. This, this satirical portrait of a corrupt lama. He's, he's greedy, he's shallow, he's short tempered, he's hypocritical, he's the exact opposite of what you would expect or perhaps what you should expect. A Tibetan Buddhist lama. And also in his name, his name is a deliberately ridiculous name. So alak is an honorific term for a llama and a drong is the word for a wild yak. So undomesticated yak, which is definitely not something that real life lama would be called, which was a deliberate choice because he doesn't want to get any blowback from accidentally naming his fictional llama, something that a real life llama is called. So he comes up again, again in these sort of cameo roles. And you'll see him a lot in his short fiction. He kind of pops up and does something comedically villainous and horrible and then goes away again. So you don't really know too much about him going into this because I think you get the sense of who he is pretty quickly in the book. But then the difference in the Redwind Howls is actually that if you think about his fictional world, you know, sort of extended universes turned on fiction, this is, this is kind of his back story. It shows him as a child first being identified as an incarnation and then installed in his monastery. And then we see a different side of him in a way, or we see where he came from.
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B
You mentioned there. He's the exact opposite of what we might expect as a reincarnate lama. And he's also very often the exact opposite of those who encounter him expect, especially in this setting. He's constantly meeting people or being thrown together with people that he met previously who expect one thing of him. And here he is in a very different situation and setting. And sometimes that backfires on everybody involved and sometimes it just backfires on the person who's come to him asking or expecting or wanting something that he is not in a position to give. Yeah, it just struck me that he's, he's, he's the exact opposite on many levels here in this, in this, in this version of him.
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A
Yeah. And I mean, he has this, you know, he is, he's A reincarnate llama. He has this incredible revered status. So the characters who meet him who are from his home region, especially in the novel, the automatic reaction is one of extreme respect and extreme devotion, regardless of how he might behave.
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B
You've said, you know, you described him as a comedic villain. You said elsewhere that this author has a very dark sense of humor. Is there a particular moment, especially in part one I'm thinking of, that encapsulates this for you?
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A
I mean, it comes up throughout, I think, just in the dialogue, in the narrative choice. You know, there's a moment early on where there's a struggle session, I think, against Alak Drong. And the people who are there witnessing keeps calling out Zhong Rinpoche, have mercy. They kind of call on him as their. As they're seeing instruments at being struggled against. And the person conducting the struggle session keeps having to pause it to ask who said that? And it has this sort of almost farcical, kind of pantomite feel to it. But there's. There's a bit also, I think, in really early in the book that sticks out to me, which is when he first meets one Ivor, who is the party cadre who's been sent to sort of basically announce the arrival of the prc. And he meets Alec Drung. And Alec Drong essentially thinks that. That Wang I should be bowing to him because he is the local authority figure. He tells him that Zishung, this sort of tiny little part of Amdo they're in Zishung encompasses the earth that encompasses the heavens. And wanna kind of laughs at him and says, actually, it's really quite small. He holds up palm and he says, if my palm, my hand is a map of China, then Zhe Sheng is just this tiny little line right here. And Al Druang kind of laughs at him and he says, no, no, no, no, no. If my palm is Zhishung, then China is just this little light right here. And then he gets drawn, gets sort of whisked off to go and see China. And he quickly comes back and says, the Communist Party encompasses the earth and encompasses the heavens. And yes, we need to listen to what they're saying to us. And it's all. It's a little bit. Again, kind of farcical and ridiculous, given the tragic events that they're about to unfold. But I think the important thing is that there's. Throughout work, there's a purpose to the humor. There's always something kind of going on behind the joke. So in this case, first of all, we get a sense of who Alat Drong is. He's arrogant, he's ignorant in many ways. And so we get a sense of him as a character. But also, I think this is a really interesting and subtle way of poking fun at and undermining China's historical claims to the region, essentially. And then China's historical claim to national unity when the Communist Party turns up, or Wang Aiguo turns up. And not only has the local. The local lama never heard of the Communist Party, he doesn't even really understand what the concept of China is. And so there's kind of a joke there where we're laughing at Alak Drong's, his arrogance and his ignorance of the situation. But there's also something kind of important happening behind a joke, as you were talking there about.
- [21:22]
B
There is importance behind everything. Everything is being very carefully chosen in terms of the story, the narrative, the characters, what they're doing. Thinking of Alak Drong, then I. Does he survives? We know this from the beginning, and that's something in the narrative that we're following him through that's a rarity. We see characters struggle to survive when there's no food and when they're being made to do just inhumane levels of physical labor. And then there's context changes. New campaigns happen. Someone has moved to a new location, and everything is thrown up in the air. And we see characters going, you know, to unprecedented lengths to survive. They turn on each other. They turn on each other again. They turn on new people. And all through. Through all of this, Alec Drong, he makes it. I'm curious as to what you think readers are sort of supposed to take away and understand about his survival.
- [22:21]
A
Yeah, that's. That's a good question. I think on. On the one hand, one important element of it is that he's a character from elsewhere in the author's fiction. So we know if you go into this having read his other work, which I think the expectation is not necessarily that readers in an English context would have, but Tibetan readers probably would have. So, you know, this character survives already because you've. You've seen him before. And as I mentioned, you get an interesting different view of him here, a backstory, in a sense. And what's really important is that it's a really interesting choice to have a villain essentially, as your protagonist, as the victim of all these campaigns, because it would have been very easy, I think, for the novel, for the author to have chosen a character for the center of the novel who is much More obviously of a victim. But when you have such an unlikable character who could himself does terrible things throughout the novel, it really challenges you to judge what's happening to him in a more dispassionate way. You have to think about the morality, about the politics of what's happening, separate from how you feel about Electron as a person. So having him survive this entire experience, I think, puts the reader in an interesting position of separating how they feel about Electron from what's happened to him. And I think another really important element of this is that having him survive and having the book go up to the 1980s where it begins, it gives you something a little bit extra in the arc of the historical narrative that it's telling. It goes beyond the Mao, just beyond the Mao, but it shows us the really crucial beginnings of how things change in the early 1980s with the. The revival of, in Tibet, Buddhist traditions, but also this. The early growth of a sort of consumerist capitalist society and. And how that changes people, how that, particularly in Alec Drong's case, leads to this utterly unscrupulous greed, which is where what we see most of the. His character, as in other works, we see the beginnings of that in this novel. How he got to that point, how. I mean, his character was always like that to some degree, arguably, but certainly the events that he goes through puts him in a position where once he gets out the other side of it, he thinks, all I care about now is myself, is my comfort, is my well being, my money. And it's something we see in other, I think, big historical, historical novels in China that have these grand arcs. If you think about Yuhua's novel Brothers, which tells a similar sort of story or similar timeframe, and it follows these brothers then up through the 90s, and how this whole generation who survived the Cultural Revolution emerge as much more ruthless capitalists in a way, for having survived that experience.
- [25:46]
B
So we see this, as you've just laid out this fascinating backstory for a character in Alac Drong in part one and then part two. So part one focuses really on Alec Drong being taken to the labor camp and his time there and all that happens. And part two looks at what was happening outside of the camp. And here we focus on two characters, not Alek Draw. So who are they? And without giving too much about their individual endings away, what is the sort of arc that they go on?
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A
So the main character, or one of the two main characters in the second part is Los Angazo, who is a monk and essentially the opposite of Alacron. He is. He's about. He's noble, he's compassionate even towards those who are persecuting it. During the Cultural Revolution, he sticks to his vows as best as he can throughout all of the Mao years, despite being persecuted relentlessly for it. And then we have who is a lay woman with whom Lozeng Gyatso enters into a fake marriage. And it's a mutually beneficial fake marriage because Dashi Lamo is being harassed by this other character, Losang Tutrim, who is cousin and one sort of main antagonist in the second part of the book. So entering into a marriage kind of gets her away from him.
- [27:26]
B
Him.
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A
And for Los Angyatso, it convinces. Helps to convince people that he has forsaken his monk's vows and that he really has given up on Buddhism. But then this fake marriage is kind of the beginnings of a complex romance. Lo Sangyasa also starts teaching Dasti Lama how to read, how to read Tibetan, and then through that starts teaching about the basics of Buddhism, Buddhist principles. And in the end, well, not to spoil things, we know they survive the Cultural Revolution because Part two, like part one, also begins at the end. It begins in the early 1980s and then goes backwards. But suffice to say that I think the end of Mao's rule brings new and different challenges for them, and you probably shouldn't expect them to live happily ever.
- [28:25]
B
I appreciate the spoiler free framing of
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A
that as best as I can.
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B
As best as you can. I appreciate that with thinking about what we know and what we don't know. You mentioned there that the teaching of Tibetan and reading is quite important in Part two, but there are some interesting things that happen. And I say interesting in the sense of the reader doesn't quite know what's going on that happened in terms of books, books ending up in interesting places, books being thrown in interesting places. I'm curious about, I guess, the role of books and learning and knowledge in this part. Is there anything that really stands out to you around that as a topic?
- [29:11]
A
Yeah, this is really crucial in Tibet. And there are many ways. I'll touch on this later if I can, but many ways in which one of the really important things about this book is that it's a history that might be familiar. Know a lot about PRC history, who've read a lot of memoirs or novels or star of works about the Cultural Revolution, but many of the things that happened in Tibet or the way that this history unfolded in Tibet, there are really important, crucial differences. And one of them is that during the Cultural Revolution, the Tibetan language itself was suppressed, was deemed essentially a tool of feudal superstition because it was deemed to be so inherently linked to Buddhist belief, to superstitious, quote, unquote, local beliefs, that the language itself was ostafressed. And so just learning Tibetan, the actual language, never mind learning about traditional culture or learning about Buddhist thought, was a huge challenge in this period. And the only way that many Tibetans were able to emerge out of the other side of this with some working knowledge of their own language was from people breaking the rules at great risk to themselves. And this is also in some ways true for. For the author himself, right, who grew up very young during the Cultural Revolution, had his education disrupted. And so we see in the. In the novel the ways in which figures, anonymous figures, even strive to find ways to preserve not just Tibetan traditions, but also the very language of Tibet itself, which, again, you know, we. We talk a lot about people, be very aware of the disruptions to education, which has a common throughout that whole generation in China. But no, at no time was the actual Chinese language and Chinese characters threatened with survive.
- [31:31]
B
As you were talking there about threats to survival, life part two, compared to part one, life doesn't always seem as sort of immediately perilous here in this half. As a reader, it did not seem like the characters were always on the brink of sudden death, which they did seem to be in part one. But as you were indicating, other things are up, are being threatened. Language itself, life is not exactly easier, put it that way, or any more routine or any more regular. In this half of the novel, the characters are certainly under suspicion the entire time. So there's lots of. But different kinds of threats from different quarters here. Is there. When it comes to thinking of part two and upheaval in part two, is there a particular episode or moment where you think that those stakes are really on show?
- [32:27]
A
So I think part two, returning to that point I was just making, actually, I think part two will probably be more familiar in many ways to readers who have read memoirs or novels about the Cultural Revolution or about this period before. We see brutal campaigns and struggle sessions. Los Angyazo is kind of dragged around from village to village to be struggled against. There's one moment where he's. He's savagely beaten up by school children, loses.
- [33:02]
B
Loses his coat, and another.
- [33:04]
A
Yeah, and these sort of terrible things happen to him as. As they did, I think, throughout China at the time. I think what perhaps grabs my attention a bit more, or maybe what I flag up is Also, some of the ways in which what is happening here is very specific to the region. Things that didn't happen elsewhere, let's say. So one of the really interesting parts is the arrival of what are called the youths. We end up being referred to locally as the youths. So this is also something that is there. This is historical, historically accurate. These thousands of teenagers, I think they probably were arrived from, I think mainly Henan province and arrived in. In Qinghai to sort of help develop the west, right? These poor west regions of China, there were these kind of young idealists who were setting out to the west to help their fellow Tibetan countrymen out of their poverty. And in this. This very sort of idealistic, overcoming nature, Maoist sort of fashion, they looked around and saw what you have in the. The highlands of Qinghai is endless grasslands. And so they thought, well, let's plant some things here, the gross and food. So they. They dig up en masse and they just dig up, up vast swathes of the grassland and plant crops, which of course does not work because the crops they plan, you cannot grow these crops at thousands of feet above sea level. Things won't grow there. That is why there is a pastoral lifestyle, a nomadic lifestyle. So not only do they disastrously plant useless crops, they also destroy all the grassland which the livestock, the yaks, rely on to graze. And so the yaks die out and there is. Contributes to this immense and tragic famine. I actually went to see some of these areas and it was pointed out to me that you could still see now that what are just empty grasslands again, you still see the remaining traces of these. These kind of square, huge square lines etched in the dirt where they had dug up these vast, vast amounts of grassland and tried to turn it into farmland, completely unsuccessfully. So, yes, there's still an immense amount of peril occurring on the outside because what. What results from this is again, famine. You referred earlier to the food, the importance of food, the youths themselves, these kids from Henan province, most of them end up dying there, starving.
- [36:06]
B
As you were talking there about the landscape, the environment, we haven't really touched on that as much, but that does appear almost as a character in its own right throughout this entire novel, throughout part one and part two. And one way in which it appears is of course, through the red wind, which howls away in the background of several pivotal moments. And again, without giving away the ending, does close out the book as a whole. The wind kind of is always there and it's even more sort of noticeable in that moment. So thinking about the Wind, which of course also comes into the title. Is there anything, Chris, you'd like to sort of see, say or touch on when it comes to the significance of the wind itself?
- [36:54]
A
Well, as is mentioned in the novel, it's, you know, the red wind literally refers or literally is the term for a dust storm sense you'd get, you know, in the northwest. But this, the air on this seems kind of red from, from the dust and the dirt whipping around. Otherwise it has, I think, a fairly straightforward symbolism which, which readers can probably draw their own, own conclusions about. The, the French, French translation of the novel, actually, which is translated into French is Tempet Rouge, which I thought about for a moment. But then in English you read Storm just it sounds like a Tom Clancy novel or something, which probably doesn't have that same association in French. So, you know, you can, you can get away with it there. But. And I wouldn't say so, but it's important to say that the, the book, the author is not anti communist in some kind of crude Makatiite type of way. But obviously I think that that sense of critique is very much captured in the idea of the red wind. But perhaps what I think is again more important is to emphasize the sense in which this history was experienced very differently by Tibetans. I think that's something that resets this book aside, because if you think in the Chinese context, what happens with the upheavals of Maoism, well, let's say 1949 was the conclusion of a civil war. War like a literal civil war, but also an ideological civil war that had been going on for decades by that point, going even all the way back to the late Qing. And then the left wing movement that grows out of the May 4th movement, which then grows into a very real bloody civil war between differing factions. But for Tibetans, Tibetans weren't part of that history. They weren't part of those debates, they weren't part of those, those struggles. It was something very much kind of outside of their realm of experience for the most part. And so when, when this, these campaigns arrive in what happens in the 1950s onwards, it's very new, it's very extreme, it's very sudden, it's very violent and it's very much imposed from the outside by a regime that's very culturally, linguistically alien to them. And so I think that the title also captures that in a way or alludes to that in a way. Just what a sudden, unexpected upheaval this was for Tibetans, again, in a way that perhaps was Experienced differently in trained it proper, let us say.
- [40:00]
B
I think that's a fabulous sort of summation, if you like, of what? If we're thinking back to again, sort of what this novel stands for and the many reasons why it deserves to be translated. I would imagine that answer you just gave would fit very well in that. But as a way of closing out our conversation about this book, is there anything else you'd like to emphasize about it? Especially maybe for listeners who have not yet had a chance to read this novel?
- [40:33]
A
I suppose I would emphasize how important I think it is to support Tibetan writers with our interest. If nothing else, Tibetan writers are all non professional. You can't make a living off writing fiction or poetry or anything like that in Tibet. Basically impossible. So this writers do this in their spare time while having full jobs, nine to five day jobs in offices. They write in their spare time and they write against extreme political restrictions, especially if you're tackling serious topics like this. Even their very language today remains under threat. So the existence of a novel like this I think is in some ways a minor miracle. And I know to Tyrnyodrup and to writers like him it means a great deal to know that his work is being read in the west, that his work is being discussed in the West. So just by the simple act of reading the book or engaging with it or having an opinion about it or talking about it, I think you are are contributing to something important and contributing in a meaningful way to supporting Tibetan writers.
- [41:53]
B
Now that you have finished with this book or with the process of translating it and seeing it out into paperback into the world, what are you working on now? What is inspiring you?
- [42:05]
A
At the moment I'm taking a break from translation for one thing. I just finished one article that I'm really excited about, which is going to be in a forthcoming book about Chinese prism writing. It's about a very famous Tibetan who wrote a book proving that water exists on the moon using Marxist theory, which he wrote while he was in prison, solitary confinement for 18 years. It's fascinating. But the more important thing I suppose that I'm working on right now is my book manuscript, which is looking at, in a broader picture kind of way, the encounter between Chinese and Tibetan literatures in the modern era, particularly in the prc. It looks at how Tibetan writers have adopted and adapted modern Chinese literary paradigms, intellectual paradigms, so particularly 5-4- paradigms in the creation of their own nationalist discourse. One of the chapters is actually about Serendrup, not about this novel, but it's about a famous short story he wrote called Jalo, which Tibetans or Tibetan intellectuals, certain Tibetan intellectuals have interpreted as a Tibetan equivalent of the true story of Aki as being a story about Tibetan national character, which is a reading I don't entirely agree with, but it raises all sorts of fascinating and really sticky, thorny, contradictory questions about how modern Tibetan literature does or doesn't fit into the broader umbrella of Chinese literature. So that's what my book is going to be about, and that is what is occupying me now.
- [43:55]
B
Very good. I'm going to have to ask you more about Water on the Moon, so I will hold that for now. But very best of luck with both the Moon, the Water, and also your book manuscript. But for now, thank you so much, Chris, for taking the time to talk to me about this book.
- [44:16]
A
Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
- [44:18]
B
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