A GIFT FROM THE PAST
Tsewang Pemba’s posthumous novel set in Tibet tells of a nation first confronted by the modern world in the form of communist China
Tsewang Pemba’s White Crane, Lend Me Your Wings: A Tibetan Tale of Love and War comes as a gift from the past. The late doctor, considered the founding father of Tibetan literature in English, had previously authored two books: his autobiography, Young Days in Tibet (1957), and Idols on the Path (1966), the first Tibetan novel in English.
His posthumous offering, White Crane, Lend Me Your Wings, in fiction on an epic scale and gives the readers a bird’s eye view of Tibet’s tumultuous history, it’s deep spirituality, and acts as a geography lesson on Tibet serving as the Water Tower of Asia. In this novel, Tsewang Pemba has evoked the tribal milieu of Kham, Tibet’s ‘wild east’ with its own sense of family and tribal honour where revenge and banditry were a way of life. Above all, White Crane, Lend Me Your Wings tells the fate of Tibet when it was confronted by the modern world in the form of communist China.
Tibet’s response to this challenge was armed resistance which was scattered, uncoordinated and equipped with antiquated weapons. Sometimes it took the form of “spiritual resistance,” a form of civil disobedience, of monks and monasteries peacefully ignoring the demands of the People’s Liberation Army at great peril to themselves and their monasteries.
In the 1920s, two American missionaries, set up a Lutheran church in Nyakyil, the Middle Nyarong in Kham in eastern Tibet. They stepped in just before the impending face-off between Tibet and resurgent China. They had sailed from San Francisco to spread the gospel on the Roof of the World. In Shanghai, the couple was encouraged by Reverend Frank Parkinson of the Spirit of Bethlemen Lutheran Mission to the Far East to set up a mission in Kham. “As I see it. Tibet is the most religious country in the world. It dominates the spiritual world of Central Asia. A victory for us in Tibet would be Joshua bringing down Jericho. All Central Asia would go Christian. All Buddhist lands and hearts would be the Lord’s,” he said.
Reverend Parkinson hoped the Spirit of Bethlemen, would give John Martin Stevens and his wife Mary the courage to accomplish this enormous undertaking high on the Tibetan Plateau. The reverend made the couple’s missionary work in Tibet sound like an adventure. The couple discovered Kham in the same state of turmoil as nationalist China. The Tibetans were blissfully oblivious of their coming fate at the hands of the communist Chinese. Instead, they were ferociously busy with family and tribal feuds and banditry. In painting a picture of a self-absorbed Tibet unaware of the forces intent on transforming it to what each considered modern and civilised, Tsewang Pemba paints a clear picture of Tibet being easy prey for the opposed forces of Christianity and communism. That Tibet became such an easy prey to communism is the tragedy at the heart of this gripping story, which he tells with a true storyteller’s skill. The reader suspects the author harboured the fond wish that if only the Khampas had abandoned their internecine tribal wars, and united, the Tibetans would have successfully warded off the invasion of communist China. This is reinforced by the repeated boasts of some Khampa characters in the story that in hand-to-hand combat “One Khampa is equal to ten Chinese.”
In the blurb, Tsering Shakya, historian and professor at the University of British Columbia and author of The Dragon in the Land of Snow:A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947, sheds some light on the title. “White Crane, Lend Me Your Wing, a poem by the Sixth Dalai Lama in which he consoles his followers banished by the Manchu in 1720, speaks through the title of Dr TY Pemba’s novel as a wistful plea for the return of the exiled Tibetans to their cherished homeland.” Finally, this treasure was discovered by Shelly Bhoil, a PhD scholar, whose thesis is on Tibetan nationalism in exile through the evolution of Tibetan English fiction. “I live in Brazil but was fortunately in India when the late Dr Pemba’s daughter Lhamo Pemba was travelling to Darjeeling from the US. When she handed me her father’s cherished treasure, the first thing that came to mind was the terma textual tradition of Tibet. I felt I had found an intellectual treasure,” she said. “I felt a sense of responsibility to bring his works to the light of day, and I am glad I could do just that.”