China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Saving Tibetan culture
Author on mission to preserve folklore, fairy tales for posterity
Hoping to read traditional fairy tales to her 4-yearold daughter, 37-yearold Kelsang Drolma has visited Tibetan neighborhoods in Sichuan, Yunnan, Qinghai, Gansu provinces and the Tibet autonomous region to dig out the long-lost stories.
She selected 45 stories and put them into a small collection called The Himalayan Fairy Tales, which was published at the end of last year.
When visiting older people and local scholars, Kelsang Drolma found that some of the stories were only known to those over the age of 80. People born since the 1950s had seldom heard of them, especially younger parents in their 20s and 30s.
She then realized that it was a race against time to save the folklore and the long tradition of telling stories.
Historically, Tibetans relied on oral methods to pass down their history, culture and understanding of the world. The long paragraphs of verse and eulogy often added to the beauty of epic poems.
But now such traditions are facing challenges as urbanization and the modern way of life inevitably reaches Tibetan neighborhoods. Many of the people have moved to cities and have therefore been separated from their traditional cultural environment.
There was a time when Kelsang Drolma would heartily embrace the modern lifestyle in Beijing and Shanghai and tried to remove the image of being an “outlander”.
However, after her daughter Hima was born, she had to face the challenge of helping her child understand who she is.
She reviewed classic fairy tales from the brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Aesop’s Fables and Arabian Nights, only to find many similarities between the stories they told and the Tibetan tales she had heard in childhood.
Tibetans also tell stories of good defeating evil as well as brave and clever men falling in love with beautiful, kind-hearted women, and children becoming friends with animals and helping each other in times of need.
They appreciated virtues like wisdom, kindness, bravery and harmony between people and nature as well, but the Tibetan stories were embedded in the traditional lifestyle and a way of thinking — a culture and history of their own.
It was that epiphany that made up her mind to revive the tradition.
Romance with nature
For Kelsang Drolma, childhood involves a romantic relationship with nature. While her parents worked in Xining, the provincial capital of Qinghai, she spent most of her early years in a Tibetan town with her grandmother.
On the grassland the children herded sheep, milked cows and made oil from crushed rapeseed flowers.
She liked lying down on the grass, watching clouds float by and looking at the reflections in the stream.
She remembered seeing mirages, sometimes by Qinghai Lake, that looked like what she imagined to be those distant realms in the stories.
And the summer storms, with their dark, brooding clouds, punctuated by piercing lightning and cacophonous thunder made her believe the battles between Tibetan warriors and the ogres were real.
The tradition of being close to nature remains part of Tibetan communities today. Perceiving mountains and waters as sacred — for example deifying them as “gods” in folklore — survives as a sense of ritual and part of the cultural inheritance, resulting in the people being very sensitive to environmental changes.
Differences in geographical conditions, economic development and lifestyle would also be reflected in Tibetan folklore. The Himalayan Fairy Tales presents different versions of some of the stories to illustrate their evolution as they change to reflect the times.
Maybe because the Tibetan pastures didn’t usually enjoy the same resources and economic development as the ethnic group’s farming communities, their legends tend to be more tragic but stirring, and love stories were no exception, being more likely to end with lovers parted by distance or death.
And although some of the stories represent some outdated values of the time when people led a simpler and more limited life, they demonstrate the real life obstacles then, educating and leaving room for discussion about moral and social issues, Kelsang Drolma says.
It’s also worth mentioning that believing in the freedom to love, Tibetan women in the stories actively strive for their own happiness, instead of waiting for a prince, or some other heroic male character, to come and save them.
Whether by firmly standing by their lovers from a different social background, building a self-contained life together despite obstacles from greedy kin, or to resolving grievances for their lovers, Tibetan women have shown extraordinary wisdom and tenacity.
A continuous journey
Kelsang Drolma’s journey to seek out these authentic fairy tales took her to closed countryside communities, such as that of the rural Muli Tibetan autonomous county in Sichuan province. The many ornate Lama temples and rich culture there are not known to many.
She deliberately tried to go beyond her own childhood to collect folklore in diversified Tibetan habitats across China, or to see whether localized versions of the classic legends had been developed.
She took local historical documents as a reference and sometimes turned to well-educated Lamas for help in the hope that they might have access to ancient Tibetan Buddhist scriptures.
One particular advantage she could draw upon during her search was handed down from her father. He used to be a journalist who frequently went to the countryside for interviews and stories. Sometimes he traveled by horse and had to stay with locals in their homes.
On the way, and during the nights, he talked with the locals, observed their life and listened to parents and elderly people read stories to the children.
He would capture the stories on a recorder he brought with him, transcribing some of the anecdotes in his spare time, something that proved to be huge benefit to Kelsang Drolma 30 years later.
While costume traditions have been relatively well kept, traditional songs, folklore and games like Tibetan chess are fading from daily life.
According to Yongdrol Tsongkha, a professor of Tibetan and ethnic studies at Lanzhou University in Gansu province, a group of scholars are working on the academic examination of folk stories and Tibetan folklore anthologies that have been published in various languages, including English.
As inheritance of ethnic languages and folk literature has been facing universal crisis around the world, the professor says that trials of collecting and compiling Tibetan folklore are meaningful and encouraged.
Yongdrol Tsongkha reminds readers to pay special attention to the regional traits and the evolution of folklore to keep up with the times. The professor adds that the stories have suggested a greater level of connection and communication than expected between Tibetan neighborhoods and the Eurasian continent and North Africa region.
Kelsang Drolma works as a reading tutor for Shanghai’s Soong Ching Ling Children Reading Room, a program to support the aesthetic education of underprivileged children.
Her journey to collect Tibetan folklore will continue and the product will adapt to modern circumstances. She’s going to make audio versions to help young readers and their parents, and prepare picture books to raise the awareness of rural Tibetan children on issues such as snow leopard protection and how to tackle school bullying, she says.
She also plans to take her daughter back to the Tibetan neighborhoods every summer. Hopefully, Kelsang Drolma says, Hima is going to be immersed in the life of her hometown for one or two years before going to school.