Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story Of Tibet
Ratings3
Average rating4.2
15
Ratings3
Average rating4.2
It was 1994 when Xinran, a journalist and the author of The Good Women of China, received a telephone call asking her to travel four hours to meet an oddly dressed woman who had just crossed the border from Tibet into China. Xinran made the trip and met the woman, called Shu Wen, who recounted the story of her thirty-year odyssey in the vast landscape of Tibet.
Shu Wen and her husband had been married for only a few months in the 1950s when he joined the Chinese army and was sent to Tibet for the purpose of unification of the two countries. Shortly after he left she was notified that he had been killed, although no details were given. Determined to find the truth, Shu Wen joined a militia unit going to the Tibetan north, where she soon was separated from the regiment. Without supplies and knowledge of the language, she wandered, trying to find her way until, on the brink of death, she was rescued by a family of nomads under whose protection she moved from place to place with the seasons and eventually came to discover the details of her husband's death.
In the haunting Sky Burial, Xinran has recreated Shu Wen's journey, writing beautifully and simply of the silence and the emptiness in which Shu Wen was enveloped. The book is an extraordinary portrait of a woman and a land, each at the mercy of fate and politics. It is an unforgettable, ultimately uplifting tale of love, loss, loyalty, and survival.
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Contains spoilers
"Snowy mountain, why do you not weep? Is your heart too cold?
Snowy mountain, why do you weep? Is your heart too sore?"
This was a really moving tale about a woman who spends thirty years(!!!) in Tibet looking for her husband she had been married to for less than a month after he went missing during his time in the military. Everyone told her he was presumed dead, but she refused to believe them and went to go find him for herself. If that’s not dedication, I’m not sure what is.
I’ve come to realize during the many translated books I’ve read that translations come in two varieties: ones that attempt to capture not just the individual words but also the feeling of the phrases that may not carry over, and ones that take the shortest route between two points and just translate the words without regard for emotional impact. This book falls into the latter category, with everything feeling dry, emotionless, and clinical, which made it a struggle to get through despite its short length. I didn’t get a huge sense about what sort of person Wen was beyond her loyalty to her husband because of the emotionless writing (translating?), which was a bit of a letdown in something billed as a love story.
Which is another thing: there’s very little person-to-person love in this love story. While their marriage is the driving factor for Wen being in Tibet in the first place, it’s actually not brought up all that much. We get a staggering amount of really interesting information about Tibet, but this is more of a travelogue than a quest to be reunited with her husband (ending spoiler alert: they don’t get reunited anyway, and if you're aware of what a Sky Burial is before reading this, you'll probably have guessed that).
Another point I should mention is that while this is billed as a memoir/nonfiction story, the copyright page labels this as historical fiction, which I think is closer to the truth. A lot of fantastical things happens to Wen, and it’s hard for me to believe all of it was true.
A quick read, and one I learned a lot about Tibet from, but kind of a thin/weak story overall.
