My Tibetan Childhood : When Ice Shattered Stone - Naktsang Nulo

My Tibetan Childhood

When Ice Shattered Stone

By: Naktsang Nulo, Sonam Lhamo (Translator), Angus Cargill (Translator)

Paperback | 5 November 2014

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In My Tibetan Chldhood, Naktsang Nulo recalls his life in Tibet's Amdo region during the 1950s. From the perspective of himself at age ten, he describes his upbringing as a nomad on Tibet's eastern plateau. He depicts pilgrimages to monasteries, including a 1500-mile horseback expedition his family made to and from Lhasa. A year or so later, they attempted that same journey as they fled from advancing Chinese troops. Naktsang's father joined and was killed in the little-known 1958 Amdo rebellion against the Chinese People's Liberation Army, the armed branch of the Chinese Communist Party. During the next year, the author and his brother were imprisoned in a camp where, after the onset of famine, very few children survived.

The real significance of this episodic narrative is the way it shows, through the eyes of a child, the suppressed histories of China's invasion of Tibet. The author's matter-of-fact accounts cast the atrocities that he relays in stark relief. Remarkably, Naktsang lived to tell his tale. His book was published in 2007 in China, where it was a bestseller before the Chinese government banned it in 2010. It is the most reprinted modern Tibetan literary work. This translation makes a fascinating if painful period of modern Tibetan history accessible in English.

Industry Reviews
"With little comment or condemnation, [My Tibetan Childhood] records the price paid in lives and lifestyles by the author's family and community for their incorporation into modern China... In many senses, it is a naive story, the chronicle of a world seen through a child's eyes. But to readers within Tibet, it was a revelation. It told of epochal events that had rarely if ever been described before in print." "As Naktsang tells it, the 1950s were a time of tremendous change: violence, war, exile, survival, and life and death defined so much of the everyday in Amdo and indeed across much of the Tibetan plateau. Told from the perspective of a child, his tale takes us into the complex and at times violent world of Tibetan clans and chiefs. We travel with him and experience the dangers faced on the road: bandits, soldiers, ferocious storms and cold fronts, and hungry wolves... [And we] learn much of the violence that accompanied the 'peaceful liberation' of Amdo and the subsequent 'reforms' in the late 1950s." "Equipped with a superbly comprehensive introduction, this absorbing memoir of nomadic life in the 1950s takes us deep into a Tibetan world neglected by both official Chinese histories and narratives by Tibetans in exile. Few books on Tibet have been as revelatory as this one."

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Hardcover

Published: 5th November 2014

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