My Tibetan Childhood : When Ice Shattered Stone - Naktsang Nulo

My Tibetan Childhood

When Ice Shattered Stone

By: Naktsang Nulo

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."

Other Editions and Formats

Hardcover

Published: 5th November 2014

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