The Tibetan Uncanny: The Short Stories of Pema Tseden and Takbum Gyal

• In Event: Modern Chinese Culture and the Uncanny: The Unknown as Critique of Enlightenment

Abstract

This paper studies Tibetan writers Pema Tseden (པད་མ་ཚེ་བརྟན་万玛才旦) and Takbum Gyal (སྟག་འབུམ་རྒྱལ་ 德本加) within the historical, social and literary contexts of Qinghai/Amdo, a multi-ethnic province shared by Tibetans, Muslims and Han Chinese, and a multi-lingual environment boasting the largest number of bilingual writers and translators between Tibetan and Chinese today. Considered among the best writers by Tibetophone readers, both Pema and Takbum write tales that turn everyday life into a familiar-strange world infused with unresolved mysteries and unknown supernatural forces. Coming of age in the 1980s, both writers were influenced by the magical realism of the Sinophone Tibetan writer Tashi Dawa and the modernism of the Tibetophone poet Dhondup Gyal (1953–1985), who taught both writers at the Minzu Teachers’ College in Chabcha, Qinghai. But more importantly, both receive inspiration from the Buddhist tradition of story-telling, particularly the story cycle of The Bewitched Corpse (རོ་སྒྲུང་, translated by Pema Tseden into Chinese as A Story that Never Ends 说不完的故事). By close-reading Pema and Takbum’s Sinophone and Tibetophone writings in the context of their literary heritage and the cultural and social ecology of Amdo/Qinghai, I argue that the uncanny in their stories offers valuable insights into the writers’ critical reflections on and struggles with multiple dichotomies particularly emphasized and politicized in the modern times: tradition vs. modernity, sacred vs. secular, self vs. other, Chinese vs. Tibetan.

Ying Qian is a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian National University. She is interested in a wide range of topics in Chinese literature, cinema and media studies, including documentary cinema in comparative perspectives, experience and memory of China’s revolutions and socialism, and writing, translation and filmmaking in China’s multi-lingual and multi-ethnic border regions and among the Chinese diaspora. She will be joining Columbia University in July 2015.

Author

• Ying Qian, Columbia University