‘I wonder if you’ve considered any books from Tibet so far,’ Chris Peacock wrote in a comment on this blog a few weeks back. ‘In recent years, there have been an increasing number of translations from so-called “minority” peoples and languages in China such as Uyghur, Mongolian, and Tibetan. Still a small number, relatively speaking, but there are some really significant books out there. My translation of the novel The Red Wind Howls came out this year, by Tsering Döndrup, one of the most prominent authors in contemporary Tibet. He’s a wonderful writer, and very worth your time.’
I love getting recommendations like this. Although I often feel guilty about how few of them I am able to follow up, it is one of the great privileges of this project that experts and booklovers all over the world share details of intriguing stories that would never otherwise come to my notice.
Peacock’s suggestion arrived at a fortuitous moment. I have long been meaning to seek out some Tibetan literature, having become increasingly intrigued by stories from minority communities in mainland China since featuring Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, the extraordinary memoir by exiled Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua L. Freeman. In addition, I’d been really intrigued by the novel Tibetan Sky by Ning Ken, translated by Thomas Moran, another recent Book of the month. If a depiction of the region by a Beijing-based Sinophone writer could capture my imagination so powerfully, how might a narrative by a native Tibetan compare?
When my copy arrived, I was shocked to learn from Peacock’s introduction of the toll the sharing of the novel has taken on its author since he self-published it in 2006. The authorities seized all his copies on the pretext the book did not have an ISBN and, after a Chinese translation was released in Hong Kong in 2012, Tsering Döndrup had his party membership revoked, his passport confiscated and his salary and pension reduced through demotion. What was it about this story that made its author face such punishment?
The Red Wind Howls is broken into two parts. The first focuses on the experiences of Alak Drong, a lapsed lama who is sent with many compatriots to be turned into a ‘labour machine’ as part of the atrocities that followed the 1958 uprising and during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, ‘a time turned upside down’ that saw widespread famine, tens of thousands of Tibetans killed and many villages reduced to women, children and the elderly. Part two centres on Lozang Gyatso and Tashi Lhamo, another former lama (although one who adheres to his vows) and a young woman who enters into a sham marriage with him for her protection.
The first thing that struck me was the voice. I suppose because of its importance, bravery and the weightiness of the subject matter, I had expected the novel to feel rather dense. It would be a necessary rather than an enjoyable experience, I anticipated – one of those books that I felt pleased to have read rather than savouring in the moment. Instead, what greeted me (and credit is due to Peacock too here) was a fresh, irreverent, surprising narrative that dodged between registers, often undercutting high-flown rhetoric with earthy retorts.
There is a wonderful directness to the writing that allows Tsering Döndrup to take readers to the heart of his characters’ problems in a handful of words. ‘Trying to cultivate the land at more than eleven thousand feet above sea level brought about as much benefit and did about as much damage as trying to graze your cattle in the ocean,’ he writes, succinctly demonstrating the lunacy of the centralised agricultural policies that ravaged his homeland. Elsewhere, in order to convey the full force of the horror that engulfed Alak Drong and his peers when they were transported to labour in a forest hundreds of miles from home, he writes: ‘For a free person, a forest might be a nice vacation spot, somewhere to get away from it all. But for someone deprived of their freedom it’s the very opposite: it feels like a prison cell.’ A deep humaneness underpins the writing, extending not only to the characters and the wronged people for whom they stand but also to the reader and how they might struggle to get to grips with this story.
Structurally, the book feels unusual, at least to an anglophone reader like me. There are no chapters – a deliberate choice, as the author makes clear when he tells us, midway through, that ‘If this novel were divided into chapters, then this would be the chapter about the Eight Cold Hells.’ The narrative is far from linear, swooping between current events, memories, the future, other life incarnations and flashbacks. Some aspects of this seemed familiar to me – I explored a similar approach (without the layering of reincarnation) with the traumatised character of Jonah in my second novel, Crossing Over, in an effort to reflect the way that deep suffering disorganises events and throws a person out of time.
With The Red Wind Howls this initially discombobulating approach ultimately had the effect of making the reading experience easier: it absolved me of the need to try to grip onto dates and places, struggling to keep straight the details of this unfamiliar history. Instead, I could give myself over to the immediacy of the experiences described without trying to fit them into a larger pattern or make sense of them – indeed, as Tsering Döndrup shows us, there is no making sense of what Tibet endured during this period.
Yet there are some sharp psychological insights to be gleaned from it. Tsering Döndrup’s satirical eye comes to the fore in skewering both the hypocrisy of many of the religious figures, who readily betray their followers for their own benefit, and the perpetual revisionism of the authority figures, who are forever rewriting history in order to make failures either a success or the fault of those who suffer the most from them. Heartrendingly, he shows us what becomes of people when all is stripped away and how easily any of us might give up our principles in the face of persecution.
But this is not a polemic or a morality tale. Tsering Döndrup is a highly nuanced writer and though there are elements of satire in this book, there is none of the black-and-white thinking that often flattens issue-led novels. No-one is entirely innocent in the way things unfold and Tsering Döndrup resists apportioning blame along purely ethnic lines. The world of his novel is messier and more troubling than that.
Nor is this a world devoid of hope. It is there in the deeds of the anonymous well-wisher who annually slaughters a sleep tethered outside Lozang Gyatso’s tent so that he can survive without breaking his vows. It is in the awkward love that grows between him and Tashi Lhamo. And it is in the secret cache of sacred texts stored in a secluded cave in the hope of better times, texts that ultimately transform Tashi Lhamo’s life.
It is perhaps particularly cruel that a story that places its hope in books should have caused its author so much suffering. To date, although Tsering Döndrup’s other works are available in Tibetan, The Red Wind Howls remains off-limits in his native language. By bringing it into English, Christopher Peacock has allowed this powerful voice to speak to the world’s largest cohort of readers (when you count second-language speakers). Thanks, Chris, for bringing it to my attention.
The Red Wind Howls by Tsering Döndrup, translated from the Tibetan by Christopher Peacock (Columbia University Press, 2025)