PERISCOPE

--Kevin Peraino

BOOKS

Tibetan Truths

In 1958, at the age of 26, Shu Wen went to Tibet "for love"--it was that simple. "My husband was a doctor in the People's Liberation Army. His unit was sent to Tibet. Two months later... he had been lost in action." That is how Shu, a Chinese dermatologist, began to recount the tale of her 36-year odyssey through northern Tibet to Beijing-born journalist Xinran, in 1994. Now Xinran has transformed that story into "Sky Burial," a haunting new book set in a mysterious, unimaginably medieval country. Shu's Tibet is no Shangri-La. It is a land of vast, empty spaces, harsh, cold winds, silence and isolation, and life without medicine or basic amenities. This is not the romanticized country we've imagined through Hollywood films or the spiritual sophistication of the Dalai Lama. Instead, one witnesses the raw life of the nomads who rescued Shu from near death. She lived and traveled with them, loved them and became one of them, before finally unraveling the enigma of her husband's tragic but heroic death along with the mysteries of an ancient ritual--the Tibetan "sky burial."

Then, Shu returned "home" alone, weary, disillusioned and Tibetanized; with China changed beyond recognition during the post-Mao years that she had missed, she found herself more isolated in her own country than in distant Tibet. Xinran's spare prose echoes the austerity of the landscape and the silence of its people, as she reveals Shu's enduring love and a spirituality born of maturity and experience.

--Vibhuti Patel