Tibetan Sky
Ning Ken, translated by Thomas Moran
Sinoist Books: 2025
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In Jia Zhangke’s 2018 film, Ash Is Purest White, the female protagonist (played by Zhao Tao) finds herself facing an uncertain future in a world that has moved on. While on a train—a symbol of a nation in transition in many of Jia’s films—she falls into conversation with fellow passengers who talk about job prospects in distant Xinjiang. Watching that scene, I remember thinking that Xinjiang could easily have been Tibet. After all, the two regions offer another roll of the dice for the people of the ‘interior’ who’ve failed to cash in on China’s fast-paced economic lottery.
For more than a century, Tibet has often been seen as a paradise for travellers and seekers hoping to find a cure for their, and the world’s, ills. Ning Ken’s fourth novel, Tibetan Sky, joins a genre of fiction writing on Tibet that began with James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, published in 1933. Since Hilton’s utopian fantasy, which introduced the mystical Shangri-La, Tibet has, in reality, experienced a tumultuous history and now remains firmly under Chinese rule. Instead of the West, it’s now the Chinese who turn their gaze westwards to Tibet for both material and spiritual regeneration. Realising this, Ning has written a novel that’s self-aware, complex, and genre-defying. It tackles a few myths about Tibet, while passing over some uncomfortable truths.
The novel is centred around Wang Mojie, an academic philosopher from Beijing, who travels to Tibet as a volunteer for Teach For China. Living in a village school outside Lhasa, he seeks to rebuild his life in the wake of a failed marriage and suppressed memories of the 1989 massacre around Tiannanmen Square. At the school, he develops an attraction to Ukyi Lhamo, a half-Tibetan, half-Chinese teacher, yet both share an antagonism that’s often sharp and sardonic. As Wang ponders various philosophical abstractions and Ukyi moves through multiple lovers, their unlikely romance slowly builds to a roiling climax.
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- Tags: Issue 43, Jamyang Phuntsok, Ning Ken, Tibet