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10 of 11 humans found the following review helpful.
A Must-Read Narrative of Tibetan Refugee Women
By Tracy Marks
"When the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the Tibetan humans will be scattered like ants all over the face of the earth, and Buddhist teachings will reach the land of the red man." This 1200 year old forecasting was proven unfeigned in 1950 when the Chinese overran Tibet, in the end killing over 1.5 million Tibetans and destructing most of Tibet's sacred monasteries.
ACROSS MANY MOUNTAINS is a extremely pleasing biography and inspiring testimony to the lives of Tibetan refugees. Initially, it introduces us to Kungsang Wangmo, a Tibetan nun in the Nyingma Buddhist tradition, who contrary to tradition, marries a Tibetan monk. With her young daughters, Kungsang escapes from the Chinese, crossing the high, frozen Himalayas on foot at night, in search of sanctuary in India. There, in a refugee camp, she raises Sonam, who later gives birth to Yangzom Brauen, the author, of this eloquent narrative of three generations of Tibetans.
This biography reads like a novel, yet is rich in the bright details of Tibetan culture, the Chinese occupation, refugee life, and resettlement in the West. Seamlessly, Brauen interweaves history and culture with her plot and demonstration of characters.
We learn of life in pre-occupation Tibet - an insulated, illiterate, hierarchical society, missing out innovative means of transportation, but where the people were united by unshakable faith in Buddhism and devotion to Buddhist ideals. We experience Kungsang's life as a Tibetan nun - involving 100,000 prostrations, 100,000 recitations of a mantra, and 100,000 offerings of the universe mandala - and likewise her strange courtship by the Tibetan monk she at last marries.
We witness the original years of Chinese occupation - destruction, sacrilege, violence, killing, and propaganda: "One after another the soldiers led them [the villagers] up onto the podium and ordered them to exercise 'self-criticism'. They were supposed to tell their life stories, describing the conventional Tibetan ways as feudal and backwards, and praising everything Chinese as correct, progressive, and promising a bright future."
We travel with Kungsang and her young daughters on foot all over the Himalayas, and live with them in a refugee camp, where they battle illness, living under open tarpaulin shelters in monsoon season and enduring backbreaking work. But there they also re-unite with friends from the past, and revered Tibetan lamas.
Author Yangzom Brauen is skilled in weaving the texture of Tibetan culture into her narrative - the exercise of kora (walking around a sacred place absorbed in prayer), the chod ritual of "cutting through the ego," sky burial rites, healing exercises ("Carry our child four times around the holy lake Basum Tso and she will recover"), the eating of barley-based tsampa, the celebration of the Tibetan New Year (Losar), and commitment to building "good karma" through selfless action.
In the second half of the narrative, when Sonam marries a devoted Swiss student of Tibetan culture, we experience with her the difficult adaptation to an altogether new lifestyle, for in Switzerland people eat with utensils, buy processed food, wash frequently, and show little respect for the dignity of the dying. Each of the three women will have to find her own remainder amid her Tibetan inheritance and western life. Finally, the author tells her own story - as a Swiss-American who becomes an actress and an activist in the Free Tibet movement, and who honors the lives of her mother and grandmother by writing this book.
ACROSS MANY MOUNTAINS is a treasure, a must-read because of it is portrayal of Tibetan female refugees and Tibetan culture in the wake of Chinese occupation, and because of the literary achievements with which Yangzom Braun narrates the lives of her family. I give it my most eminent recommendations.
6 of 7 humans found the following review helpful.
A Family's Escape from Tibet
By Joan A. Adamak
"A Tibetan Family's Epic Journey from Oppression to Freedom"
"And that's why I have written this book: to prevent the culture, traditions, and unfeigned story of Tibet from being forgotten," so says Yangzom Brauen, author of this story and granddaughter of Tibetan ninety-one year old Buddhist Nun, Kunsang, and Sonam, Yangzom's Tibetan Mother. The unfeigned heroine of this story is Kunsang, when she and her monk husband, Tserling, fled Tibet in front of Chinese soldiers in 1959 when the Dalai Lama likewise escaped. Although the Chinese had invaded and taken over Tibet in 1950, they never held the terms of the peace treaty and started out systematically arresting, torturing and imprisoning Tibetan Buddhist monks, nuns and aristocrats.
Thus begun Kunsang's fifty-one year exile from her home as her family climbed in freezing winter cold over the Himalaya Mountains with Kunsang carrying their four year-old daughter on her back like a rucksack, along with few personal effects. Their six-year old daughter, Sonam wearing thin leather shoes with leather sole stuffed with hay to keep her feet from freezing, was struggling in the rear, slipping and falling until her feet were numb with pain inside of ice-caked shoes. Kunsang freed Sonam's bare feet from the frozen shoes and kept them to her bare breast to warm them. Tserling carried the rest of their few personal effects. They climbed for days in the frozen heights of the Himalayas with exceedingly little to eat, no shelter and no water. Many other Tibetans never pulled through this same trek.
Kunsang does not recognise her birth date for sure as in Tibet they are unimportant and there were no identity documents in old Tibet nor registry offices. Children were not born in hospitals... there were none in the entire country. It was said that each fifth man in Tibet at that time was a monk living in a monastery or hermitage. Old Tibet had approximately five million inhabitants, half of them men, meaning some half million monks. The number of nuns were much littler In almost each Tibetan town was a monastery or nunnery, a great deal of having two or three occupants, galore assorted thousand. Monks were in charge of all monastery estates, goods and workers, the finances, accumulated taxes, practiced and taught classical Tibetan medicine, astrology and copied religious texts. There were very few schools except private ones remunerated for by the rich. Most Tibetans were illiterate.
The author does an magnificent occupation in describing the culture of the Tibetans, including Buddhism, the monks and the nuns, the aristocrats and the very poor, which were the majority. Men considered women as much less, including the monks over the nuns, and the aristocrats viewed the poor as not one thing other than to serve and bow down to them. This is the primary book this author has read that stated there was a class cognizance in old Tibet outside of the monasteries. Kunsang was a Nyingma Buddhist, which permitted cohabition. Although she was not so inclined, she met the young Nyingma Buddhist monk, Tserling, and he took up with her. They had four children, of which only Sonoma survived. No one lived to be old in Tibet and the death rate among children was exceedingly high. There was no medicine nor doctors and if there was an illness, a monk was given a gift to pray for healing and it was up to the deities if one lived or died. If one passed from physical life and the monk received a gift, he gave one a sky burial. Otherwise the deceased was laid in a ditch, covered with rocks and forty-nine days later when the body was dried out, it was cremated.
Although it took months, ultimately Kunsang and Tserling with Sonoma made it into India, where they were not treated well as India was being overrun with escaping Tibetans seeking the Dalai Lama, whom they felt would protect them. Some European countries set up workhouses or schools or a lot of facilities in India for them, but oversight was lax and conditions were bad. One of the troubles for the Tibetans was that they did not bathe often, never all of their bodies at once, and never bared their bodies wholly in front of others. Thus, they smelled and they had no psychological result of perception learning and reasoning of indoor plumbing, hot water, or any modern conveniences. Nor did they speak anything other than Tibetan, with few translators to aid the situation. Consequently, if they could not adjust, they could not get anything but the most menial labor, including breaking rocks for roadbeds, which both Kunsang and Sonoma did. Eventually Tserling's health broke and for years he was ill and Kunsang worked harder for little or not one thing to survive. Sonoma likewise begun working when she was twelve underneath the same conditions.
Kunsang and her family and all Tibetans suffered terribly in the lower lands of India where it was so hot and humid, which made Tserling's health worse and where so a lot of Tibetans were firstborn moved. Later Kunsang was competent to move her family into northeastern India in the much cooler mountains. Eventually underneath exceedingly stressful conditions, Tserling passed from physical life and life became a little posing no difficulty for Kunsang. She was capable to get better paying work, including Sonoma working near her. Eventually Sonoma was sponsored by an English woman to attend a private school, but she could not speak English, let alone read it, so she was always at the bottom of her class and ignored by the other students. As Sonoma matured, she started out to attract suitors, which frustrated her for in her world, there was only her mother and her.
Eventually Kunsang and Sonoma worked for a Swiss group in India and a young Swiss man, Martin Brauen, became attracted to Sonoma, and though he didn't speak Tibetan, he made friends with Kunsang and asked to court Sonoma. Kunsang had to get permission from her own personal monk adviser and through a good deal of tryouts and tribulations, Sonoma and Martin in the end were capable to marry and he moved both women to Switzerland, where the Swiss had already taken in one thousand Tibetan immigrants. The only thing that the Tibetans and the Swiss had in mutual was the weather and high Alps.
The author, the daughter of Martin and Sonoma, of course, is a well-educated, professional, progressed young woman, has visited Tibet and is now an activist in encouraging globally that China leave Tibet. She pursues this along peaceful lines as the Dalai Lama has requested of her and all others with this purpose.
This book reads like an anthropology because the author is exhaustively describing all distinct features of Buddhism, the living conditions and hardships of the Tibetan people, both before and beneath Communist rule, doing so through describing Kunsang's life. I commend this book to all readers who like anthropology with a humane touch.
3 of 3 persons found the following review helpful.
Tibet from the inside out
By Evelyn Uyemura
I loved this book! I have long been fascinated with Tibet, as so a great deal of others have, and this book gave such an intimate picture of the life of one Tibetan woman, her daughter who scarcely remembers Tibet, and her granddaughter, who was born and grew up in Switzerland.
The granddaughter does a superb occupation of telling the story of her grandmother's childhood, in "old" Tibet, when things continued as the seemingly had been forever. Despite the fact that she is relying on oral history as well as a heap of exploration of her own, and the fact that the story has gone from Tibetan to German to English, it lives and breathes. Mola (grandma) chooses to become a nun, and spends her early years meditating and chanting. Then unexpectedly, she meets a monk and they choose to marry, even though marriage is not part of the normal path for a monk and nun in their version of Tibetan Buddhism. And yet she strives to carry on on her spiritual path as a nun.
When the Chinese invade in power and the Dalai Lama escapes from the country, the family, along with their young daughter (the author's mother) find themselves forced to flee on foot over the Himalayas. It is a story that has been told a heap of times over, and yet this telling, a family story that has been told over and over, brings the fear and the loss vividly to life. The miserable condition of Tibetans after their escape to "freedom" is likewise described in outstanding detail.
Amala (mother) grows up in a Tibetan community in exile, uneducated, hungry, over-worked, and then out of nowhere, a man from Switzerland, a wealthy young man with an interest in Buddhism, falls in love with her. The story of their kinship is an awful one, again told as only one who grew up hearing this story could tell it.
Finally, the author's own life as a half-Tibetan living in Switzerland is also told frankly and with outstanding sensitivity. Her sense of herself as a European, and yet as a Tibetan, is rather clear. She becomes involved in pro-Tibetan independence actions (and she expended a summer in a remote portion of Tibet when only a child, so her origins are reinforced by this.)
One of the things I most cherished in regards to this book is how balanced and even-handed it is. Yes, the Chinese were brutal in their destruction of Tibetan culture. But they likewise attacked their own culture with almost as much brutality. The Cultural Revolution was brutal for everyone involved. And while her grandmother was perfectly accepting of the inequality in established culture, both her daughter and granddaughter are well conscious of the fact that the aristocrats did in fact exploit and oppress the mutual people, and even continued to do so in exile. Even in the nunnery she lived in, grandmother saw that a woman from a rich family got far dissimilar accommodations and treatment than a woman from a poor family.
If you are fascinated in Tibet, read this book. The author's voice is so calm, so precise, so unsparing. A masterful book in each way.
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