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general interest
My Tibetan Childhood
When Ice Shattered Stone
naktsang nulo
Translation edited and abridged by Angus Cargill
With a Foreword by Ralph Litzinger
and an Introduction by Robert Barnett
Naktsang Nulo (born in 1949) worked as an official
in the Chinese government, serving as a primary
school teacher, police officer, judge, prison governor,
and county leader in Qinghai province, China,
before retiring in 1993. Angus Cargill was formerly
a Lecturer in the Department of Tibetan Language
and Literature at Minzu University of China, Beijing.
Ralph A. Litzinger is the author of Other Chinas:
The Yao and the Politics of National Belonging.
Robert Barnett is the Director of Modern Tibetan
Studies at Columbia University and the author of
Lhasa: Streets with Memories.
“Equipped with a superbly comprehensive introduction,
this absorbing memoir of nomadic life in the 1950s takes
us deep into a Tibetan world neglected by both official
Chinese histories and narratives by Tibetans in exile.
Few books on Tibet have been as revelatory as this
one.”—PANKAJ MISHRA, author of From the Ruins of
Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking
of Asia
In My Tibetan Childhood, Naktsang Nulo
chronicles his life in Tibet’s Amdo region
during the 1950s. Recalling events as he
experienced them at the age of ten, he
describes his upbringing as a nomad on
the grasslands of Tibet’s eastern plateau.
He depicts pilgrimages to monasteries,
including a 1500-mile horseback expedition
his family made to Lhasa. A year or so
later, they attempted to flee by the same
route as troops of the People’s Liberation
Army advanced into their area. Naktsang’s
father was killed in the fighting that
ensued, part of a little-known wave of
unrest that took place throughout Amdo
in 1958, as Tibetans rose up against the imposition of social and religious
reforms by the Chinese forces. During the next year, the author and his brother
were imprisoned in a camp where, after the onset of famine, very few children
survived.
The narrative reveals, through the eyes of a child, the lived experience of the
forced and violent incorporation of the Tibetan heartlands into the People’s
Republic by Chinese troops in the 1950s. The author’s matter-of-fact accounts
cast the atrocities that he relays in stark relief. Remarkably, Naktsang lived
to tell his tale. His book was published in 2007 in China, where tens of
thousands of unofficial copies are believed to have circulated. It is one of
the most reprinted works in modern Tibetan literature. This translation offers
rare insight into a fascinating, painful period of modern Tibetan history.
“With little comment or condemnation, [My Tibetan Childhood] records the price paid
in lives and lifestyles by the author’s family and community for their incorporation into
modern China. . . . In many senses, it is a naive story, the chronicle of a world seen through
a child’s eyes. But to readers within Tibet, it was a revelation. It told of epochal events
that had rarely if ever been described before in print.”—ROBERT BARNETT, from the
introduction
2
TIBET/MEMOIR
November 356 pages, 30 illustrations paper, 978–0–8223–5726–1, $24.95tr/£15.99 cloth, 978–0–8223–5712–4, $89.95/£59.00