Customer Reviews

Sky Burial

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Sky Burial is a novel that transcends the centuries, as a young Chinese wife, Shu Wen, a physician, joins the army in search of her husband, Kejun, reportedly killed in Tibet. A doctor as well, Kejun volunteered to aid to the Chinese soldiers, fighting for dominance of Tibet. Unlike the other soldiers killed in action, there is no information as to cause of death, no acclaim for the fallen man as a hero. His bride refuses to believe Kejun has perished, traveling the same route her husband took. Shu Wen has no idea at the start of the journey that she will spend the next thirty years looking for traces of her love.

In 1958, when Shu Wen joins the army to follow Kejun, China is recovering from decades of civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists and Mao is rebuilding the motherland. The Communists have had control of the country since 1949, nurturing patriotic extremism; loved ones are often separated in service of the country. Shu Wen starts out with a contingent of soldiers and eventually they come across a stranded woman, Zhuoma, a Tibetan who will prove a trusted friend and guide for a young woman far from home and family, a bride who does not speak the language.

Zhuoma has her own fascinating familial tale, which she relates to her new friend, as the two set out in the direction Kejun traveled. The women are beset by a number of trials, separated from the soldiers during a skirmish, rescued by a nomadic Tibetan family who take them in, caring for Shu Wen as she recovers her strength. It is through this family that Shu Wen learns the patterns of Tibetan life, the spiritual nature of their days and the rituals that have accommodated their needs for generations. Far from the world she has known, it is possible to exist in this rarified state of prayerful existence, lost in the centuries-old daily routines. One of Tibet's most profound religious ceremonies, the Sky Burial "manifests the harmony between heaven and earth, nature and man". This ritual reflects the Tibetan philosophy concerning the connectedness of all things, the natural flow, the great design of the spiritual universe. While Shu Wen is absorbing these time-honored traditions, her country is changing from one decade to another, rendering the China of her memory virtually unrecognizable.

Shu Wen's odyssey is related by a journalist who learns the story firsthand in an interview; soon after, the woman disappears once again into history. In thirty years of wandering, dear friends are lost and found and a human spirit awakened, as a woman continues her quest with incredible tenacity, the love of her mate filling the pages of this book with transcendent moments and indelible images. Time falls away, days reduced to the most essential elements, families immersed in Tibetan culture and religious ceremony, spending their every waking moment in prayer. Sky Burial is a poignant testimony to the power of love, commitment and spiritual awareness. Luan Gaines/2005.

'Sky Burial' is an astounding and remarkable tale and follows hot on the heels of Xinran's first book 'The Good Women of China'. It is a story of love, adventure, loss, friendship, and belonging. It is a true emotional roller-coaster which will, I daresay, not fail to have a profound effect upon most readers.

Xinran wrote 'Sky Burial' after a two-day-long conversation with the subject of the story, Shu Wen. Wen left her home town of Suzhou, in the east of China, for Tibet in the mid-1950s in order to discover what had happened to her husband, Kejun, who had been sent there as a doctor in the People's Liberation Army. Wen travels to this vast, distant land as a brave but somewhat naive twenty-six year old Han Chinese woman and returns some three decades later a profoundly different person, having been transformed by time and circumstances into a Tibetan Buddhist nomad.

It is unsurprising, having read this book, that Xinran felt an intense desire to tell the world Shu Wen's story. Indeed, Shu Wen's story has, according to Xinran, been one of the three greatest lessons of her life. It will no doubt inspire many other readers with what one may interpet as its main message: that one should never lose hope.

The book is also interesting on a number of other levels. Firstly, it is a lesson on cultural exchange; what happens when is thrown into a culture completely alien to their own. The first section of the book explores how acts and beliefs which at first appear barbaric to Shu Wen come to make sense with the passage of time and when explained in their proper cultural context. Secondly, the story is interesting for the insight it provides into the life of Tibetan nomads in particular and Tibetan culture in general. Thirdly, the book sheds a different light on life in the People's Republic of China over the last thirty years in comparison with the works of other authors such as Jung Chang and Ma Jian.

'Sky Burial' is a stunning read, both for those with a deep-seated interest in Chinese and Tibetan culture and also for those who are inspired by tales of extraordinary compassion and humanity.

Xinran's story tells about the life of a Chinese medical student, Shu Wen, and her one and only love, Kejun. Spanning a thirty year period, Shu Wen experiences what true love really is; travels and lives amongst a unique and different culture; and then returns to an unfamiliar world.
Xinran's "Sky Burial" is an interesting, enjoyable, learning experience. It's a quick read that will hold your attention from start to finish. Wait for a cold and rainy afternoon, sink into an overstuffed chair, and endulge yourself in a love story like no other.

A friend of mine whom I lovingly refer to as the Uberlibrarian once recommended a book to me that I thought was a total stinker. So when she began to rave about Sky Burial, I was skeptical. After all, the last book she was very enthusiastic about was The Smoke Jumper--which was the aforementioned stinker. Could she be trusted again?

Oh, yes. This is a very slender volume of a woman's search for her husband who was reported dead by the Chinese government shortly after their marriage. As they were both doctors, the woman left her home and volunteered her service to the Chinese army, traveling to Tibet in search of her love, hoping he was not dead. Abandoning the army (in a hopeless situation of invasion and occupation), she was adopted by a Tibetean family, changed her way of life and along the way found the truth about his remarkable fate, so much more than the Chinese government had even known. Her journey--which took nearly three decades--is not to be missed. It is a great story written by a female journalist who met this amazing woman and took her story down over the course of two days.

Might I add: this is a fantastic book if you are traveling. It is slender and can be read in full on a cross-country flight. You will be so engrossed you probably won't notice when they ask you for coffee or tea or peanuts or whatever.

Xinran is a Chinese journalist who became famous as the host of "Words on the Night Breeze," a call in radio show where for the first time Chinese women could reveal the painful details of their lives anonymously. In our tell-all culture, it's hard to appreciate how revolutionary this was, but the show gave Xinran broad access to women of all ages, classes and professions. In this story, Xinran tells the tale of Shu Wen, a young bride who travels to Tibet to find her husband who was a doctor with the Chinese Army. Xinran doesn't pretty-up the details of the long journey, the bleak landscape, or the harshness of Tibetan life, as she is separated from the army and ends up deep in the wilderness of the Tibetan plateau. For years she lived with a Tibetan family, watching the seasons turn as the herders move from low winter pastures to high mountain meadows, the men avoiding all society to escape the turmoil of China in the second half of the 20c. There are vague hints that the Tibetans weren't oblivious, but cannily hiding themselves in the vastness of Tibet. Shu Wen eventually finds what she was looking for in a series of improbable events that could have happened? Hard to tell.

This book is beautifully written, simple and mysterious at the same time. Yes, the world passes these people by, but they deliberately lost themselves to the world, and inhabited what was almost another reality. Are there still people like this in Tibet? I wish I knew, and I hope that someday we'll all learn the true end of the story.

Readers seeking a romantic story in an ethereal, almost other-worldly setting will likely find much to please in Xinran's first novel, SKY BURIAL, accurately subtitled An Epic Love Story of Tibet. Her story is an engaging one, fluidly told and full of insurmountable obstacles and enormous personal sacrifices for the sake of "true love." While her characters are not deep and tend toward one-dimensionality, readers will nevertheless identify and empathize with their stories.

A former radio talk show host and writer about women's issues in China, Xinran presents an idealized Tibet through a woman's eyes via a romance tale that is often more quest than love story. She relates the purportedly true story of a woman named Shu Wen, a native of the artistically refined city of Suzhou in eastern China. Shu Wen meets her beau, Kejun, while studying in medical school. They fall in love and marry, but in late 1957, just three weeks after their wedding, Kejun is called up for military service in Tibet. When Shu Wen receives a letter just one hundred days later informing her of her husband's death in "an incident" in Tibet, she joins the army herself as a doctor so she can travel to Tibet looking for Kejun, whom she is sure must still be alive.

Over the course of years, Shu Wen saves a Tibetan woman named Zhouma who turns out to be the daughter from a wealthy family and lives with a nomadic herding family for decades. Zhouma in turn becomes engaged in an idyllic quest for her lost love, her family's former groom to whom she gave the too conveniently symbolic name Tiananmen. Meanwhile, Shu Wen becomes a virtual Tibetan herself, enabling her to "miss out" on Mao's Great Famine and Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, Deng Xiaoping's opening to the West, and the late 20th Century industrialization of China. When she finally learns the truth about her husband's disappearance, she discovers not only the strength of his love but his transcendent nobility as a major, albeit unknown, actor in the China/Tibet drama. Kejun's actions center on the ancient Tibetan practice of sky burial, in which the deceased's body is ritually dismembered, the bones crushed, and everything fed to vultures. The deceased are thus returned to Nature for their next reincarnation, much like cremation but far richer in imagery.

Tibet holds a peculiar place in American culture as an Edenic haven of inscrutable Buddhism, a combination mile-high Shangri-la and stage set for Hollywood activists and the over-hyped Dalai Lama. Movies and stories about Tibet invariably promote romantic notions over harsh realities, and SKY BURIAL regrettably follows this pattern all too often. The end result, while engaging and enlightening, treads so far into the realms of pure romance and Rousseau's (and Gaugin's) notions of the noble savage as to deflate the author's exposition of both Tibet and its long, conflicted history with mainland China. Xinran gives us slices of Tibetan life that are harsh but sanitized, with Chinese soldiers who are decent folk whose altruistic, civilizing motives are simply misunderstood by the unruly Tibetans. Her main characters - rich princesses and their grooms, Platonic husbands and wives, poor but noble nomads, self-effacing monks and holy men - fit our fairy tale images but shed pallid light on the reality. Having Shu Wen live in the Tibetan wilds for thirty years serves conveniently to let the author circumvent the messy, real world complications of China's political history from the 1960's through the 1980's. Even the ending, where Shu Wen returns home to an utterly unrecognizable Suzhou, glides over decades of dramatic changes and does little more than call to mind, rather tritely, Thomas Wolfe's renowned title, YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN.

SKY BURIAL is an easy, entertaining read and a worthy romance novel, but little more, along the lines of the movies SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET and THE STORY OF THE WEEPING CAMEL. Regretably, the author's avoidance of the harsh realities of Tibetan life and Chinese rule lend the book an air of unreality that makes it less an introduction to present-day Tibet than it might have been. For this fairy tale version, a shorn Fabio dressed as a Buddhist monk would have been an appropriate cover.

This is a VERY romantic story of a Chinese Evangeline, separated from her youthful love by war and politics.

Wen and Kejun are full of optimism for the new China which not only trains them in medicine, but also allows them to marry for love. Shortly after the marriage, Kejun is sent to Tibet, and shortly after that Wen receives word that he is dead. The "word" is less than official, and Wen, deeply in love, makes the perilous journey to Tibet to find him alive as she believes he must be.

Romance, in the larger sense of the word, is embodied in the army she travels with (she is an army doctor). They believe they will bring Chinese arts, sciences, medicine to the poor and needy people of Tibet. The army's romantic ideals are abruptly halted by an attack by Tibetans who don't see their visit in the same way. Wen and a Tibetan woman she has befriended are separated from the convoy. They are found and taken care of by a kindly and poor Tibetan family. After many years and a long and arduous search, the two friends find respective pieces of their youthful romances.

While I was enchanted by the beautiful story, descriptions of Tibet and its people, like many fairy tales, what is left out is haunting. The attack that separates Wen and Zhouma from the army is sketchy (but had to be brutal), Zhouma's kidnapping and most likely years of mistreatment are similarly minimized. Qiangba was not being given a sky burial... he was being willingly left to be eaten alive by vultures. Kejun's martyrdom might not have been necessary, and could have been the result of impulse, loneliness, fear, desperation to name a few sad but plausible alternatives.

The sadness of Wen is always written in soft focus, but the situation of her existence suggests depression, desperation, uncertainty, exhaustion or exposure, particularly in the period when she is traveling horseback and sleeping, presumably, under the stars, on the cold Tibetan Plateau for a long long time.

Wen's return to China is likewise sweetly and sadly portrayed. The truth may be considerably more harsh. Pensions for COUPLES with a lifetime of service in China barely pay the rent in the new China (many were granted apts. for low cost in the 80s and 90s which Wen missed). When I was in China (2000-01), women HAD to retire at age 50, men could work longer, so "official" work is not an option, and for "unofficial work" her skills would be outdated. It is not surpring that she cannot be found. On the bright side, Wen has escaped China's great famine and the Cultural Revolution. Maybe she has found her family.

There is more to know here. Unfortunately, the author cannot find Wen to know it, but at least we have this brief record of remarkable individuals and their lives in this turbulent period of Chinese and Tibetan history.

I'd like to know more about the Tibetan family and why it was so long before Wen re-mobilized her quest. What was the nature of a routine day with them? How did she obtain clothing? Learn the language after Zhouma left? What chores did she do and how did she learn them? I'd like to know more of the family dynamic of Saierbo and her two husbands, and the joint fathership. Were Zhuoma's ornaments really valuable enough to finance all the traveling? food? shoes? How did they keep warm while on the move? How did the monestary react to Tianamen's long absence traveling in the company of 2 women?

I recommend this book if you can keep the high romanitic level of the author. I also recommend if you are interested in descriptions of people, places, everyday life in this part of the world. If you're a worry wort like me, it could haunt you, as it continues to haunt me.

Xinran's "Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet" was loosely based on an interview that journalist, Xinran, conducted with a Chinese woman, Shu Wen. In the 1950s, Shu Wen's husband who was in the Chinese army was sent to Tibet and shortly after that, Shu Wen received the news that he died. Not knowing what happened as no one in the government was able to provide further information for Shu Wen, she set out to Tibet with the Chinese army (as she was a doctor) hoping to find out what happened to her husband and if he was indeed dead. In one particular incident, Shu Wen together with a Tibetan woman, Zhouma whom the army rescued, were separated from the army and they found themselves living with a family of nomads. Shu Wen had never once give up the hope of searching for her husband.

This was an interesting read as the author provided lots of information and insights on the Tibetan culture as well as its people. I was particularly captivated by the description of the nomadic ways of some Tibetan people. Even though the pace of the book was slow, it was still an engaging read. A recommended read!

Xinran's short novel, based on the story of a woman that she had met, is a gem.

Two young people in China, doctors, met and married. A few weeks later, the husband was sent, with the army, from China to Tibet. This is the story of the wife's quest to find her husband, or her husband's fate in Tibet after having been informed of his death. She also travelled as a "physician/soldier" but stayed many years, learning of Tibet in her search for her husband.

I was profoundly impressed by the essential goodness of each of the characters in the book. It reminds me, at a time when many people are at war, that people are, or can be, essentially good.

Thank you, Xinran, for sharing Shu Wen's story with us. And, Shu Wen, if you hear of this book, thank you for sharing your story with Xinran.

This was an unbelievably great book! I read it in one sitting because you just cant put this down. It is a story of a modern Chinese woman who loses her beloved husband in Tibet. He was in the army and they refuse to give her any details on what exactly happened to him. She spends the next thirty years looking for him and ends up becoming more Tibetan than Chinese. It is a wonderful book of everlasting love and how powerful it can be. This review is not justifying how good this book is. Just read it!