Tashi Dawa

(Mandarin: Zhaxi Dawa)

b. 1955, Batang, Sichuan

Writer

One of the most prominent Tibetan authors writing in Chinese, Tashi Dawa was born to a Tibetan father and a Han Chinese mother in the Tibetan region of Kham in Sichuan province. He began to write stories in 1979 and has published several volumes of fiction and essays and produced a Tibetan-language documentary film. His translated works are found in most of the major languages, and scholarly studies of him began to emerge overseas in the mid 1990s.

The story ‘Tibet: A Soul Knotted on a Leather Thong’ (Xizang, xizai pisheng koushang de hun, 1985) was a path-breaking text that is at one and the same time realistic and magical, historical and futuristic. The tortuous path of Tibet’s entrance into the modern world unfolds in the daily confusion with technology, in conflicts of belief and value systems, and in the story’s structure, which encompasses contradictory notions of time and existence. He continued to explore this theme in its variations, culminating in the novel The Tumultuous Shambhala (Saodong de xiangbala, 1993). Although raised in a modern environment, Tashi Dawa draws inspiration from various Tibetan traditions and folk culture. Yet his deep concern with the complex issues facing modern Tibet leaves him with no illusions for a Shangri-la that never existed nor seems likely to come. As chairman of the Tibetan Writers’ Association, his own career tells the story of a Tibetan intellectual simultaneously searching for roots and modernity and exploring faith and fate, only to embody the dilemma of embracing both.

See also: Root-seeking school

Further reading

Taxi, Dawa (2001). Tibet: A Soul Knotted on a Leather Thong’, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ and The Glory of the Wind’. Trans. Herbert Batt. In idem (ed.), Tales of Tibet: Sky Burials, Prayer Wheels, and Wind Horses. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

YUE GANG