Fiction: ‘The Red Wind Howls' by Tsering Döndrup
Censored in China, Tsering Döndrup's vivid and excoriating 'The Red Wind Howls' recounts the decadeslong Communist clampdown in Amdo, a multiethnic region of northeastern Tibet roughly the size of France. The story begins in the late 1950s, immediately after the civilian massacres perpetrated by the People's Liberation Army during what has come to be known as the Amdo uprising but which the characters in this novel call simply the Harrowing Day. It ends with the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, by which time Tibetan society has not been transformed so much as nearly eliminated.
Mr. Döndrup, who writes in Tibetan, divides the novel into two parts. The first follows the 10-year sentence being served by the lama Alak Drong at a brutal re-education camp alongside other so-called class enemies from the clans of nomadic Tibetan Buddhists. The second part chronicles the fate of the camp's survivors during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), when all traditional customs are violently proscribed and the people are brought to starvation by the government requirement that they plant crops that cannot grow in Amdo's mountainous altitude.
In an acid-etched translation by Christopher Peacock, the whole book is memorable, but it is the first section that makes 'The Red Wind Howls' a contemporary world-literature classic. With the vigorous anger and precise detail that calls to mind Varlam Shalamov's remembrances of life in the Siberian Gulag, Mr. Döndrup depicts the horrors of the Chinese prison camp: the struggle sessions, the culture of 'backstabbing and informing,' the ritualized torture and the many other daily punishments and deprivations that turn even the strongest prisoners into mindless 'labor machines.'
As in all totalitarian regimes, the rules imposed by the party cadres are Kafkaesque in their absurdity. For instance, suicide is commonplace among the prisoners, but because it is outlawed in Buddhism the nomads succumb to it far less. This fact is marshaled as evidence of their lingering religious faith, and for the crime of not killing themselves they are re-educated even more harshly.
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