Tsewang Pemba’s Young Days in Tibet: A Paratextual Analysis of a Border-crossing Memoir

Julie Fletcher

 

Abstract: This paper is primarily a close paratextual analysis of Tsewang Pemba’s Young Days in Tibet, the first full-length Tibetan memoir in English, published by Jonathan Cape in London in 1957. Drawing on contemporary life writing theory to consider questions of genre, purpose, and framing, this reading of Pemba’s memoir traces how this new form of Tibetan life writing has emerged from the lived experience of historical change, transcultural encounter, and imposed modernity within the context of colonialism and imperialism. Analysing Young Days in Tibet through the theoretical frameworks of autoethnography and transcultural life narrative helps establish this memoir as a border-crossing text that responds to imperialist accounts of Tibet in a narrative form that emphasizes ethnos—the shared, collective life of a people or nation—more than the individual bios of canonical autobiography. The paratextual analysis of Pemba’s memoir in this paper highlights the materiality of the text, specifically as a border-crossing commodity, illuminating the tensions between authorial purpose and the framing of the narrative for a global readership.

Keywords: Tibet, life narrative, autoethnography, postcolonial memoir, colonial modernity, paratextual analysis.  

 

Introduction

Within the Tibetan diaspora, English language auto/biographies are one of the most prolific forms of modern Tibetan literature available to, and arguably intended for, non-Tibetan readers. With a few examples pre-dating 1959, this new genre has progressively developed over the decades of diaspora, with a notable high point in publications during the 1990s. This diverse and growing corpus includes memoirs of everyday life, women’s autobiographies, narratives of childhood in Tibet, multi-generational family autobiographies, memoirs of civil and military service, political auto/biographies, narratives of resistance, imprisonment, escape, and exile.  A small number of these are written directly in English by the author/narrators, and many are narrated, translated, and collaboratively produced in ‘as told to’ accounts.

Autobiography is a form that has been strongly linked to Western modernity, anchored in European Enlightenment conceptions of the autonomous, sovereign subject and the “universalising life story.” [1] In recent years, however, life writing scholars have acknowledged a longer and broader history of autobiography, noting the existence of early Western autobiographies in Ancient Greece and Rome, and throughout the medieval period, and limited forms of autobiographical practice in pre-modern China. [2] At the same time, within Tibetan Studies, the extent and significance of the traditional Tibetan auto/biographical canon is widely acknowledged.[3] In the Tibetan literary tradition, auto/biographical forms have long occupied an important place, and these texts have been described as unique, in terms of their extent and significance among Asian literatures.[4] Unlike the secular focus of modern Western autobiography, Tibetan rNam-thar, or sacred autobiography, is primarily a form of spiritual teaching text. These multi-levelled life-stories, which describe the journey of a highly realised Buddhist practitioner along the path to enlightenment, are written and read primarily as guides to life and higher spiritual achievement.[5]

However, in an early scholarly discussion of the English-language texts, Heather Stoddard argues that the new Tibetan auto/biographies represent a significant departure from traditional Tibetan auto/biographical practice, and one that began to emerge very early in the exile experience.[6] In an overview and analysis of developments in modern Tibetan literature, Stoddard has described the emergence of modern, English-language Tibetan auto/biographies as an exile innovation and “an interesting development in the diaspora.” [7] For Stoddard, the significance of this innovation is linked to a radical shift in the function or purpose of the texts. The exile autobiographies, she argues, “represent one of the earliest and fullest expressions of a new kind of awareness concerning Tibetan identity.” [8]  

Among scholars engaged with the English-language Tibetan life narratives, there is broad agreement that these texts constitute a significantly new genre, emerging out of the experiences, conditions, and circumstances of diaspora, including displacement, loss, and historical, social, and political rupture. Barbara Aziz associates these texts with cultural preservation in exile, arguing that they record and preserve valuable oral-historical accounts of life in traditional Tibet.[9] Meg McLagan discusses these life narratives as diaspora forms and activist texts, developing in response to the post-1959 experiences of exile.[10] Steven Venturino examines them as rights-based narratives that, while valuable, mobilise potentially problematic victim identities.[11]  Laurie McMillin suggests they can be understood as hybrid forms of “new age namthar” reflecting idealized versions of Tibetan-ness to Western readers seeking Tibetan spiritual “presence.” [12] Charlene Makley refers to the new life narratives arising in exile as “oppositional histories,” [13] and Isabella Ofner discusses them as intimate, domestic histories of Tibetan women’s experience, [14] while I have examined these texts as rights-based testimonial forms that seek to engage non-Tibetan readers in relationships of ethical witnessing. [15]

This paper goes back to the beginning of the development of rights-based testimonial writing by Tibetans to examine the first full-length Tibetan memoir in English, Tsewang Pemba’s Young Days in Tibet. In what follows, I outline the ways that Young Days in Tibet can be usefully read as a transcultural and collective life narrative, that speaks back to exoticization and misrepresentation, and narrates not just an individual life, but the lived experience of a community or people. I then undertake a close paratextual analysis, informed by contemporary life writing theory and the genre frames of autoethnography and postcolonial life narrative, to consider questions of genre, purpose, and framing, in Young Days in Tibet.  While Pemba’s text predates the post-1959 diaspora, Young Days in Tibet is a border-crossing memoir that clearly arises out of encounters with (colonial) modernity, and the need to communicate Tibetan experience across linguistic, cultural, and geographic borders.

Young Days in Tibet narrates the early life and experiences of Tsewang Pemba in Tibet and at school in northern India before he travelled to London to study and became the first Tibetan to graduate in Western medicine from an English university. Written directly in English by the author/narrator, Young Days in Tibet was published in Britain in 1957, before the events of 1959 saw the exodus of large numbers of Tibetan refugees into border camps in India and neighboring Himalayan kingdoms. Young Days in Tibet engages deeply with the narrator’s encounters with colonialism and the legacies of colonialism and stands as a witness to history at a time of profound social and historical change for Tibet and Tibetans.  As such, this very early Tibetan life narrative in English prefigures the further development of life-writing in the diaspora. Like the later forms, it can also be linked with new forms of globalized life narrative emerging since the mid-twentieth century within diverse post-colonial, or post-imperial contexts.

 

The New Life Writing of a Global World

Since the latter decades of the twentieth century, developments in life writing practices began to expand significantly beyond the confines of canonical Western autobiography, giving rise to an increasing diversity of non-traditional auto/biographical genres, and following this, a similar expansion of scholarly approaches to, and understandings of, diverse life writings. [16]

The sweeping historical changes in an increasingly globalised and post-colonial world have led to theoretical shifts and developments in the study of literature and humanities. Human rights, feminist, post-Marxist, post-structuralist, and postcolonial theories have accompanied the emergence and academic embrace of post- and anti-colonial literature, third-world texts, diaspora literature, and a wide range of literature on displacement, oppression, migration, minority, or refugee experiences. Linked with these world historical changes and theoretical shifts, the decades of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw an increasing scholarly interest in minority, indigenous or ethnic experiences within multi-ethnic states, and previously colonised regions. In these contexts, life writing emerged as a particularly important and rapidly developing field within which significant and diverse “self-writings” are being produced. [17]

In response to this increasing diversity, the broader and more inclusive terms of life writing, or life narrative, have largely displaced the term autobiography, [18] and scholars in this field now identify and theorise a wide range of life writing genres, including autoethnography, captivity narrative, collaborative and collective life writing, ethnic life narrative, human rights narrative, indigenous, migrant, and refugee life narrative, prison narrative, resistance narrative, and testimonial narrative, to name a few. [19] Many of these genres reflect in the body of English-language Tibetan life writings.  Gillian Whitlock argues that while these diverse forms of life narrative practice have come to scholarly attention since the late twentieth century, they have a much longer history of production and circulation but had been marginalised and overlooked by scholars. However, she suggests that the more recent developments in critical approaches and theorising provide us with ways to recuperate and re-read earlier texts through newer interpretive frames. In this way, she argues, previously overlooked forms of subaltern life narrative, emerging in response to colonial experiences, can now be understood as important forms of postcolonial agency and voice.[20]

 

Genre Frames: Autoethnography in Tibetan Contexts

One of the most significant differences between canonical modern Western autobiography and postmodern or postcolonial forms of life narrative is that the latter frequently embody a collective view of subjectivity that extends beyond the “I” of autobiography to speak of the “we” of community or nation.[21] One such form is autoethnography, where the singular bios of autobiography is replaced by the collective ethnos of a people, community, or nation.[22]  This type of autoethnography consists of an insider account, presented in a narrative form that includes rich description of a people, or a way of life, provided by a member of that community, ethnicity, or people.[23] While anthropologists’ ethnographies and adventurers’ travel writings formed part of the ways that colonial powers sought to know and possess “primitive” or ‘other’ cultures,[24] autoethnography can be understood as a form of subaltern writing back to imperialist and colonial representations.[25]

In the Tibetan context, an early text that we can now read as significantly autoethnographic is Rinchen Lhamo’s We Tibetans. Published by the British publisher Seeley and Co. London in 1926, We Tibetans, is a personal account of Tibet and Tibetans, written by Rinchen Lhamo. Described in the back matter of the book as “the first Tibetan woman to marry a European, leave her homeland, and settle in the West,” Rinchen Lhamo was a Tibetan woman from Kham in Eastern Tibet, who married the former British Consul in Tachienlu and later settle in England as Mrs. Louis King. While not a fully developed life narrative, the text interweaves first-person fragments of memoir and elements of personal narrative with remembered descriptions of homeland and ways of life. In this type of autoethnography, we see both agency and voice, in speaking back to Western exoticisation and misrepresentations, as well as an intersection with, and appropriation of, colonial culture, language, and forms of discourse. We Tibetans is a very early example of Tibetan self-presentation in English, and one that clearly writes back to Western representations of Tibet and Tibetans. 

Almost thirty years after the publication of We Tibetans, another young Tibetan found himself in England, studying medicine at the University of London. Like Rinchen Lhamo, the trajectory of Tsewang Pemba’s actual life intersected with British imperialism at several points. Similarly, his status as one of the first Tibetans to reside in the West, as well as his largely British education, fluency in the English language, and his exposure to British cultural life, are all contributory factors enabling the writing and publication of his memoir.  Tsewang Pemba spent his early childhood in Gyantse, and later Yatung in southern Tibet, where his father was employed as a clerk in the British Trade Agencies in both towns.  As a young child, Pemba was encouraged by his father to learn some rudimentary English, and after attending a local school in Yatung, he completed his education in a ‘British school’ in northern India before attending university in London and graduating as the first Tibetan trained in Western medicine. As he describes it in the introduction to his memoir, after being frequently questioned by university colleagues about the mysteries of Tibet, he wrote and published his personal account, Young Days in Tibet. 

Against the historical background of Tibet remaining uncolonized by any European nation, and travel to Tibet being comparatively rare, Tibet became, for Europeans, hidden, mysterious, unattainable, and thus fascinating. In both these early Tibetan life narratives, the circumstance of being among the “first Tibetans” to live outside Tibet, and in the case of Pemba, also fluent in English, is significant. Both Rinchen Lhamo and Tsewang Pemba are border-crossing Tibetans, able to communicate across linguistic and cultural borders, to non-Tibetans.  As such, they can provide, for English-speaking audiences, “authentic” and “insider” accounts of Tibet.  The writing, publication, and circulation of these early texts are clearly linked to Western fascination with ‘hidden’ and ‘mysterious’ Tibet, and both Lhamo and Pemba exercise agency in writing back to these representations.  Both texts share elements of autoethnography, and both arise from colonial contexts.  While We Tibetans is more autoethnographic, Young Days in Tibet is a fully developed postcolonial life narrative, significantly engaged with the lived experience of historical change and cross-cultural encounter, as the narrator negotiates the impact of colonial modernity in the form of British imperialism in Tibet, and legacies of the empire in India. 

 

Tsewang Pemba’s Young Days in Tibet: A Paratextual Analysis.

As discussed above, Young Days in Tibet can be viewed as an early example of modern Tibetan life writing that can be fruitfully approached through the genre frames of autoethnography and postcolonial life narrative. Written in English, this life narrative is transcultural, speaking across geographic, cultural, and linguistic borders, bringing Tibetan lives and experiences to non-Tibetan readers. As such, issues related to the interface between writer and reader, and the processes through which life becomes a story, the story becomes a book, and the book becomes a commodity to be circulated in global exchanges and transactions, become important. In what follows, I utilise a paratextual analysis to illuminate these processes, drawing attention to the materiality of the text as “an object, a commodity, and an artifact,” produced for the circulation of Pemba’s story in global markets, and the creation of international readerships through the “global commodification of alterity.”[26]

Whitlock suggests that postcolonial life narratives should be read “cover to cover, peritext and paratext.”[27] Paratextual analysis draws our attention to the material, constructed nature of the text as object, illuminating issues of framing, the construction of a readership, and consideration of the text as a globally circulating commodity. Analysis of authorial and publisher’s peritexts, such as front matter, introductions and prefaces, cover design and blurbs, dedications, and contents pages can shed light on how and why ‘a life’ became ‘the life story.’ As the story becomes a book, paratextual analysis allows consideration of the book’s materiality, as well as how is it packaged, framed, and presented to non-Tibetan audiences as it circulates in markets of potential readerships. The paratextual analysis also allows consideration of how unfamiliar cultural experiences are represented and made knowable across these borders. 

A paratextual analysis considers the materiality of the text, and its surrounding and framing as produced by the processes of publication and the demands of circulation. Paratextual materials are those things that surround the text, including peritexts within the book, such as cover design, introductions, prefaces, end notes, and so on, while epitexts are elements outside the text, such as reviews or author interviews.[28] Paratextual apparatus present the text to the market, with visual elements, as well as any written content, framing the text for the potential readership, constructing an audience and shaping expectations, interpretation, and approach to the text.[29]  Some paratextual elements are the result of publisher decisions, while others are determined by authors, and yet others may be decided in consultations between author and publisher. In the case of cover design, for example, there may be input from both publisher and author, and the cover designer brings yet another interpretive orientation to the task of presenting the text to the prospective reader.

Approaching Young Days in Tibet in this way, we begin with consideration of the publisher, and then examine the text as a material object, and in terms of cover design. Young Days in Tibet, Tsewang Pemba’s first memoir, was written directly in English by Pemba, and published in 1957 by Jonathon Cape, London.  Jonathon Cape, now an imprint of Random House, and part of Penguin Random House, is a reputed British publishing house founded in 1921. Paratextual analysis also assists us to historicise the text, locating it, as a created, material object, within a time and place, and within a particular market. The publishing list of Jonathon Cape included renowned authors such as T. E. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Ian Fleming, and Han Suyin. The firm established a book series that included fiction, and of direct relevance to consideration of Young Days in Tibet, memoirs, travel narratives, and accounts of the empire. As such, Jonathon Cape is a publishing company concerned with sourcing, producing, and marketing books to readers within the former British Empire, now the British Commonwealth. The readerships being sought and constructed through various paratextual framing devices will be those interested in, to some extent at least, alterity at the edge of the empire.

The copy referred to in the following analysis is the hardback first edition of Young Days in Tibet. The volume is covered in plain sky-blue fabric, with the title, author’s name and initial, Y. Pemba, and the publisher’s colophon in gold lettering on the spine. On the front of the cloth cover, laterally centred but positioned towards the top of the page, is an embossed gold emblem resembling a sprig of daphne flowers and leaves. The dust jacket has a maroon background, and across the top of the page, the words of the first part of the title “Young days in” are in cream font. Below that, a wide cream-coloured banner with ragged edges, like those of handmade paper, runs across the centre of the cover. Within the banner are scattered small pale sky-blue Tibetan script letters, and over the top of those, the word Tibet, in a slightly oriental style, upper case, large red font.  Below the banner is the author’s name, Tsewang Pemba, in black type face against a narrow band of darker, more muted blue.  The spine of the dust jacket repeats these elements, with the addition of the publisher’s logo at the bottom.

The word TIBET, in large, red, upper-case orientalised letters, is the most prominent feature of both the cover and spine. The use of red typeface, the centring of this word on the front cover, and the framing of this word within the horizontal banner that extends across the cover are all forms of visual “flagging”[30] that serve to highlight the significance of the word Tibet within the title, on both the cover and the spine. The cream-coloured, ragged-edged banner, scattered with small, blue, well-formed, apparently hand-written, Tibetan script letters, is the next most prominent feature. The shape, colour, and soft edges of this banner are suggestive of Tibetan paper, traditionally handmade from the bark of the daphne bush, and used within traditional Tibet for religious texts and government documents. This image thus contains a reference back to the daphne flower emblem on the cloth front cover. The allusion to traditional Tibetan paper is strengthened by the scattering of hand-written style Tibetan letters across this banner. These elements combine to form subtle references to Tibetan texts, knowledge, and traditional cultural practices. Finally, the background of dark maroon, above and below the banner, echoes the maroon of Tibetan monastic robes. What at first glance appears as a simple cover design can thus be seen, on closer examination, as a subtle, and perhaps quite respectful, reference to Tibetan learning. At the same time, and importantly, while this is a memoir, the overall effect of this cover design is to foreground the central subject of the book as Tibet, rather than Tsewang Pemba.  

This emphasis on Tibet as the predominant subject of this book continues into the publisher’s description on the dust jacket, and other elements of the front matter. On the inside front cover of this copy is a very small sticker that reads: Dymock’s Book Arcade Ltd. 426 George St Sydney, indicating the book has been distributed and purchased internationally, circulating within the markets and readerships of the former British empire. In the front matter, the memoir is clearly addressed to a primarily British (or Commonwealth) readership and contextualised within the issue of Western fascination for ‘secret,’ ‘mysterious’ and ‘unknown,’ but nonetheless much written about, Tibet. On the verso inner flap of the dust jacket, the publisher’s description addresses an English-speaking, non-Tibetan, “we”:  

 

For a country that by repute is ‘mysterious’ Tibet has been remarkably well publicised. Its mysteries have been unveiled and its ‘secrets’ divulged by a score of English, French, German and American writers; its people have been ‘explained’ until we feel that we know them as well as any other inhabitants of our globe. (Front matter, my emphasis)

 

The implied and constructed readership here is the Anglophone ‘we’ of the British Commonwealth, post-imperial, worldly readers who are familiar with the travel narratives, memoirs, and accounts of ‘others.’  However, unlike the previous accounts of Tibet written by Westerner travellers, this book is presented as delivering, for an international readership, an authenticated, genuine insider account written by a Tibetan: “Here, for a change, is a book written by a Tibetan. It tells what no other book could tell, the ‘inside story’” (Front matter). The author and the account are thus positioned as authentic, and the reliability and unmediated nature of the text is confirmed with a statement that the author is fluent in the English language and educated within the British university system: “Its author writes in English. He is the first Tibetan to have graduated in medicine from a Western university” (Front matter). In this we see the way peritextual elements frame, position, and authenticate both the text and the author for readers. The prospective reader is thus assured that they have in their hand an authentic insider account of Tibet, written directly in English, by a Tibetan author. Further, the book is presented as giving access to an account that is rare and new, and never before accessible, as the author is the first Tibetan to be living in the West, fluent in English, educated, and able to tell his story.

The title itself, Young Days in Tibet, is suggestive of a quite simple tale, imbued with the lightness of childhood and youth. The role and purpose of the publisher’s description is not only to frame and position the text for the reader, but also to entice the prospective reader to cross the threshold and purchase the book.[31] 

According to the publisher’s description, the purpose of the author, which he “quite successfully achieves,” is to provide a description of his early life and upbringing in Tibet, and in so doing, “introduce us to typical characters, scenes and customs” (Front matter). In this, the front matter signals that the importance and purpose of this memoir is not to give an account of a remarkable or special person but rather provide an authentic and insider account of Tibet, and a narrative describing the ‘typical’ Tibetan ways of life. While Pemba’s life trajectory is decidedly atypical for a young Tibetan man at this time, his account is framed as providing the reader with a point of access to ‘typical’ ordinary, everyday life within (hitherto inaccessible) Tibet.

Reinforcing this sense of Pemba as providing a window onto Tibet and Tibetan life, the publisher’s description positions the author as transcultural, who can negotiate and bridge the gap between the cultural worlds of Tibet and the West. Not only does Pemba open an authentic version of Tibet to English-speaking readers, but he is also able to ‘look both ways’ between these two cultural worlds. Pemba is described as both “mildly scornful” of the “exaggerations” of “Western writers” but also “sufficiently emancipated to dismiss some Tibetan beliefs and superstitions as ridiculous fantasies.” The author speaks “our” language, with “humour” and “gentle satire,” and is sufficiently educated and “emancipated” to critique both “our” culture and his own.

While the publisher’s description signals a degree of distance from, and critical stance toward, the exoticisation and misrepresentation of Tibet, the final sentences of this introductory piece reinvoke the mystery and isolation of Tibet, and re-position Pemba and his narrative clearly within the unchanging realm of Tibetan specialness:

 

The remoteness and inaccessibility of Tibet meant that its people were able to preserve a difference, and that difference has not disappeared. As Dr Pemba more or less inadvertently shows, it is a charming difference. (Front matter, my italics)

 

Pemba’s book is hereby commended to readers with the assurance that the work will be both sufficiently familiar and different and exotic. In the final sentence, the promise to the prospective reader is that within this book, they will find a narrative voice that is accessible, authoritative, and sufficiently anglicized (Dr. Pemba), and yet authentically Tibetan, speaking to us of remote, timeless, inaccessible, and “charming[ly] different” Tibet. At the same time, the language of “charm” and “difference” aligns with the evocations of simplicity, childhood, and youth in the title, Young Days in Tibet, and combines to suggest a light, pleasant, yet interesting read.

Analysis of paratextual material thus helps us understand the role of markets and marketing as publishers frame texts to appeal to and construct intended audiences or readerships and the ways that reading of the text is pre-primed by this framing. Paratextual analysis can also draw out tensions or discrepancies between the commercial imperatives of publishers, the constructed expectations of potential audiences, and the needs and concerns of the producing communities of storytellers. As we see in the following analysis of the authorial peritexts in Young Days in Tibet, examination of the various and intersecting (para)textual threads surrounding the narrative can help to uncover these tensions, and thus we can become alert to the story the teller is wanting to tell, and the range of forces operating around that telling.

While the front matter discussed above provides the publisher’s introduction to the text, peritexts can also include the author’s introduction, dedication, preface, foreword, and so on.  These also serve to frame, explain, and position the text for the reader from the author’s point of view, and provide an opportunity for this to be done in the author’s voice, as an extension of authorial control of the text. Unlike the frontispiece, in most cases, the Contents page is considered as authorial peritext. In Young Days in Tibet, the contents page once again, at first glance, speaks of simplicity. It is not illustrated or adorned and consists of Roman numerals for the twenty chapters, the chapter titles themselves in simple, small font size, upper-case text, and page numbers for each chapter.  While not presented as thematically organized, the chapter titles refer to thematic content that includes places and culture, life events and geographical movement, and the negotiation and impact of significant social change. 

Several of the chapter titles, particularly the earlier ones, read like those to be found within travel narratives, referring to places, sights, and cultural practices in Tibet. For non-Tibetan readers, this may provide a familiarity, echoing subject matter previously encountered within travel narratives already in existence. Those chapters that reference places include “The Chumbi Valley,” “The Donkar Monastery,” and “Lhasa and its Sights.” The chapters that refer to cultural practices include: “Eccentrics, Festivals, Dances, Minstrels and Customs,” “Festivals, Dances and Customs in Lhasa,” “‘Migou’ or The Abominable Snowman,” and “Tibet and the Occult.” However, unlike earlier narratives on Tibet in the West, this account is written by a Tibetan. Conditioned by the publisher’s description, the prospective reader can assume that these chapters will provide more authentic, genuinely Tibetan, descriptions of places and practices in Tibet, and provide correctives to the misrepresentations and exoticizations of the earlier traveler accounts.

At the same time, while some of these chapter titles suggest the reader can expect to find descriptions of traditional Tibet and Tibetan ways of life for non-Tibetan readers, others signal that this is nonetheless a life narrative, indicating chapters that give an account of movement and development in Pemba’s life. Several of the chapter titles refer to life events and stages, and geographical movement. For example, “On the Road to Lhasa,” “Farewell to Lhasa,” “School in India,” and “The Chumbi Valley Again.” Some chapter titles signal the negotiation of significant change and cross-cultural encounters, for example, “Changing Years” and “Border Tibetans,” and five of the final six suggest the broader impact of widespread social change, experienced at both the individual and collective levels. The titles “The Lure of Modernism,” “Seeds of Change,” and “Impressions” invoke the massive social change beginning to impact the nation and its people. 

In the contents page of Young Days in Tibet we can thus trace the move from autoethnography to postcolonial memoir, engaging more deeply with the impact of profound historical and social change. In these deceptively simple chapter titles, we see a narrative development that moves from autoethnographic, travel narrative style descriptions, and writing back to exoticization, to those that suggest a deeper encounter with, and negotiation of, significant historical change associated with colonialism. The simplicity of the earlier chapter titles referring to places of childhood gives way to the deeper complexity of the later ones, with their references to more significant historical and social change, and the tensions of colonial modernity. In this too, we see a shift in authorial purpose and concerns from issues of representation and perceptions of Tibet to engagement with the early years of Tibetan experiences of disruption, dislocation, and loss.

Related to this evocation of a sense of disruption, dislocation, and loss in Pemba’s memoir is another example of authorial peritext—Dedication. In Young Days in Tibet, the text contains a simple personal dedication to the author’s parents, Pemba Tsering and Tsering Yangchen, in an italicized font that is reminiscent of a hand-written script. The font emphasizes the personal, familial nature of the dedication, and similarly, including the names of Pemba’s parents highlights the personal nature of the life narrative. At the same time, the presence of these two names, at the top of an otherwise empty page, evokes a sense of separation and distance, prompting thoughts of Pemba’s parents, both lost in a powerful flood two years earlier, far away in Tibet.[32] Further, these Tibetan names inscribe a cultural difference in naming practices, accentuating a sense of cultural and geographical distance and difference. The differences between Tibetan and Western naming practices are likely to be unfamiliar to Pemba’s intended readers, and within the text, Pemba tells us that his father, who embraced British culture, modernity, and change, chose to follow Western naming practices over Tibetan traditions of naming, and gave all his children the surname Pemba.

The next, and arguably most important, authorial peritext to be encountered by the reader is Tsewang Pemba’s “Introduction.”  In this, Pemba firstly frames the text in relation to Western misrepresentations, misconceptions, and exoticized “Shangri-la” expectations. Secondly, he historicises the Tibetan experience vis-à-vis the British empire, introducing its limited but significant influence in Tibet and its profound impact on the lifestyle of several Tibetans. Finally, he refers to the as-yet uncertain impact of the changes brought about by Chinese communism and the likely irrevocable loss of the Tibet of his childhood. In the final part of the introduction, we see that Pemba’s ostensibly simple remembered account of Tibet not only locates his homeland and people within history but also stands as witness to profound and dramatic change at this important historical juncture. 

Tsewang Pemba’s Young Days in Tibet contains a short, one-and-a-half-page Introduction by the author. Here the author clearly links the book’s purpose and his motivation for writing, with existing representations and misconceptions of Tibet as a mysterious ‘Shangri-La’. The introduction begins with an immediate reference to the inaccessible, mysterious, and misrepresented Tibet of the “tales that have appeared in many books” (9). In the opening sentences, Tibet is described in the kind of play of opposites that have become well established in English language representations.[33] Pemba writes of “closed frontiers” being “penetrated by hardy explorers,” “strange rites” and “things of the spirit and mind” counterposed with “smells and dirt” and a “total absence of sanitation,” and “lamas living amongst cliff faces” juxtaposed with ordinary Tibetan people who “lack inhibition” and are “happy-go-lucky” (9).

The author explains how, as a student in London, he was sometimes questioned about his homeland, and asked to “give an account of ‘the fabulous city of Lhasa’ and ‘your strange lamas living up to hundreds of years’” (9). Those listening, he writes, were somewhat disappointed by his stories, which were “not so hair-raising as the tales of the explorers and adventurers” (9). For these reasons, Pemba tells us, he decided that when he had time to do so, he would “write something about Tibet as seen by a Tibetan” (9). In this authorial introduction, a key purpose of the book is thus established for the prospective reader as contesting and correcting the misconceptions of those for whom Tibet is “synonymous with ‘Shangri-La’” (9).

Having confirmed the stated motivation for writing the book, the authorial introduction explains the choice of the life narrative genre. He writes that “a bald tale giving details of … geography, climate, food… etc.” would “merely repeat the writings of travellers” and the “numerous books on Tibet” and would “bore the reader”. By contrast, he explains that telling his own life story “from [his] earliest days” (9) would provide the best means to describe and explain Tibet and Tibetans, through “a fairly broad perspective of the country and its habits” as well as “some of the lovable and eccentric characters in which Tibet abounds” (9).  Life narrative is thus identified as a form able to address both the broad and the personal, and the general and the particular aspects of life in Tibet. In this, we see the justification not only for including but also moving beyond the autoethnographic to also accommodate a more deeply engaged postcolonial life narrative. Importantly, Pemba’s decision to write a memoir is justified in terms of it being a genre suitable for writing about the place and people of Tibet, rather than by any reference to his own personal importance or significance. In this we see the collective motivation of autoethnography, and related forms of global, transcultural, postcolonial life narrative, rather than the individualised, internalised focus of Western autobiography. At the same time, the fact that this account is based on the narrator’s own experiences and life story also serves, via the authentication of the author provided in the publisher’s blurb, to guarantee the genuineness and truthfulness of the narrative.

As the introduction continues, it becomes evident that the narrative is concerned with another type of refutation of earlier representations. Like the chapter titles, the authorial introduction also signals that the impact of social and historical change forms an important part of the subject matter of the book:

 

I hoped it would interest readers to know about the lives Tibetan boys and youths live, how they react to the outside world, especially the Western world, and the changes in their habits and thoughts as they come into contact with the stream of modern life. (10)

 

Here, the introduction foregrounds that the navigation of significant social change, of encounter with the West, modernity, and the ‘outside world,’ is central to the concerns of the narrative. This is important, as it serves to historicize Tibet and Tibetan experiences, locating them within history and wider social forces, rather than somehow frozen outside these. Clearly contesting and dispelling ideas of remote, inaccessible, and timeless Tibet, Pemba’s life narrative is introduced as illustrating and embodying some of the ways in which Tibet and Tibetan lives have been engaged with change and exchange in encounters with the outside world, and colonial modernity. Notably, the author does not individualise these experiences and encounters by confining them to himself but generalises them to the collective “Tibetan boys and youths.” Thus, in this early example of Tibetan life narrative in English, we see the life story of one Tibetan framed as representing a larger shared and historicised experience.[34]

The final paragraph of the authorial introduction further emphasizes the collective aspects of the narrative, and the impact of revolutionary social change, at a historical moment that seems likely to produce a grave and shocking outcome: 

 

In writing about Tibet, it is impossible not to say something about the impact of Chinese communism; in fact, the changes produced by the Chinese will have a permanent effect on the country, for good or ill. The Tibet of today is in the throes of a revolutionary change. It is no longer the Tibet of old whose virtues and vices are so familiar to readers of books. The Tibet of old is dying, and its place will be taken by a Tibet that will be little different from any modern Asiatic country.  Most of my story deals with the Tibet I knew as a boy, and as a youth, that had been the same for generations; the country that has attracted so many people just because of its centuries old sleep. I shall most probably not see this Tibet again. (10)

 

In these poignant final lines, where Pemba announces that not only is Tibet changing but dying, we see how far we have come, almost imperceptibly, from the narrative lightness of the book’s title, and the opening of this introduction. Suddenly, the reader is positioned as a witness to an intensely serious moment in history.

Here too, we also see a significant contrast between the final sentences of the publisher’s introductory text, and that of the author. The publisher’s blurb ends with a reference to an unchanging and “charming” Tibetan “difference,” while that of the author speaks of a profound change and loss: “The Tibet of old is dying and will soon be indistinguishable from any other modern Asian nation.” Pemba’s Tibet, the Tibet of his family, his ancestors, and his childhood, is not likely to be seen again. This contrast demonstrates a considerable tension between the publisher’s framing for a British readership of, perhaps, armchair travellers, and the tale the teller is trying to tell, of profound and potentially devastating historical change.

 

Conclusion 

Through a close paratextual reading, informed by contemporary life writing scholarship, this paper set out to consider questions of genre, purpose, and framing in Tsewang Pemba’s Young Days in Tibet, the first full-length Tibetan life narrative to be written in English. I suggest that Young Days in Tibet is a collective form that, while it centres on the narrative of an individual life, is concerned with the lived experience of a people impacted by British imperialism, and Chinese colonialism. As such, it can be usefully read through the genre frames of autoethnography and postcolonial life narrative, as a transcultural autoethnographic memoir that responds to imperial misrepresentations, and encounters with, and experiences of, colonial modernity.  The paratextual analysis illuminates the processes through which this lived life became a story, at the same time as it draws our attention to the materiality of the book and some of the implications of that story becoming object, artefact, and transcultural commodity. As a border-crossing, marketable product destined to circulate in global flows and exchanges, we have seen how the publisher’s peritexts authenticate and validate both the author and the account, and frame the text to appeal to, and construct, readerships in global markets. In this, we see how paratextual analysis can illuminate tensions between authorial purpose, the narrative the author wants to tell, and the market imperatives of the publisher. Nonetheless, while largely framed for a post-imperial British readership informed by the travel narratives of the time, this text not only writes back to exoticisation and misrepresentation but also engages with and responds to the legacies and impact of colonialism and imperialism at a time of profound social and historical change. While this analysis has been limited to close examination of the paratextual material, this argument holds true for a reading of the full text.

Against the background of imperial mythologizing of Tibet, Young Days in Tibet sets out to correct the record, writing back to Western misrepresentations, and providing a more realistic account of Tibetan life. But it is evident that this memoir is not only written to explain Tibet to that ‘we’ of the former British empire but also challenge Western exoticisation and misrepresentation. Close analysis of the authorial peritexts points toward the ways that Young Days in Tibet also operates at a deeper level as it traces Pemba’s – and Tibet’s – encounters and negotiations with imperialism, colonial modernity, and the impact of unprecedented social change. Much of the emotional power of this account lies in its narrative simplicity – but beneath this apparently simple surface is Young Days in Tibet’s serious engagement with the Tibetan encounter with colonialism and the threat of an imposed modernity. Through the eyes of the young Pemba, the reader is positioned as witness, looking back at the remembered Tibet of his childhood, on the precipice of massive, possibly irrevocable, social change.  In this image, we can see the way that Pemba’s Young Days in Tibet presages the social changes to come, and also prefigures the further development of modern Tibetan life writing in English that followed.

 

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Notes

[1] Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography.

[2] Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography Now, 4-5.

[3] Galli and Erhard.

[4] Tenzin Gyatso, The Essence of the Middle Way, 466-467.

[5] Gyatso; Stoddard; Willis; Galli and Erhard

[6] Stoddard, 153.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Aziz.

[10] McLagan.

[11] Venturino.

[12] McMillin.

[13] Makley.

[14] Ofner.

[15] Fletcher.

[16] Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography Now, 6.

[17] Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography Now.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.; Smith and Watson, Life Writing in the Long Run.

[20] Whitlock.

[21] Whitelock.

[22] Lionnet, 321.

[23] Hayes, 157.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid.; Moore-Gilbert.

[26] Whitelock, 6.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Whitelock; Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography Now, 6. 

[29] Genette and Maclean.

[30] Peikola and Bos 15.

[31] Genette and Maclean.

[32] Bhoil.

[33] McMillin.

[34] Fletcher.

 

Julie Fletcher is Senior Lecturer in Humanities and Social Sciences at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia. She obtained a PhD in Cultural Studies from Deakin University (Witnessing Tibet: Life narrative as testimony in the Tibetan diaspora). Her research interests include life narrative, testimony, human rights, and cultural politics. Her current projects are a monograph on English-language Tibetan life-writing in the diaspora, and a smaller project on life narrative and contested land use among fell farmers of the English north. Julie has presented her work nationally and internationally in the fields of auto/biography studies, sociology of law, literature, diaspora studies, Tibetan studies and Asian studies. She has also received a number of awards for teaching excellence, including a national Australian Awards for University Teaching Citation.
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