Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet by Xinran Xinran - I was skeptical

It was 1994 when Xinran, a journalist and the author of The Good Women of China, received a telephone call asking her to travel four hours to meet an oddly dressed woman who had just crossed the border from Tibet into China. Xinran made the trip and met the woman, called Shu Wen, who recounted the story of her thirty-year odyssey in the vast landscape of Tibet.

Shu Wen and her husband had been married for only a few months in the 1950s when he joined the Chinese army and was sent to Tibet for the purpose of unification of the two countries. Shortly after he left she was notified that he had been killed, although no details were given. Determined to find the truth, Shu Wen joined a militia unit going to the Tibetan north, where she soon was separated from the regiment. Without supplies and knowledge of the language, she wandered, trying to find her way until, on the brink of death, she was rescued by a family of nomads under whose protection she moved from place to place with the seasons and eventually came to discover the details of her husband's death.

In the haunting Sky Burial, Xinran has recreated Shu Wen's journey, writing beautifully and simply of the silence and the emptiness in which Shu Wen was enveloped. The book is an extraordinary portrait of a woman and a land, each at the mercy of fate and politics. It is an unforgettable, ultimately uplifting tale of love loss, loyalty, and survival.

I was skeptical
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.

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