![]() I was never at university, but I was a great reader. How hard it is to write in a convincing manner. Then you realize how hard writing as a craft is. They thought he was taking a people who had been oppressed by the system, people who had been dehumanized over centuries and with one stroke, was turning them into revolutionaries. The Cultural Revolution was totally misinterpreted – experts in the West claimed it was this wonderful social experiment that Mao had conducted to change the fundamental psyche of the Chinese people. This was the 70s and it was the height of Maoism when Mao had this great cachet with Western intellectuals. When I was in Mustang after the Tibetan resistance collapsed, after the whole thing failed, I asked myself what I could do going on? At that time in the world, what was being written about Tibet was really negative. Only later I outgrew the macho ideology and developed a more nuanced take on his writing. JN: I had a very unsophisticated appreciation of Hemingway. TD: So basically you went to Mustang as a teenager to join the Tibetan resistance there, in the same way that Hemingway went to war or other writers went to Paris. And Robert Jordan the hero, ahem, that’s me. The heroic Spanish guerillas in the mountains, that’s the Khampas fighters in the resistance. Then I realized that the Fascist army in Spain, that’s the PLA. Before that I read a lot but I was a confused kid. One day I read Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls, the great novel of the Spanish civil war. I always believed I was a Hemingway character. I read everything by Hemingway from when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. That school was hard, but at least it encouraged you to read. I had a lot of problems and the way you could escape was to read. Joseph’s – a boys’ school in Darjeeling in India. I went to a British style public school called St. Ever since I was a kid, I was very fond of reading. Jamyang Norbu (JN): I never intended to be a writer. Tenzin Dickie (TD): How did you come to writing? But more importantly, like Kim, the talented, brilliant, and courageous Jamyang Norbu has an irrepressible zest for life, a deep-rooted belief in justice, and a deep, abiding love for his country and his people. Like Kim, JN picked up languages like so much luggage (Tibetan, English, Hindi, Nepali, French) and had an early and defining encounter with the underworld of spycraft. JN says he thought of himself when he was a teenager as a Hemingway character, but for me, he brings to mind a Kipling character: Kipling’s beloved Kim, the precocious and brilliant boy who gets caught up in the Great Game and emerges an unlikely hero. When he wrote his novel The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes, a brilliant account of the famous detective’s missing years in Tibet, he won the Crossword Book Award (India’s Booker) and found mainstream literary success. He was astonishingly productive in those years, writing not only countless journal articles and pieces, but also co-founding Amnye Machen Institute, the leading center for advanced Tibetan studies. He was successful in his mission and French intelligence supported the guerillas for two more years.Ĭoming back to Dharamsala, the Tibetan capital of exile in northern India, as director of the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts, JN began to write and produce plays. The CIA had been covertly supporting the Tibetan resistance but when they began pulling out, the Tibetan government sent JN to Paris. Still in his late teens, he taught the Khampa guerillas Nepali and military history. As a teenager growing up in the Indian border town of Darjeeling where a substantial Tibetan refugee community had resettled, JN dropped out of school to join the Tibetan resistance forces based in the Himalayan kingdom of Mustang in Nepal. His Skype handle includes the numbers 59, referring to the year the Chinese army consolidated its occupation of Tibet, an event that radically changed the trajectory of JN’s life. I talked to Tibetan writer and intellectual Jamyang Norbu, who lives in Tennessee, on Skype the other night. Tibetan resilience: an interview with Jamyang Norbu Today’s interview features Tibetan writer and intellectual, Jamyang Norbu, one of our four benefit readers. ![]() This week we’re posting interviews and previews for our annual benefit on Friday September 25th. ![]()
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