By Kate Hartmann
Flowers of Lhasa tells the bleak but beautifully wrought story of four young women living in Lhasa, the bustling “City of the Gods.” Each woman’s story is different, and yet follows the same cruel arc. Driven from their homes by death, mistreatment, or the need to earn money for their families, they struggle to survive. Ordinary jobs prove low-paying or abusive, and they eventually find themselves resorting to sex work in the flashing lights of a nightclub called the Rose. Along the way, they abandon their given names and take on the names of flowers. The four share a cheap apartment and form a tiny family in a world that values only their youth and beauty.
The book was written by Tsering Yangkyi and was originally published in 2016 with the title Flowers and Dreams (Tibetan: me tog dang rmi lam). Tsering Yangkyi works as a teacher at a middle school in Lhasa, and also is one of the most well-known writers in Tibetan today. Her work has to this point mostly consisted of poetry and short stories. Flowers of Lhasa, which she wrote over the course of seven years, is only the second novel written in Tibetan by a Tibetan woman, a fact that reflects the relative paucity of novels in Tibetan compared to poetry or short stories rather than any lack of talent among Tibetan women writers. Indeed, Tibetan women’s writing is flourishing in Tibetan, Chinese, and English. Interested readers should seek out the writings of Chimay and Tsedronkyid in Tibetan; Pema Lhadzi/Baimanazhen and Tsering Woeser in Chinese; and Tsering Yangdzom Lama and Lekey Leidecker in English, to give a very short list, although much of this literature remains inaccessible to those who read mainly in English.
Tsering Yangkyi, Flowers of Lhasa. Translated by Christopher Peacock. London; Singapore: Balestier Press, 2022.
Readers are thus extremely fortunate to have this volume made available by the translator Christopher Peacock. Peacock brings a deep knowledge of modern Tibetan literature, having completed a PhD at Columbia University in the subject, as well as experience translating other contemporary fiction. See, for example, his rendering of Tsering Döndrup’s The Handsome Monk and Other Stories to get a sense of how his English prose changes to capture the different mood and style in these two different translations. This particular translation has already won an English PEN award and artfully captures the dreamy quality of Tsering Yangkyi’s writing while adapting complex Tibetan syntax into flowing English.
We can see this even in the opening sentence of the translation, which sets the tone for the novel. The sentence reads, "As the route circling the Jokhang Temple, the Barkhor is the heart of the old city of Lhasa, and the countless lively alleyways that weave in and out of the main thoroughfare are always teeming with people." To highlight the translation choices that Peacock makes, here is a deliberately over-literal translation of the same passage: "Around old city Lhasa's Middle Circle, there are many alleys. Usually, through those alleyways, many people go to the Middle Circle, so there is a very confusing aspect." Peacock subtly and sparingly adds information that will help English readers unfamiliar with Tibet. He also manages to convey a vitality—with alleyways that “weave in and out” and “teeming” crowds—that a literal translation mangles.
The story itself unfolds by shifting between characters’ backstories and present circumstances. Drolkar moves to Lhasa to earn money to support her brother’s bright academic future, but is eventually deceived by a struggling restaurant owner who uses her beauty to attract wealthy male clients. After one of the clients cruelly assaults her, she decides that it is her karma to work at the Rose, and embraces her new identity as Dahlia, as well as the material luxuries that come from her new line of work. When she encounters Yangdzom, an orphan from her hometown who recently fled from her job as a maid after being wrongly accused of theft, she takes Yangdzom under her wing. But the protection Dahlia can offer is minimal, and despite Yangdzom initially refusing to do sex work, she suffers a similar fate—assault and assent to a new life as Azalea. The two live with Dzomkyi/Magnolia, who leaves home after being abandoned by a fickle boyfriend who gets her pregnant and by her parents who disapprove of her abortion, and with Xiao Li/Cassia, whose cruel step-mother demands that she earn money for the family. Cassia is the lone Chinese member of the group and is the least committed to their shared family. She doesn’t speak much Tibetan, and edges away from Dahlia when a problem emerges that will transform all their lives.
Along the way, we meet various other people trying to make their way in the world: a wealthy teen girl who acts out to protest her parents’ preoccupation with work and mahjong; a young couple in love on their honeymoon; grief-stricken parents searching for their lost daughter; and a lost young man who turns to Dahlia for a weekend of companionship (Dahlia refuses to take his money, revealing her erstwhile “corruption” to be entirely superficial). These characters encounter and transform the central characters before fading back into the background. Each character study is finely observed, and much of the pleasure of the novel comes from following Tsering Yangkyi’s keen eye for the strange details of modern life. (Working as a maid, Yangdzom is “bowled over” to find that her wealthy mistress’ teen daughter has “haphazardly plastered” her room with posters of “young, blonde-haired foreigners in nothing but their underwear, their arms covered in strange tattoos.”)
One particular focus is the differences between city and country. We follow people from the country fed up with city life (“That’s the city for you–such big crowds!”), enjoying the freedom of the city (“We can buy a little place in the city, […] wouldn’t that be a better life than working our fingers to the bone in the countryside?”) or simply trying to figure out the difference (“Incredible—are city people’s stomachs smaller than ours or something?”). Tsering Yangkyi invokes some romantic ideas about the countryside preserving health and culture, but is also clear-eyed about the lack of opportunities and the difficulties young people face there. But she does not see the city as a paradise either; the novel is deeply attuned to the cruelties of life in Lhasa, which chews up so many of her characters. Wages are low, rent is high, bosses are callous, and the people are more concerned about advancing their own interests rather than caring for those lost in the big city.
One might fault Flowers of Lhasa in a few areas. Certain characters can read as archetypes rather than real people. For example, before they fall into life at the Rose, Drolkar, Yangdzom, and Dzomkyi are each described as beautiful, hard-working, selfless, and innocent country girls. They suffer powerlessly at the hands of heartless men. One would be hard-pressed to identify any distinct personality traits; their differences emerge only in the particulars of how they have been mistreated. Similarly, the novel could be seen as too bleak or even maudlin in its presentation of these women’s mistreatment.
However, to focus too much on these potential faults would be to miss what I take to be one of the central messages of the novel: the very sameness of these women’s situations reflects the social and economic dynamics in which they are enmeshed. That the story repeats itself is part of the point. It recalls the workings of samsara, where beings circle endlessly, rebirth to rebirth, suffering all the way. And as the novel itself repeats, “there is no happiness on the needle tip of samsara.”
And indeed, there are moments that point to potential escapes from suffering. Drolkar/Dahlia supports a brother who is on his way out of their impoverished village; Yangdzom/Azalea spots the woman who tricked Drolkar into sex work, who has improbably become a Buddhist nun; and the women themselves form an adoptive family that supports Drolkar/Dahlia in her moment of greatest need.
Lhasa is cruel, but flowers bloom there nonetheless.
Kate Hartmann is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wyoming. She specializes in the intellectual history of pilgrimage in Tibet, and received her PhD from Harvard University in 2020.