I FIRST MET Tsering Döndrup at his home in Xining – the largest city on the Tibetan Plateau, located in Qinghai province in western China. This was in early 2016, when I interviewed him about the complex and contentious relationship between Chinese and Tibetan literatures. I was embarking on the research that would coalesce into my doctoral dissertation, and I had not yet begun translating literature in earnest.
Over several cups of tea and even more cigarettes, we discussed his famed short story ‘Ralo’. Tsering Döndrup is soft-spoken, with close-cropped hair and prominent straight sideburns. His eyes occasionally glimmered mischievously when he offered more caustic or cryptic responses. As our discussion veered away from his short story, he suggested I put away my recorder, and we carried on our conversation, no longer as interviewer and interviewee.
This was the beginning of a fruitful partnership during which I have come to know the author as an astute, witty and deeply humane person who is also, in my limited estimation, perhaps the most important writer of Tibetan fiction working today.
Tsering Döndrup’s landmark work of fiction is arguably The Red Wind Howls, released (briefly) in 2006. Yet this novel is also something of an anomaly among his books, since its daring contents quickly led to it being banned by the Chinese authorities. Within the People’s Republic of China, it has long been unavailable to Tibetan readers, and it has been almost impossible to find a copy of it even outside of China. My English translation of the novel was published by Columbia University Press last month, hot on the heels of a recent French edition. Finally, through translation, this repressed masterpiece is once again seeing the light of day.