New Tibetan writing stares down the hard truths of exile

At one point in the Tibetan writer-in-exile Tsering Yangzom Lama's evocative debut novel We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, the protagonist, Dolma, says, "People find our culture beautiful … But not our suffering." She has stolen a ku – a statue – of a nameless saint from the vault of a rich white Canadian collector, an artefact that has time and again found a way to emerge whenever her family is in need of protection. Her birth-father, Samphel, who sold the statue to foreigners, tells her it was her mother, Lhamo, who gave it to him. "What I do know is that survival is an ugly game, and our objects are all the world really values of our people," Samphel says. "Our objects and our ideas. But not us, and not our lives." 

Scattered like ants across the face of the earth as a Tibetan prophecy foretold, the world's 130,000 Tibetans in exile have been rendered invisible for the most part. Their histories have been subsumed within the "Tibet issue", meaning individual stories of dislocation and suffering are typically framed within the questions of politics, territory and sovereignty that followed the Chinese government's annexation of the Tibetan plateau in the 1950s.