"Marie Hua's Journey to Tibet: Soul Like the Wind (Revised Edition 2007)"

Author: Ma Lihua
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2007-01-01
Features: Ma Lihua entered Tibet in 1976 and over the years, she traveled extensively across the region, publishing numerous works including poetry, prose, academic treatises, and long novels. Among them, the writing and research for Tibetan North Journey, Westward to Ali, Soul Like the Wind, and Red Mountains of Eastern Tibet spanned over two to three decades, presenting both a broad and profound display of the natural and cultural landscapes of representative regions in this world-highland. The first three were compiled into Across Tibet in the 1990s, becoming a bestseller both domestically and internationally. The literary circles hailed it as "a rare gem in contemporary Chinese literature" and "a bridge between literature and anthropology," earning Ma the title of a "writer-ethnographer." These four long documentary works are also regarded as the pioneering works of Chinese literary anthropology. Soul Like the Wind records various traditional agricultural cultural phenomena in central and southern Tibet, particularly in Lhasa and the Shannan region. Through tracing the history of the area and conducting in-depth interviews with farmers, monks, pilgrims, and other groups in rural communities and monasteries, the work delves into the core of traditional contemplation—the soul. It is both a song of the soul and a questioning of the soul. Due to the depth of observation and reflection, alongside the vivid portrayals of numerous phenomena and characters, the book leaves readers pondering long and hard.