 |
| Buy Virtual Tibet
|
The release of Orville Schell's new book on Tibet was perfectly, if accidentally, timed to coincide with the granting of permanent normal trade status (PNTR) by the United States to China.
Amid the excitement over the bill's passage, Schell's book reminds us that China is the country that fifty years ago forcibly occupied Tibet and since then has forever altered the nation that for so long has held a strong grip on the Western imagination.
In Virtual Tibet, Schell lays out the delicacy of the situation in Tibet. He shows especially how Tibet's actual reality is bracketed, on the one hand, by the occupying Chinese and their plans and dreams, and on the other hand by an ethereal, but nevertheless powerful, Western Hollywood culture with its own set of plans and dreams. For much of the book, Schell explores this second "virtual Tibet" by following the making of the $65 million Hollywood picture, "Seven Years in Tibet," starring Brad Pitt.
Exercise in Introspection
In a recent interview Schell said the book had afforded him the opportunity to "come home." He'd tired of grinding away on his usual subject, China, for 14 books, he said. That body of work has firmly established him as a journalist and scholar capable of tackling huge periods of history, monumental events, and larger-than-life characters with great imagination. Schell's words on Mao and Deng and China, old and new, have long been taken as somewhere between gospel and a solid jumping-off-point for intellectual debate.
Schell's latest book is an interesting exercise in introspection. It is not so much about the vast, barren plateau that separates China from India, as it is about the Western inability to come to grips with the current reality of Tibet. That reality is an impoverished country whose leader, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, now occupies a strange virtual reality between Hollywood and Beijing. As a child, Schell admits that he, too, marvelled at the book on which the Hollywood film was based, and concedes that he was long guilty of projecting the fantasy of an idyllic Himalayan kingdom.
Levels of Tibetan-ness
The problem with "our" Western, imagined Tibet, the grown-up Schell says, is that it never was the paradise of James Hilton's 1933 "Lost Horizon," or Heinrich Harrer's 1948 book, "Seven Years in Tibet." In an age when our imaginations, once shaped by our grandmothers' stories and stories in books, are now colonized by the movies, Schell's careful accounts of the filming of Hollywood's two big Tibet films ("Seven Years in Tibet," and Martin Scorsese's "Kundun") are Vanity Fair-like psychological profiles of the cast of characters who want a piece of enlightenment Tibetan-style.
Schell talks to Steven Segal, the action pic actor who bought his enlightenment -- literally -- and to Pitt, Harrer, and Richard Gere, Western hero-figures whose levels of Tibetan-ness, if graded, might be said to start below sea level with Segal and approach the foothills with Gere.
Schell also interviewed those Tibetans most well known to the West, the Dalai Lama and his family.
The words of Jestun Pema, His Holiness' younger sister, at once exhibit the harsh reality Tibetans have faced and the phenomenal sense of humor of which they are still capable. Schell skillfully draws the surreal out of the Hollywood-Lhasa connection, noting that Jetsun Pema played the Great Mother in "Seven Years in Tibet," while her daughter, the Dalai Lama's niece, played the Great Mother in "Kundun."
Wisdom, Power, and Hope
She is at once capable of seeing the humor in this and of telling Schell of her last trip to her homeland in 1980 in a starkly contrasting tone.
"There seemed to be no balance," she said. "The Chinese go either to one extreme of the other. First they were Marxists, and now they've gone to the other extreme and become capitalists. There's no middle path."
As if he were trying to answer her, even apologize to her, for what mankind has allowed to befall her Tibet, Schell tries to explain how it is that the West has been unable to be of much real help:
"Indeed, it is ironic, if not misguided, that we citizens of the wealthiest and strongest nation in world history -- one that also has a culture of awesome (and voracious) dynamism -- should choose to invest a land that is occupied and a leader who has been exiled and dipossesed of almost everything with the presumption of such mythic wisdom, power and hope. Perhaps it just demonstrates that even the most powerful find it necessary to project unattained ideals somewhere else in order to maintain faith in the future."
Schell is a wry and skilled tour guide to a place no one can quite seem to pinpoint on a map. This is no mean feat for a China scholar who's involvement in another recently published book, Tibet Since 1950, demonstrates his keen awareness that the real Tibet on the real map is nearly all Chinese today.
VIRTUAL TIBET: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood is available at Amazon.com.
