Foreword

Stevan Harrell

We usually think of Tibetans in the People’s Republic of China as an oppressed people. This is not wrong. Their religious activities and institutions are carefully monitored and severely circumscribed; their ability to use their own language in education and government is progressively constrained; they are denigrated as “backward” and in need of help from the Han-dominated regime; and their almost universally revered leader, His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama, is excluded from his homeland and denigrated as a traitor to China and a dangerous “separatist.” For some people, this oppression sometimes becomes unbearable, and their most extreme reactions include self-immolation in protest.

Because Tibetans are an oppressed people, we can easily assume that there is little joy or laughter in their lives, and that we should approach their predicament with uniform solemnity. This is wrong. Tibetans deal with the tragedy of Communist oppression as they have dealt with the vicissitudes of life on Earth for centuries—not only with “quiet desperation” or extreme religious devotion but also with uproarious comedy and biting satire. That satire, zurza in the Amdo dialect, is the topic of Timothy Thurston’s Satirical Tibet, based on his decade-plus of observing, listening to, recording, questioning, and even performing Tibetan comedy and satire.

To illustrate the continued salience of humor and satire in the cultural life of Amdo (northeastern Tibet, now mostly in Qinghai Province), Thurston leads us through a historical progression of satirical genres. He shows us first how zurza was present in traditional Tibetan folklore, and then presents detailed analyses of the specific forms that satirical performance has taken from the 1980s to the present. Focusing on extended passages from specific works, laid out in parallel columns of Tibetan text and his own English translation, Thurston demonstrates how the form and content of satire has changed as the medium has changed.

The first post–Cultural Revolution format for zurza was scripted, staged performances of khashag “crosstalk” dialogues (which Thurston helpfully compares to Abbott and Costello). These made fun of the politics of language and ethnicity in the emerging post-Mao order, as when an ethnic Tibetan Communist Party secretary will speak only broken Chinese to incomprehending Tibetan herders but insists on speaking Tibetan with his Han superiors, demonstrating his importance by employing an interpreter.

Khashag continued its popularity in the 1990s as audiocassettes and recorders became widespread, and the focus turned to the social ills of Amdo society as it began to experience modern economic change. Satirists directed their mockery at official malfeasance and corruption, village and clan feuds exacerbated by new opportunities for economic gain, the uncertain prestige of real lamas and their impersonators, and continued discrimination against girls in education.

In the early 2000s, as televisions and VCRs became widespread, the medium for satire changed to video discs, requiring much more preparation and better acting, since audiences would see as well as hear the performers, whose acts were now known as garchung. These concerned the increasingly precarious state of Tibetan culture, with many barbs directed at both Chinese and foreigners who began to view Tibet as a source of religious and ecological inspiration, often aided by Tibetans eager to benefit from their national and cosmopolitan connections.

Finally, after protests and repression across the whole Tibetan Plateau in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, hip-hop came belatedly to Amdo. But Thurston points out that performances during this phase were not as funny as their predecessors, as Tibetan cultural activists found their creativity increasingly circumscribed not just by repression of outright dissent but also by the very waves of digitalization that made their performances possible. To this day, many of them plaintively and mordantly, sometimes desperately, call for the preservation of Tibetan culture, even if they have to concentrate on such relatively neutral topics as language and secular folklore, and cannot mention more contentious aspects of religion, let alone Tibetan nationalism.

As Thurston makes clear, zurza has continued, sometimes more and sometimes less humorously, to be a channel for social critique and on occasion for understandable social resentment. But hilarious as it sometimes is, zurza always has a serious purpose. We see no examples as nonsensical as “Who’s on First?” or Gracie’s Allen’s malapropisms. Absurdity abounds, but frivolity is absent. Every dialogue, skit, and rap is about a social problem of some sort. In contemporary Amdo, comedy and laughter exist not so much in spite of repressive politics but because of it. Where direct critiques might be dangerous, the indirection embodied in zurza takes advantage of its own ambiguity (and of course of its frequent hilariousness) to serve a serious purpose of saying what needs to be said but cannot be said in plain words. While zurza brings levity into the lives of the audience and gives direction to the creative impulses of the writers and performers, that is an extra benefit, a psychological uplift in dark times and an indicator of the strength of character of people who are, as we know, living under an oppressive regime. The important thing is to be able to criticize.

As Thurston also recognizes, not all overseas audiences will appreciate the ways in which creative comedians and writers deal with oppression through satire. Some will see the situation in Tibet as so dire as not to admit anything humorous. But people living there have little choice. And Tim Thurston shows us this through his meticulous scholarship and infectious sympathy for those of whom he writes. We are proud to present Satirical Tibet as the twenty-sixth volume of Studies on Ethnic Groups in China.