Conclusion The Irrepressible Trickster

In late 2019, concerns about a mystery illness emanating from Wuhan gradually morphed into a full-blown pandemic reaching all corners of the globe: COVID-19 needs no introduction. As the movement of goods and people around the world ground to a halt, increasing amounts of human interaction and creativity moved online and into digital spaces. Tibetan interactions were no different, with China’s zero-COVID policy limiting travel even within the country more seriously than was done in many parts of the rest of the world. There was, in fact, no guarantee that a person would be allowed out of their homes even just to buy necessities. People might find that one day they could do their shopping in the local market, and the next a neighbor’s positive test might result in their entire apartment complex going into lockdown, with little indication of when they might be able to leave. Everything from education to traditional performances moved into online spaces as people turned to digital spaces to transmit culture and maintain bonds of sociality at a distance.

Comedians and other cultural producers quickly rose to meet shared challenge by creating new works to entertain online audiences and (sometimes) to assist in efforts to fight the new virus.¹ Namlha Bum (mentioned in chapter 1), sometimes called “Daddy Cheche” after one of his most famous roles, starred in a series of short videos in which he selfishly bumbles about town, overlooking many of the new regulations of the COVID-19 era in the process. The series, entitled “Daddy Cheche’s Shorts on Pandemic Precautions,” includes over ten videos, acting as public service announcements for Tibetans in Amdo.

The videos, most of which come in at under two minutes in length, each place a single practice on display. In one, the comedian blithely walks into a market without a mask, oblivious to the fact that everyone has their face covered. Guards turn him away at the door. In another video, Daddy Cheche sets about cleaning his apartment, but his mask-wearing wife corrects him for not using alcohol to sterilize surfaces. In a third, he gets bored of quarantine after traveling and is caught going about town when he should still be at home. While the topics may differ, each video also shares a common structure: a humorous illustration of an activity, plus an intertitle in Tibetan and Chinese stating explicitly how Namlha Bum’s character has transgressed the appropriate practice. The video then ends with a statement from the performer—as himself, sitting at a computer—about the correct behavior.

The videos, created in 2020 with the support of the government of the Tsholho Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, were then broadcast on the prefecture’s television station and shared online.² Video effects like speeding up time, along with extradiegetic soundtracks (like an a cappella version of the Super Mario Brothers theme song or the one for the famous “Pig’s Head Soothsayer” miniseries), help to generate some extra humor and entertainment value. Using the tried and tested techniques of indirection and sarcasm—that is to say, using zurza—Daddy Cheche’s misdeeds illustrate the correct behaviors by negative example. The use of zurza again allowed a Tibetan presence in yet another form of cultural production and at the height of the pandemic.

A host of other short videos—ranging between one and twenty minutes in length—have also appeared in recent years, some with a similar aesthetic, others more akin to filmed garchung. Most are scripted. Many appear to be privately produced, while others have government backing. Like the comedies of previous decades, these satirize a range of behaviors, including distracted driving, public drunkenness, and gambling, among others. They also benefit from reaching audiences apart from the New Year’s variety show. Now comedians and other creators can respond to events in real time.

Alongside these short videos, streaming and video-sharing platforms like TikTok and Kuaishou—already on the rise before the pandemic—have emerged as popular ways for people to reach audiences across previously unthinkable distances in real time. Expressive practices that had only recently begun circulating beyond their communities with the advent of audiovisual media—cassettes tapes, VCDs, and DVDs—now reach audiences around the world with the same immediacy of the oral performance (connectivity permitting). Pastoralists stream their morning routine as they roast barley or churn butter, bards stream as they perform the Tibetan epic, singers duel opponents from the comfort of their own homes. In many cases, they may perform for hundreds or even thousands at the same time.

Such platforms, however, have their limitations. For users of Kuaishou, which Tibetans call Jyoktrin, Tibetan script is not supported and Tibetan-language videos are subject to increased scrutiny. While WeChat permits Tibetan-language posts, most are limited to a relatively select group of followers. The restrictions on language are a sign of the times, and the degree to which the space for minority-language cultural production has become constricted in recent decades. At the same time, it persists, often in humorous form, because of its ability to be perceived as bringing zheng nengliang—and streamers may explicitly label their videos and channels as such—and because of tangential links to ongoing government projects of cultural heritage safeguarding. In doing so, such new forms of communication link tradition bearers with audiences in new ways, and potentially provide tools for Tibetans to overcome problems of distance, formalized education, and urbanization that seem to take many away from the communities that have sustained their culture.

The increasing numbers of platforms and expressive forms available to Tibetan cultural producers, alongside the residual presence of favorite works from decades past, makes the present moment (indeed, the twenty-first century more generally) an era of aggregation. Consumers can listen to their favorites from the “Careful Village” series, followed immediately by streaming a video “Gesar’s Horse Herder” and then a rap video. The specific, temporal, and contextual critiques of the different works collapse into a single logic of Tibetan cultural survival: their shared interests in modernizing communities through language.

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A decade earlier, in the fall of 2009, I arrived on the Tibetan Plateau to conduct my first fieldwork with the goal of researching first horse race festivals and then Tibetan trickster tales. Despite finding many sanitized versions of favorite episodes in published collections or available as illustrated children’s books, I only ever heard a few oral retellings of such trickster narratives that year. Those stories I did hear were confided, with furtive and almost embarrassed looks. These were old stories, a little bit dirty, and not really appropriate for repeating. Beyond trickster tales, in fact, I was left with the impression that the relating of Tibetan folktales in general had largely ceased. As potential narrators found their audiences more enamored with modern media, including both Chinese film and television, folktales now lived primarily in collections compiled, edited (excised of any salacious or unwholesome material), and published alongside other works of “folk literature.”

Student autobiographies from across the Tibetan Plateau reinforced my sense of the decreasing place of folktales in rural life, with many devoting an entire chapter to the sudden appearance of television and how it changed the fabric of their lives. Even elders, they claim, began to feel that the old stories were unimpressive: how can cultural heroes like Uncle Tonpa or King Gesar possibly compete with the likes of film star Jackie Chan or mythical hero Sun Wukong, the Monkey King in Journey to the West (Kondro Tsering 2012, 96)?

These recollections found parallels in nostalgic films and television series that began appearing around that time. The hit miniseries Yesterday’s Story (Rdo grags, 2008), with its catchy theme song and powerful plot, depicts a pastoralist encampment undergoing the changes of the early post-Mao era—moving from tents to fixed dwellings, the influx of modern technologies and other vices—through the experiences of Grandpa Nyima and his family. Grandpa Nyima, a patriarch whose stories had once made him the center of his small encampment, watches helplessly as his family abandons traditional lifeways in favor of modern alternatives. Around the same time, the award-winning film The Silent Holy Stones (Lhangjag gi mani donbum) (Pad ma tshe brtan, 2005) shows a young monk who seems more interested in television than in his studies (perhaps understandably). This reaches its visual and narrative climax in a scene in which he joyfully dons a plastic mask of Sun Wukong at a party. Doing so visually emphasizes the intense changes brought on by mass television ownership and, by extension, technology.³

In some cases, cultural producers sought to keep folktales and traditional knowledge alive in the minds of Tibetan audiences through retelling and reimagining folktales in new media; The Pig’s Head Soothsayer (Mohtun phamgo), the highly popular miniseries of the popular folktale, provides one standout example. In the 2014 feature-length film Uncle Tonpa (Aku Tonpa), meanwhile, director Lujya Rati takes considerable artistic license to create a narrative that links some of the trickster’s tamer exploits into a single narrative. In addition to and beyond these reimaginations of folktales, this book has shown that cultural producers have also sought inspiration in zurza (rather than in any particular narrative or tradition) to tell stories about contemporary Tibetan life in new genres and media. The works studied here provide a representative, rather than exhaustive, look at post-Mao cultural production in Amdo. The focus specifically on secular cultural production necessarily overlooks the important place of religion in Tibetan identity both historically and into the present day, but it is done primarily to highlight the continued role of zurza.

If folklore is the stories people tell themselves about themselves, then post-Mao Tibetan cultural production in Amdo has seemed to create modern stories that these producers were telling themselves about their contemporary lives. Though these stories can be attributed to specific individuals, in many cases, Tibetans across Amdo (and beyond) quote them in daily conversation, incorporating them into their own conceptions of their modern selves. They describe anxieties over the state of the language, culture, and environment in Tibetan communities, and provide new “equipment for living” in a rapidly changing world.

Using zurza, the texts profiled across the pages of this monograph serve as new trickster tales for a modern Tibetan society. Zurza invites audiences to engage with these new narratives of modern life along traditional lines, and to consider how works might entertain, engage in critique, and proffer some sort of (sometimes implicit) resolution. Menla Jyab’s pretending to be a lama to dupe the people of Careful Village is a staple of Uncle Tonpa stories, and also models the solution to a significant problem. Uncle Horse Herder’s use of folk wisdom and traditional reasoning to protect local interests against higher-status outsiders also invites audiences to consider the behavior and attitudes of the teacher Hongmei. Less directly, the speakers in Dondrup Jya’s “Speaking Tibetan” scheme about how to deal with the language tricks of a superior, and twenty-first-century rappers seek to shape public opinion by satirizing behaviors deemed inappropriate or incongruous. The solutions modeled all offer ways for communities to make Tibetan futures out of their present conditions. Tricksters are, after all, healing characters (Jung 1968), and cultural healing is often what is needed in societies that have had languages and cultures threatened by a dominating, external force (Squint 2012, 108).

I had found tricksters after all, just not the tales I had expected. Instead of traditional narrative, I had found comedy and hip-hop. Instead of Uncle Tonpa, I had met Uncle Menla, Uncle Buddhist, and several other comedians, rappers, and authors. These cultural producers also live betwixt and between. Like tricksters, they cross physical and social boundaries (Hyde 1998) with ease, and model pathways for cultural healing. Keenly observant comedians and other cultural producers, keeping one foot in the city and the other in their home communities, have found the emergence of these new technologies to provide valuable spaces to engage in meaningful work. Uncle Buddhist, who grew up in the city not learning Tibetan well, is now a famous Tibetan rapper. Menla Jyab, Dondrup Jya, and Jason J, meanwhile, left the countryside for education and employment but later became central to the Tibetan cultural world through their influential work. I had gotten a similar sense from Alai, an internationally renowned Sinophone Tibetan author (who is almost universally disliked by Tibetan readers), whose most famous works often include some reference to Uncle Tonpa.

Sitting on the geographic and social margins of society—and always “the Other” in relation to the dominant society by virtue of being minoritized—these cultural producers bring the trickster to life every day. Both in their work and their lives, Menla Jyab and others model for their audiences—readers, listeners, and viewers—new ways of trickster-living and linguistic and cultural healing in a modernizing society.

The trickster ethos that these cultural producers embody and employ is also evident in the boundary-crossing behaviors of many of the Tibetans I met who navigate their lives in contemporary Amdo, including those who have chosen to work within the government. Those in positions of power advocate for their ethnic group. Though things might have changed in recent years, as the focus on party orthodoxy has grown, I have often been struck by the ways that many who work in government have found to practice Buddhism, advocate for Tibetan culture, and access valuable resources, even under the watchful eye of the state. Take, for example, the police officer I met in Golok, who circumambulated the holy mountain of Amye Machen—a grueling multiday hike in the best of weather—as if it were an extreme sport; he also had the six-syllable mantra Om Mani Padme Hum tattooed in large writing across his chest. According to him, this work was little more than a way to pay the bills—that is, render unto the party that which is owed to the party.

I met many young Tibetans who also seemed to take similar boundary-crossing positions. With families pressuring them to join the Communist Party and seek the financial stability of government employment, these young people navigate a complex set of incentives and desires. In many cases, however, those working in government have served as some of the staunchest advocates I have met for safeguarding Tibetan traditions or building new educational opportunities for youth (as described in Makley 2018). Often, they also praise the government for the tremendous investments of human and financial capital that it has made on the Tibetan Plateau. Though this praise runs counter to many of the narratives to which we are most accustomed in the Euro-American West, they seem heartfelt (at least in context), as it seemed to provide resources for them to work within the system to carve out Tibetan cultural futures, and the work is ongoing.

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I left Amdo in 2015, returning for short trips each year prior to 2019. Since leaving, I often struggled to describe to people outside of China—including but not limited to academics, activists and members of the exile community—the very complex calculus of internal motivations, social pressures, and external incentives that seemed to shape the decision-making processes of the Tibetans I met. At conferences, workshops, and in casual conversations, my descriptions were frequently met with some variation of the response: “They’re brainwashed” or “They have no choice.” Others reflexively seemed to blame every problem on “the Chinese.” I cannot accept these assumptions—at least not when formulated in this way.

Tibetans in the People’s Republic undoubtedly live in and navigate a highly constrained environment, in which they must carefully monitor what they say and do (and, as I have shown in this book, how they say and do them). But ignoring the creative ways that Tibetans have maintained and even revolutionized their culture—both from within the state system and in resistance to it—denies them agency and treats them only as victims. I have shown how zurza—the Tibetan arts of indirection, sarcasm, and satire—provided cultural producers with a powerful way of actively localizing new expressive resources, accessing state media to do this work, and ensuring Tibetan physical and cultural presence in some of the harshest of times. Across decades and media, the texts examined in this book record some of the ways that Tibetans have used zurza to foreground issues seen as particularly pressing for their communities in spite of the tremendously asymmetric power of the Chinese state.

Zurza sits in conversation with discourses of ethnic pride, modernity, and linguistic identity, helping to advance some of the most important intellectual and cultural debates of the post-Mao era. The specific practices and forms that Tibetan intellectuals and cultural producers in Amdo use for sarcastically expressing ethnic pride and supporting ethnic development are unique to their circumstances and constrained by the requirements of their positions—but they do this nonetheless. Rather than “collusion,” “collaboration,” with the state, or outright resistance to it, these people were strategically considering how to improve their own lives and those of their fellow Tibetans.

This environment is also dynamic. Each of the decades profiled in this book shows how cultural producers work in response to Tibet’s evolving political, intellectual, and media environments. This dynamism continues today, as I noticed in short fieldwork trips between 2016 and 2018. In 2016, on my first return to China, Ziling had not one but two Starbucks coffee shops (there had been none when I left the year before). In 2017, a viral social media post about changes to the implementation of China’s bilingual education policy (Dak Lhagyal 2019) resurfaced old debates and anxieties about the present and future of the Tibetan language. By 2018, urban Tibetans in Ziling no longer did circle dances in the city’s central square due to a new regulation aimed at curbing noise pollution, and some (even retired) officials confided that they would no longer circumambulate religious sites. These signs hinted at the rapidly changing material and political conditions over the last few years.

With zurza providing an important, traditional resource for cultural producers to draw on, the ongoing existence and popularity of the expressive forms studied in this book—comedic dialogues, sketches, hip-hop, and others—tell a story of Tibetan cultural resilience and survival in post-Mao China. They create and maintain spaces for Tibetan language and culture in state media and in daily life, all despite the disruptions experienced by communities across Amdo. The future of Tibetan media and expressive cultures are very much up in the air at the moment. Whatever form it takes, however, and whatever issues it engages, zurza and Tibetan trickster energy will almost certainly have a role to play if Tibetanness is to survive in and beyond modern media.