White Crane, Lend Me Your Wings, a line from a poem by the Sixth Dalai Lama in which he consoles his followers banished by the Manchu in 1720, speaks through the title of Dr T.Y. Pemba’s novel as a wistful plea for the return of exiled Tibetans to their cherished homeland. This long awaited novel dramatizes the recent history of eastern Tibet, bringing the human story of resistance to colonial conquest and a clash of worldviews to the fore.
—Tsering Shakya, Historian and Professor (Univ. of British Columbia)
Author of The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947
Tsewang Pemba’s story telling is dramatic, intricate and powerful, with flashes of the erotic, the sordid, the mystical and the brutal. He offers important insights into the real tensions at the root of China’s still-unfinished attempt to absorb Tibet into itself sixty years ago. Drawing on his own lived experience of Tibetan culture, as well as on the extraordinary life of the Scots missionary George Patterson among guerrilla fighters in eastern Tibet—together with a nod to the moral questions posed by Dostoevsky’s ‘Grand Inquisitor’—Pemba shows just how complex and incompatible were the multiple ideals, brutalities and passions which must have driven events at that time, and perhaps still do.
—Robert Barnett, Director of Modern Tibetan Studies (Columbia Univ.)
Author of Lhasa: Streets with Memory