“We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies” by Tsering Yangzom Lama

Tsering Yangzom Lama

As is so often the case, when Tibetans fled their homeland for Nepal and India, they thought to return in their lifetime. Their homes in these new lands were in what were hoped would be temporary refugee camps. Decades later these camps have now become permanent and Tibetans work in jobs that revolve around the tourist industry, serving trekkers, mountain climbers, and westerners out to “find themselves”. Tsering Yangzom Lama covers these realities in her debut novel, We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies, a family saga of love and loss that spans three generations and centers around an ancient statue of a deity, or ku, that both represents their rich cultural heritage and a guiding light in their exile.

The story begins in 1960 as two young sisters, Llamo and Tenkyi, move from a border town in Nepal to half a dozen other refugee camps in that country over a couple years. Lama writes vividly of the landscape.

 

After months of living in caves and snowbanks, foraging for berries and drinking from mountain streams, we have descended to the desert lowlands. Here, people look a little like us, though they call themselves by different names. Here, we found a valley dotted with many others who fled from other parts of Ngari and U-Tsang. Our group of eighteen families, nearly half our village, huddles together beside a mighty river, making a new village with fabric and sticks.

 

Llamo and Tenkyi’s mother, Ama, is a medium and guides their group. The girls’ parents die en route, one after the other, and in a dream Llamo hears from Ama, imploring her to take care of Tenkyi, who will travel far. The girls are left in the care of relatives and the guidance of a ku, of which they don’t know the name and simply call the Nameless Saint. The ku becomes just as important to the story as do Llamo, Tenkyi, and Llamo’s daughter, Dolma, and Llamo’s childhood sweetheart, Samphel. The book is separated into sections narrated by each of these characters.

The ku first comes to Llamo and Tenkyi’s mother when she’s a young girl and senses that there’s something otherworldly about her. This is when it’s first discovered that Ama was a medium. A high monk visits the family to try to calm a young Ama and brings the ku.

 

The high monk explained to Ama that this was no ordinary statue. Just days before he came to her aid, the monk’s dreams had been visited by an unfamiliar Saint, who directed him to a nearby cave where a ku was hidden. The Saint told the high monk that the ku did not belong to him or anyone else. It would appear and disappear depending on who needed it, and the high monk must respect that.

 

We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, Tsering Yangzom Lama (Bloomsbury, Penguin Random House Canada, May 2022)
We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, Tsering Yangzom Lama (Bloomsbury, Penguin Random House Canada, May 2022)

A small statuette, the ku appeared as an emaciated, distressed man wearing only a loincloth, looking toward the sky. Llamo and Tenkyi are a little frightened by the ku, but understand its importance. The ku disappears for years and returns to the family when Semphal’s uncle brings it back in the 1960s. Decades later, when Llamo’s daughter, Dolma, is living in Toronto with Tenkyi—Ama’s prediction come true—the ku reappears yet again. Dolma is given a special viewing of it at a fancy dinner she attends at the home of collectors of East Asian art. She doesn’t know it’s from her family, but feels strange when she learns it’s Tibetan and hundreds of years old.

Lama weaves into her story issues of Tibetan activists, art collectors, and academics, none of whom are Tibetan themselves but feel a call to this land. The ku is representative of this complexity. Where does it belong? In Tibet or Nepal? With the family that has had it in its possession for decades? Or should it continue to help another family when needed? Or should it be safe in a museum in Toronto? In Lama’s story there is no one correct answer. The ku can also represent Tibetans in exile, as in a later section, Dolma wonders about the ku and its destiny.

 

I think of the Nameless Saint. His promise of continual return. His freedom to move. His frailty. His persistence. That minute but ancient mirror of humanity.

Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.