[FIRST IMPRESSIONS] “Four Women Migrant Workers: TSERING YANGKYI’S 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐹𝑙𝑜𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝐿ℎ𝑎𝑠𝑎” by David W. Landrum

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Tsering Yangkyi (author), Christopher Peacock (translator), The Flowers of Lhasa, Balestier Press, 2022. 205 pgs.

The city of Lhasa in Tibet is generally known as the site of Jokhang Temple, a Buddhist shrine, and Potala Palace, once home to the Dalai Lamas (now a museum and a world heritage site). Yet Lhasa is also a populous urban area and an administrative centre. Flowers of Lhasa is a novel that focuses on the lives of young women who got to the “big city” hoping to find well-paid jobs but find their ways into less-envious lines of work.

The four women—Drolkar, Yangdzom, Dzomky, and Xiao Li—through various sets of circumstance, enter prostitution. Some are forced into it with violence; some decide they have no other choice; all have a sense of duty to their families, who depend on the money they send home (and are unaware of how they earn it)). The novel chronicles their lives and, as it does, describes the violence and sadism they are forced to endure. One of them dies of venereal disease. The others are trapped in the place to which circumstance has led them.

The book calls attention to the exploitation that frequently occurs as the result of economic inequality. All the same, it is not melodramatic or overly emotional, but rather a well-written text that shows, at the same time, genuine sympathy and unstinting realism. The novel is a must for anyone wanting to understand the culture of exploitation that, unfortunately, thrives in so many cities and so many cultures around the world.

How to cite: Landrum, David W. “Four Women Migrant Workers: Tsering Yangkyi’s The Flowers of Lhasa.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 28 Feb. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/02/28/flowers.

David W. Landrum teaches Literature at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, USA. His poetry, fiction, and literary criticism have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including Twentieth-Century Literature, Mosaic, Studies in Philology, and Italian Quarterly. [All contributions by David W. Landrum.]