Tsering Lama

We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies

Tsering Yangzom Lama

For readers of Homegoing and The Leavers, a compelling and profound debut novel about a Tibetan family's journey through exile. In the wake of China's invasion of Tibet throughout the 1950s, Lhamo and her younger sister, Tenkyi, arrive at a refugee camp in Nepal. They survived the dangerous journey across the Himalayas, but their parents did not. As Lhamo-haunted by the loss of her homeland and her mother, a village oracle-tries to rebuild a life amid a shattered community, hope arrives in the form of a young man named Samphel and his uncle, who brings with him the ancient statue of the Nameless Saint-a relic known to vanish and reappear in times of need. Decades later, the sisters are separated, and Tenkyi is living with Lhamo's daughter, Dolma, in Toronto. While Tenkyi works as a cleaner and struggles with traumatic memories, Dolma vies for a place as a scholar of Tibetan Studies. But when Dolma comes across the Nameless Saint in a collector's vault, she must decide what she is willing to do for her community, even if it means risking her dreams. Breathtaking in its scope and powerful in its intimacy, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies is a gorgeously written meditation on colonization, displacement, and the lengths we'll go to remain connected to our families and ancestral lands. Told through the lives of four people over fifty years, this novel provides a nuanced, moving portrait of the little-known world of Tibetan exiles.

Lindsay

If you let them, anyone can make you feel ashamed of your impulses. Sometimes I think that is the true religion of this country.

Still, I can see that what he offers me isn't love. It is something more basic. He offers me his emptiness, a chance to be important, to fill him. When he holds me tight in the darkness of his house, I can feel the hollow of his chest - as if a tunnel has borrowed through his ribs and into my chest when he siyes when he sighs into my back, breathing in my smell and rubbing my skin, I imagine I'm made of cold air, that I can slip out from between his fingers.

"We could all go mad if we let ourselves," Mo said. "But you've survived, so you need to keep living. That's all there is."

The world has forgotten us. To the vast majority, we do not matter. How else could they pass around our gods as possessions, display them in the sterile confines of museums and private collections, as though we were already long gone?

For years, I've sensed this violent but hidden truth - that beyond the welcome smiles of this country lies a vast and impenetrable wall: a national self-regard that insists on a mythic goodness. This is a nation that gives and gives to the less fortunate and asks nothing in return. Nothing, that is, but our grateful acquiescence to their silent expectations.

It feels wonderful to say yes to him. I want him to ask me more questions so I can say yes to every request, so I can spend my life saying yes to him.

My mother was not just an idea. She was made of a body, and a body is not simple or plain. It has its own will and its own mysteries periown mysteries. When it gives up, no song, no prayer can bring it back.

"They will not be satisfied with our land alone. They want to possess our minds."

Andrew Reeves

This one got put down a few times. I appreciate it was well written but it wasn’t for me.

April

This book felt like a lesson. It's a lesson of survival. Many parts of it are unrecognizable to me and were a learning experience: the culture of Tibet, Tibetan exiles and their way of life, the history of their land, their journey to Nepal, and their hardships. But so much of it felt familiar too: the life of an immigrant in the West and how exploring a new country isn't the hardest part about immigration, but the distance you put between yourself and your homeland. The questioning of your knowledge and intellect because you are an immigrant, and how small you feel in a place that puts little value to the things you've accomplished, all because these accomplishments you gained were from a country that isn't their own. Any accomplishment outside of the West isn't an accomplishment when you get to the West. 

My hearts break and mend for these characters: Lhamo, Tenkyi, Dolma, Samphel. Their parents and uncles--Ashang Migmar. Their friends. Relatives. There's so much being told in this story about the people of Tibet, especially those that are still living stateless, unable to attain a status for themselves as people exiled from their homeland, or as refugees in a new place. How much they hold onto the hope of returning to Tibet, of looking at their exile as temporary. Still, they don't let this hope blind them from reality, or prevent them from building a community outside of their home. 

Tsering Yangzom Lama, writes such beautiful and well-rounded characters, full of faults and perfections, love and anger, their failures, their victories, and all that's in between. But she also reminds us that these characters are real people--Tibetan people have endured and lived and survived. Although this book is fiction, their struggle is not.

We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies

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