Echoes from the Himalayas: the quest of Ma Lihua, a Chinese intellectual in Tibet

In 1976, a landmark time in recent Chinese history, Ma Lihua graduated from a junior college in Shangdong province and answered the Party’s call to go to Tibet. Not a remarkable action when jobs were assigned to college graduates, working in Tibet was nevertheless one of the few things one could find sufficient excuses to avoid, especially for a young woman from the Eastern seaboard. For the first 12 years she worked as a cultural worker and an editor at Tibetan Literature. With two volumes of poetry published in the second half of the 1980s, ¹ she was selected to attend a two-year program for creative writers at Peking University. Upon graduation she went back to Tibet and was reassigned to work as a professional writer. As a full-time professional writer and with the two-year refreshing education in Beijing, she embarked on a series of field research and traveled to almost all counties in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR). From 1990 to 1994 she published three separate volumes of essays, which in 1994 were collected in Traversing Tibet, a huge volume that earned her national and some international recognition. ²