Abstract
“Life in the Shadows” is taken from Lhasham Gyal’s acclaimed short story collection Sunlight on the Path (lam gyi nyi ’od), first published by Qinghai Nationalities Press in 2010. It tells the story of Tashi, a Tibetan working in an unnamed modern metropolis in the east of China. The introverted Tashi works at a research institute, where he goes through the motions of a humdrum job weighed down by the arbitrary demands of bureaucracy. As the story flashes between the present and the past, we learn about Tashi’s childhood in the highlands of Qinghai, the exploits of an extroverted schoolmate, and how he came to meet his wife. Throughout the piece, poetic motifs of light and shadow render a vivid picture of Tashi’s solitary existence, a picture that reveals to us not just an existential crisis of urban living, but a pointed commentary on the fraught politics of ethnic identity in modern China.
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