'Nowhere to Call Home: A Tibetan in Beijing' to be screened at White Lecture Hall

Anyone who has been to the expat-heavy Sanlitun area of Beijing has seen the ubiquitous street side Tibetan vendors, selling coral and turquoise jewelry, furs, and wood and metal artifacts. Few stop to peruse their wares; even fewer take it upon themselves to talk to the vendors themselves.

Jocelyn Ford went several steps farther than conversation. Ford, a former Beijing bureau chief for NPR’s Marketplace show, first met Zanta, a Tibetan jewelry seller, in 2005 in Beijing, and Ford left her phone number. Two years passed with no contact until Zanta called Ford out of the blue with an extraordinary proposal: she wanted Ford to take her young son Yang Qing as her own child. Widowed at 28 and afraid to return to Tibet and face the wrath of her oppressive father-in-law, Zanta was out of money and out of options. Ford ended up sponsoring Yang Qing through school, befriending Zanta, following Zanta back to her home village, and documenting the entire experience. That unlikely story is now the material for Ford’s new documentary, Nowhere to Call Home: A Tibetan in Beijing.

The documentary (which full disclosure, I have not seen yet) promises to be a rich cross section of the obstacles Tibetans and indeed, all outsiders, face in a Han-dominated (China’s biggest ethnic group; more than 90% of Chinese are Han) society. Nearly 10,000 Tibetans live in Beijing, a city infamously inhospitable to the millions of migrant workers who toil invisibly. Having spent several months at various points in my life in Beijing myself, I can confirm the city is a sometimes wonderful, occasionally tragic, cesspool of contradictions between traditions and modernity, outsiders and insiders, and the haves and have-nots.

“For a long time the blame for all internal problems in China in the minds of the Chinese has always been directed externally. So this movie for the first time shines the light inward, and it documents a lot of these internal factors that a lot of Chinese aren’t aware of and that the previous narrative used to wallpaper over, which is why it’s so popular at a lot of Chinese universities. They’re seeing a story they’ve never seen before,” said Tenzing Thondup, a Tibetan student at Duke University.

Tibet remains an extraordinarily sensitive third-rail issue in China, for whom recognizing but assimilating the country’s 55 ethnic minorities has been a decades-long effort. That history makes it even more remarkable that Nowhere to Call Home has been quite well-received among Chinese audiences. Ford described to The New York Times her ultimate goal to begin a dialogue about race in China.

“I wanted to make this something that everyone can understand,” she told the NYT. “It’s about a woman trying to get an education for her child.” For the many thousands of nameless Tibetans in China, who are alternately vilified as politically deviant “separatists” or fetishized as an exotic, benign Shangri-La Buddhists, Ford’s more humanistic and nuanced portrayal is long overdue.

That portrayal is especially relevant today, as ethnic tension and conflict rise again. Deadly attacks in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, a major railway station in Yunnan province, a Urumqi marketplace, and seemingly weekly bombings, stabbings, and executions in Xinjiang province have put ethnic groups and perceptions of them back in the spotlight. Chinese authorities have responded to recent attacks with police force and a soft culture campaign. A new Chinese television show rife with historical inaccuracy about a Xinjiang princess married to the Chinese emperor Qianlong is the latest example of a Pocahantas-like effort to paper over ethnic tensions through historical editing. In a time when discussions about race and ethnicity are more needed than ever in China, a romanticized master narrative has dominated instead. Ford’s documentary will hopefully buck the trend.

Nowhere to Call Home: A Tibetan in Beijing will be screened at White Lecture Hall on East Campus, September 2 at 7 PM.