© 2011 Guy de Viron
© 2011 Association Francophone des Lecteurs du Livre d'Urantia
A bit of history: Shu Wen is a young Chinese woman from Nanking. After her medical studies, she decides to specialize in dermatology. At university, she meets another student, Kejun, a laboratory assistant. Having lost his entire family during the Sino-Japanese War, the government finances Kejun’s studies, who is gentle and kind to everyone. He works hard and is an exceptional student. The army urgently needs surgeons, so Kejun thinks about enlisting. He leaves and Shu Wen has no news for two years. When he returns, Kejun finishes his studies and the young couple decides to get married. He is twenty-nine and Shu Wen is twenty-six. The marriage is celebrated but only three weeks later, Kejun’s unit is sent to Tibet. Shu Wen anxiously awaits his return but receives a summons to Suzhou headquarters to learn that her husband has died in an incident in eastern Tibet on March 24, 1958, at the age of twenty-nine.
But Shu Wen refuses to believe in Kejun’s death. She decides to go to Tibet to try to find him. The army desperately needs doctors, Wen’s dermatology degree makes her precious in their eyes. She therefore leaves with the army for a quest that will last around thirty years during which Wen will be taken in by a family of Tibetan nomads with whom she will live for many years in the company of a Tibetan friend, Zhuoma, met in the army and who is also looking for her lost love.
The story of Shu Wen, this young Chinese doctor who became a middle-aged Tibetan woman, is true. The author Xinran is a journalist in Beijing and hosts a radio show when she meets this extraordinary woman, Shu Wen, in 2003. She will collect her confidences before losing sight of her. Since then, she has been looking for her and a moving letter to Wen accompanies the story. This story is simply overwhelming. It is the story of a woman driven by the unwavering determination to learn what happened to her husband, her great love whom she has never forgotten. Demonstrating extraordinary courage and tenacity, she will travel through Tibet for thirty long years in order to find traces of her life partner. During this time, she discovers a country whose customs and beliefs she knew almost nothing about and gradually becomes more Tibetan than Chinese. She adopts the clothes and hairstyle of Tibetan women and learns to live in the fashion of nomadic families in Tibet. Every evening, she writes her diary and takes out Kejun’s photo in order to keep a good memory of his features. Over the years, the photo has yellowed but the sweet face of her great love reassures her and consoles her in her torments…
My personal reflection: Far from any historical, political and even literary consideration, the story of this nomadic love is of a rare and prodigious intensity. The emotion it arouses has something visceral, not at all frivolous. And yet this romantic relationship of a few months was able to generate feelings so powerful that they grew throughout a lifetime, despite the physical absence of the other. It is an atypical journey that we follow here, with a knot in our stomach, and our minds that think, that race. That of a young woman who left alone for Tibet, with no other goal than to find her husband who was certainly deceased. Her faith in him, her tranquility, allowed her to overcome multiple sufferings, physical as well as moral and to survive in a region that seemed inhospitable, compared to “a large monastery”. And this decor, this “emptiness of the landscapes, the invisible wind blowing on the uncultivated land, the high, infinite sky, and total silence”, both immense and desert-like, accentuate our affectivity.
A human being, in this case a woman, undergoes a test that she considers right to take on. She will go all the way, that is to say to the point of no return, where there is nothing left material or mental. Where authentic spirituality blooms, the breathing of the soul with fruits such as patience, constancy, resignation, serenity…
The years no longer count. Timelessness. Shu Wen has become a transfigured woman! And to think that she could have stopped this experience, consoled herself with another man, chosen an easier life, … what else do I know? I hardly dare to imagine if the roles were reversed! This kind Kejun, would he have been as wise, as exemplary, as persevering? And to extend my reflections: what is the rest of their adventure? Will their reunion be as celestial as we hope? What is the goal or the price of this experience? Does this human couple have a special destiny? Had the celestial associates of these characters premeditated this adventure? Could these qualities manifest themselves, be transposed into a “normal” life as a couple? Between consenting “Joint Actors”?
In any case, hats off to you, Mrs. Shu Wen! Thank you for being a woman! Thank you for showing us so many skills and abilities! Thank you for teaching us to love so intensely, for sublimating human love! Thank you for the discreet sacrifice of your earthly life! Thank you for being so humanly close to us!
If I remember correctly, the UB tells us that the differences between genders will become more pronounced during our universal career. Since sex will no longer be a criterion, we must guess that there are other, more essential reasons… Why not take advantage of it from our first incarnation? Our differences can be acquired or innate. The role of education and civilization is sometimes more decisive than that of human physiology. For example, we are taught that women currently have one more rod in their eyes than men; which would allow them to more precisely distinguish certain shades of color in the red-violet spectrum and that this would probably be due to the picking of small fruits for thousands of years while men hunted mammoths and developed a sense of direction, essential for… hunting! In short, this feminine acquisition could be resolutely exploited today in all graphic, advertising, decoration work, etc.! It would be great for an infinite number of applications. Calling upon such skills, whether physical, mental or spiritual, would become truly exciting and would motivate our joy of living our partnerships here below… In his interpretation of the myth of Orpheus, Gustave Grasset proposes a procession of musicians to tame the wild beasts. As such, the potential of femininity is part of our collective imagination but can also become a reality if we give it the possibility.
(to be continued)
* The heavenly funeral or the extraordinary adventure of a Chinese woman in Tibet by Xin ran P. Picquier / PICQUIER PHILIP. Text compiled and reformatted by the editorial staff.
Guy from Viron