Tswang Pemba’s White Crane, Lend Me Your Wings: A Tibetan Tale of Love and War comes as a gift from the past. The late doctor, considered the founding father of Tibetan literature in English, had previously authored two books: his autobiography, Young Days in Tibet (1957), and Idols on the Path (1966), the first Tibetan novel in English.
His posthumous offering, White Crane, Lend Me Your Wings, is fiction on an epic scale and gives readers a bird’s eye view of Tibet’s tumultuous history, it’s deep spirituality, and acts as a geography lesson on Tibet serving as the Water Tower of Asia. In this novel, Tsewang Pemba has evoked the tribal milieu of Kham, Tibet’s ‘wild east’ with its own sense of family and tribal honour where revenge and banditry were a way of life. Above all, White Crane, Lend Me Your Wings tells the fate of Tibet, long isolated and friendless, when it was confronted by the modern world in the form of communist China.[Source]