From the backwaters of Central Asia: An exiled Indigenous voice
By: Tenzin Mp
Tags: Tibet, Water, Colonization, Asia, Climate Change

This essay is about a UC Berkeley program describing the region I and others are from as a “backwater”, while at the same time extolling it as a site of opportunity for academics. I find this important to discuss because scholars who take no issue with such a description are the same ones who media outlets will reach out to for perspective on Central Asia. In March 2021, the sentence with the backwater reference was removed from the program website. I encourage journalists to first seek out scholars who belong to the communities they study, in the interest of more accurately and ethically considering groups whose lives and perspectives are usually articulated by others.

On January 7 2020, UC Berkeley’s Institute of East Asian Studies announced a unique graduate seminar on Central Asia. Recognizing the emerging strategic importance of the region, the seminar sought to attract graduate students to join a “Central Asia Working Group” that could establish itself as a “focal point” for Central Asian studies in North America. The seminar was cosponsored by the Center for Silk Road Studies, the Institute of East Asian Studies, the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the Buddhist Studies Department.

For its purposes, the seminar defined Central Asia as Mongolia, Xinjiang (‘New Frontier’ in Mandarin), Tibet, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, as well as “potentially extending into Manchuria and southern Siberia”.

I’m from Central Asia. In March 1959, my grandparents walked dangerous, unfamiliar paths across the Himalayan mountains so that their Tibetan culture might survive and they could live without fear of imprisonment by invaders. Three of them survived; however, one of my grandmothers died shortly afterward in a refugee camp. But her youngest child, my father, lived, as did her other children. He was 22 months old when he left his village, strapped to his mother’s breast and shielded from the bitter cold by her woolen chupa. “I remember a feeling of kindness”, he said. “And then her body is carried from the tent.” Although they were relatively near the Himalayas, they were at a vastly lower elevation than the Tibetan plateau. The summer heat and lack of basic hygiene made disease extremely communicable, and my grandmother was the one my family lost. In those first few years of exile most Tibetan families lost a loved one; if not at the hands of Chinese forces or while crossing the Himalayas, then in the various Tibetan refugee camps scattered across Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Bomdila (Arunachal Pradesh), Baksa (Assam), and India.

It is not only Tibetans who are impacted by our land’s continued colonization. The world’s highest and largest plateau, Tibet is home to the headwaters of eight of the major rivers of Asia. Supplying water to people and wildlife living downstream in such countries as Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, India, and China, “The Water Tower of Asia” is one of Tibet’s titles; “Roof of the World” is another. Hundreds of millions of human beings receive life from vast river systems that begin in Tibet; indirectly, these rivers sustain the life and livelihoods of half of Asia. This is 1.3 billion human beings alone, each one’s water supply affected by their neighbor’s choices. No neighbor’s actions are of more consequence to Asia than that neighbor who decides what happens to the water in Tibet.

After the North and South Poles, the Tibetan Plateau stores our planet’s third largest reserve of freshwater. This attribute earns it another nickname, this one among climate change scientists: The Third Pole. It is also Earth’s largest source of alpine permafrost, a fact that makes The South China Morning Post describe it as our planet’s permafrost “arsenal”.

It’s interesting then, to see how the Central Asia Working Group introduces its subject: “After two decades as a relative backwater, [Central Asia’s] geography and natural resources have attracted significant energy and infrastructure investments from a new generation of trade and development partners, which includes China, Europe, the United States, and high-income Asian countries.”

If you look up ‘backwater’ on a search engine you’ll get the following results: “a part of the river not reached by the current, where the water is stagnant”; “an isolated or peaceful place”, and ; “a place or condition in which no development or progress is taking place.”

It is disturbing to see an institute of higher learning, an Asian studies program no less, describe my homeland and its neighbors as a region where nothing noteworthy or progressive was taking place until recently. Because that’s what a backwater is — a place where nothing important happens. To be stagnant is to have no flow, a state usually accompanied by an unpleasant odor and overall unhealthy environment. The Central Asia Working Group has ostensibly formed to help correct Central Asia’s lack of recognition. But institutional scholarship doesn’t take place without money, and something else a working group like this facilitates is a generative place for people to carry out research, publish, and build careers.

The Institute of East Asian Studies didn’t seem to find it necessary to select a scholar from a Central Asian community to run the program, so they probably didn’t consult one before writing such an insulting description. Currently colonized as many of us are (or recently decolonized), there aren’t many Central Asian scholars on Turtle Island/the United States. I happen to be one of them — I’m a Tibetan doctoral candidate in UC Berkeley’s Rhetoric Department. I’ve kept a low profile for the most part, because I find Tibet is a subject most academics lack critical thinking or political solidarity around, and because Tibetan Studies is a field controlled by white scholars who don’t take kindly to constructive criticism by Tibetans. So I stick to conducting my research and teaching the occasional course.

Like other Indigenous lands including the one I write from, Tibet is still being colonized. I caught a Lyft to school in February because I was running late; it was a week before the first Covid-19 case was detected in the United States. The Lyft driver happened to be Tibetan. He recognized me instantly and encouraged me in my studies. “Education is the key to self-determination,” he said. He told me he left Tibet 22 years ago, and I asked if he had been lucky enough to return home during that time. No, he told me, not once. “My father died five years ago. I asked for a visa three times as he was dying. The Chinese consulate in San Francisco denied me each time.”

Tibet is no backwater and neither are its neighbors. Stagnation has no home there; it is the place where the flow begins.

This essay was written on Ohlone lands. Its author Tenzin Mingyur Paldron is a transgender Tibetan doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley’s Rhetoric Department and a Magistretti Fellow in Asian Languages, Cultures, History, and Society. His other works are available at paldron.net.

Recommended reading:

This list is brought to you collaboratively, by the author and his peers from Central Asia.

we have not heard from my baba-jaan’s relatives in kashgar for almost two years now. By Nurdoukht Khudonazarova Taghdumbashi (Instagram: @mandu.manta). daikon*, 23 June 2020.

Nile Green, The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca (New Texts Out Now) by Dr. Nile Green, Guggenheim Fellow and Professor of History at UCLA. Jadaliyya, 4 September 2019.

How Nowruz is Celebrated Around the World by Alex Shams, PhD student of Anthropology at University of Chicago. Ajam Media Collective, 21 March 2018

From Syndication to Society: Abdullah Tuqay and Central Asian Literature by Asher Kohn, City Planner (Master of Urban Planning and Policy from Univ. of Illinois at Chicago, law degree with emphasis in Land Use Law from Washington University in St. Louis). Ajam Media Collective, 18 February 2013.