MCLC: Leaving China confiscations (4)

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Leaving China confiscations (4)
And just imagine if you were Chinese! You get a flavor of what that means -- and of the anxieties of the post office employees trying to obey the Chinese state censors -- if you read Woeser's blog page cited on Ragged Banner Press, namely the piece "Some details about Tubo (Tibet) in Gyanak (China)", see: http://raggedbannerpress.com/VoxPop/aTubo.html
Quoting Part 1:
"One afternoon I went to the post office to mail some books. They were my books: one copy of Tibetan Memories, published by Dakuai on Taiwan, and one copy of Poem In Tibet’s Name translated into Böyik (Tibetan), a volume that arrived not long ago from America. I wanted to send these two books to a friend in Amdo. Not long before — well, a bit more than a month ago — I had mailed some books, the Taiwan magazine Unitas and a copy of my Invisible Tibet. On that occasion they had gone out with no fuss after the comrades at the Post Office thumbed through them perfunctorily — not like that spell during the Olympics, when even a single piece of paper would get taken apart for analysis. And this was November, now, even further removed from the Olympics; who would have thought they’d have grown edgy again?
The two women comrades at the Post Office were quite young. They said, “Ah, Tibet, this book’s about Tibet, that’s pretty sensitive.”
Suddenly on my guard, I asked, “How come? Is there a rule?”
“Well of course,” one of them said, “These days Tibet’s gotten very sensitive. You can’t just go and mail anything you want about Tibet. This book of yours, where was it published? It’s in the traditional characters.” The other chimed in, “And this one hasn't got a single word of Chinese, it’s all in Tibetan. Where was this published?”
I got annoyed at the way they were taking turns grilling me. “What’s wrong with traditional characters? What's wrong with Tibetan? They’re both formal publications.”
“Even if they are, we can’t do it,” they said firmly. “Got to ask our boss for instructions. We’ll find out whether we can mail ’em for you.” They both wore a relaxed, pleasant smile. One of them actually picked up a phone and started telling the person on the other end: two books on Tibet, can they be mailed, one in traditional characters and the other all in Tibetan yada yada. I asked the other one whether no books about Tibet could be mailed.
“No, it’s not that,” she said. “Anything published in our country can be mailed, like, you know, from the China Youth Publishing House and so on, that stuff can be mailed.”
The other woman put down the phone and said to me, “You leave these books here with us. The boss will check them out for you, OK?”
“Why should I do that?” I almost had to laugh. “Thanks a lot! I won’t mail them; someday I’ll deliver them myself.” I picked up the books and walked out somewhat discouraged.
When I got home, I told W. it seemed this country was starting to view Tibetans in a very different light. He answered nimbly: “What’s there to feel glum about? If this were a rational world and irrational things were happening, that would be bad news. But in an irrational world, irrational phenomena are perfectly normal — it’s only if rational things started happening that there would be something wrong.” With a little thought, I saw the truth of this, and it made me feel better."
End quote.
Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42 at cornell.edu>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on October 30, 2015
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