Posts by Alec Ash

One Tibetan's story, caught between identity and modernity – by Alec Ash

When Tashi calls, I am in a temple overlooking Xining, the capital of Qinghai Province in western China. Loud, slurred, distraught, he asks me to come quickly.

Tongren, or Rebkong in Tibetan, is eight bumpy hours south, high on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, and the next bus is at noon. When I arrive, it is dusty evening. Tibetans in cowboy hats or Adidas beanies walk the markets, where Hui Muslims in characteristic white hats sell fried chicken and chilled Coke to Han Chinese immigrants. Monks from the Tongren monastery stretch their legs, trainers poking out from underneath their dark crimson robes. Although this region is not politically defined as Tibet (“China’s Tibet,” the autonomous region established by Beijing in 1965, is many miles to the southwest), ethnically and historically, it is firmly Tibetan. It is Tibet out of Tibet.

I find Tashi in a bar on the outskirts, in the middle of a self-hating drunk. He is in his mid twenties, with dark Tibetan skin, brown puppy dog eyes, and a greasy waterfall of black hair. On the table in front of him is a small Everest of cigarette butts and a display of beer and liquor that would make the poet Li Bai, famous for his verses on wine, blush.

“I’m an animal,” Tashi says, looking up. “She left me.”

Inside the world of reality TV dating shows – by Alec Ash

When rock didn’t make him famous, Lucifer tried TV. Rustic had burnt bright but short. D-22 club had closed in early 2012, and the scene had moved on. But talent and dating shows were booming, and here he looked for a new adoring audience.

A new book by Alec Ash

While we've been publishing stories from China by you, dear readers of our little colony, your humble editors have also been beavering away at their own writing. Now that fruit is ripe for the tasting. So gather around. That's right, it's time for some shameless self promotion and abuse of editorial privilege as I plug my own book.

On top of my own journalism, and anything else that keeps me in my noodles, for the last four years I've been germinating, researching and writing my first book, Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China. It's literary nonfiction, a deep dive into the lives of six young Chinese of my own generation, and it was published yesterday by Picador.

The book is very narrative in conception, and jumps between the six people I write about, telling their stories from childhood to mid to late twenties. There's Lucifer, an aspiring superstar (who was in Rustic for those who know it); Snail, a country migrant from Anhui who gets addicted to World of Warcraft; Fred, daughter of a Party official from Hainan; and even a love story, though I won't spoil the surprise by revealing which two characters meet each other halfway through the book.