During their stay at the guesthouse, Wen had further opportunities to talk to the general about what had happened to her. She was particularly adamant that Zhuoma and Tiananmen should be allowed to travel with her to China. She explained to him that Zhuoma was the head of an important Tibetan family. She showed him some of Zhuoma’s family jewelry as proof of her story. The general promised to do what he could to find documentary evidence of Zhuoma’s identity. One afternoon, he came to Wen and Zhuoma in a state of excitement, saying that he had found written records of Zhuoma’s clan.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news, though,” he said hesitantly. “I have been told that their estate burned down many years ago.”

Zhuoma didn’t explain to him that she had witnessed the burning of her house. Wen looked at her, but said nothing. She knew that Zhuoma’s former home had long ceased to exist for her in any meaningful sense.

Two days later, the general came looking for them again. This time his face was wreathed in smiles.

“Someone in Beijing remembers reading a report that described Kejun’s death exactly as you have told it to me,” he said, “and one of them recalled that there was mention of a wife who lived in Suzhou. I think this is enough evidence for us to confirm your identity and grant you permission to travel to Beijing. There you can apply for resettlement and an army pension. As for Zhuoma, we have learned that there was indeed a female heir to your clan’s estate, and the uniqueness of your jewelry proves that you are her.”

Wen and Zhuoma were filled with happiness, as if for the first time in decades they had been told who they really were. But there was still something that troubled Wen.

“If there were records of Kejun’s death,” she asked, “why then didn’t his death notice mention how he had died, or accord him the status of a revolutionary martyr?”

The general looked at her gravely. “I cannot answer that,” he said.

WITHIN A week, Wen, Zhuoma, and Tiananmen found themselves on an airplane to Beijing, equipped with all the paperwork they needed. Zhuoma had been given an official letter of introduction that would allow her to find teaching work at the Minorities Institute in Beijing should she wish it. Tiananmen possessed a document which said that he was on an official visit to China and would then return to his monastery.

Wen didn’t say a single word during the flight. Before her eyes passed scene after scene of her life in Tibet. The faces of Gela’s family filled her mind. She took out Kejun’s creased photograph and battered diaries, and poured a silent stream of tears over them. Kejun would never see his wife again, her face now deeply etched with the spirit of Tibet. He would remain forever on the plateau, beneath the blue sky and white clouds.

Her heart was full of trepidation. Would her parents be alive? Where was her sister? Would her family recognize her?

She unfolded the paper crane, kept prisoner for so many years inside her book, and gently smoothed out her sister’s letter. Time had erased all trace of the characters. Her half book of essays felt heavy, as if weighted down with the water and soil of the plateau.

Wen was shaken out of her reveries by the voice of a child asking her mother in Chinese, “Mummy, why does that Tibetan lady smell so bad?”

“Shh, don’t be rude,” her mother said. “Chinese and Tibetans have very different ways of life. You shouldn’t say thoughtless things like that.”

Wen looked down at her threadbare and faded clothes. If she was no longer Chinese, who was she? But perhaps that question did not matter. What was important was that her soul had been born. Wang Liang had been right: just staying alive was a victory.

THERE COULD be no comparison between Wen’s first-class sleeper compartment on the journey from Beijing to Suzhou and the stuffy sardine can of a train that had carried her to Chengdu all those years ago. It was like the difference between heaven and hell, not to be mentioned in the same breath. In contrast to the Tibetan plateau, the scenes that flew past her window were full of life. She sat and watched the red-brick and gray-tiled houses of Beijing give way to the familiar white houses of the Yangtze delta.

Zhuoma and Tiananmen had not accompanied Wen on her return to Suzhou. She had asked them to wait for her in Beijing. She wished to see her family alone.

Throughout the journey, Wen’s tears fell in a constant stream over her robe. Whenever the train guards or her fellow passengers asked what was wrong, she just shook her head. So concerned was one of the guards that he made a request on the train’s loudspeaker for someone who knew sign language or Tibetan to come forward and help.

When the train pulled into Suzhou, the station bore no relation to Wen’s memory of it. She assumed it was a new station and began asking directions to Suzhou’s old train station. It had been pulled down, she was told. She hailed a taxi, but the driver hadn’t heard of the place she wanted. After much discussion, he worked out that she was referring to a street in the suburbs that had been demolished ten years ago. He kept looking at her as if she were some kind of monster and she had to plead with him to drive her there.

When they arrived, she was stunned by the scene that greeted her.

Her sister’s courtyard home with its moon gates and the beautiful little garden by the river had disappeared, replaced by row upon row of high-rise buildings. She stood there, dazed, not knowing what to do or whom to ask for help. She approached some construction workers mending a road, but couldn’t understand a word any of them said. She finally worked out that they were from the south of Anhui Province and had no idea what had happened in Suzhou in the last three decades. Wen felt utterly lost.

As evening drew in, Wen gathered herself together and found a hotel not far from where her sister’s house used to be. A sign with two small stars on it hung above the reception desk, although Wen didn’t have a clue as to what that meant. At the desk, she was asked for her identity card but had no idea what that was. Instead, she produced the letter of introduction the Tibetan Military Department had given her. Unwilling to make a decision on her own about whether to let Wen register, the hotel receptionist asked her to wait a moment and disappeared. When she finally returned, she told Wen that she could have a room, but she should go and register at the police station as well.

THAT NIGHT, Wen dreamed she had returned to Tibet with Kejun to look for her parents and sister on the holy mountains. She was woken before daybreak by the roar of traffic. She sat watching it from her window until she fell into a daze. Her eyes were used to the endlessly rolling grasslands. Everything here seemed so crowded that she could make nothing of it. The hometown she had dreamed of had vanished without a trace.

At that moment, she heard the rattle of bamboo clappers below her window. Her heart leaped at the memories the sound awakened: when she was a little girl in Nanjing, the itinerant rice sellers carried such clappers and, when they passed her house, her mother would always buy her a little bowl of sweet fermented rice. Wen rushed out of her room, toward the sound. Outside she saw a familiar sight: a rice seller carrying two buckets suspended from a long pole on his shoulders. In one of the buckets the hot water used to cook the food steamed, heated by a small charcoal-burning stove built in beneath; from the other rose the old intoxicating aroma of fermented rice. Nothing had changed: even the waistcoat the man wore was the same as she remembered.

Wen hurried over to the peddler. He stopped banging his clappers.

“Eat here or take away?” he asked.

“Here,” she replied.

She watched him deftly pour a ladle of boiling water into a bowl, then scoop out two lumps of fermented rice with a bamboo spatula.