The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong Audiobook By Gyalo Thondup, Anne F. Thurston cover art

The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong

The Untold Story of My Struggle for Tibet

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The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong

By: Gyalo Thondup, Anne F. Thurston
Narrated by: Lane Nishikawa, Bernadette Dunne
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In December 2010 residents of Kalimpong, a town on the Indian border with Tibet, turned out en masse to welcome the Dalai Lama. It was only then they realized for the first time that the neighbor they knew as the noodle maker of Kalimpong was also the Dalai Lama's older brother. The Tibetan spiritual leader had come to visit the Gaden Tharpa Choling monastery and join his brother for lunch in the family compound.

Gyalo Thondup has long lived out of the spotlight and hidden from view, but his whole life has been dedicated to the cause of his younger brother and Tibet. He served for decades as the Dalai Lama's special envoy, the trusted interlocutor between Tibet and foreign leaders from Chiang Kai-shek to Jawaharlal Nehru, Zhou Enlai to Deng Xiaoping. Traveling the globe and meeting behind closed doors, Thondup has been an important witness to some of the epochal events of the 20th century. No one has a better grasp of the ongoing great game as the divergent interests of China, India, Russia, and the United States continue to play themselves out over the Tibetan plateau. Only the Dalai Lama himself has played a more important role in the political history of modern, tragedy-ridden Tibet. Indeed, the Dalai Lama's dramatic escape from Lhasa to exile in India would not have been possible without his brother's behind-the-scenes help.

Now, together with Anne F. Thurston, who cowrote the international best seller The Private Life of Chairman Mao, Gyalo Thondup is finally telling his story.

The settings are exotic - the Tibetan province of Amdo, where the two brothers spent their early childhood; Tibet's legendary capital of Lhasa; Nanjing, where Thondup received a Chinese education; Taiwan, where he fled when he could not return to Tibet; Calcutta, Delhi, and the Himalayan hill towns of India, where he finally made his home....

©2015 Gyalo Thondup and Anne F. Thurston (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Asia Buddhism China History & Theory Political Science Politicians Politics & Activism Politics & Government Religious Tibetan World Imperial Japan Middle East
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An interesting account from one particular point of view. The author lived through and participated in the key events so there is much of interest here, however, the content is presented from his point of view only. The remarks at the end by Anne Thurston are helpful. What is totally unacceptable is the narrator Lane Nishikawa. He is an awful narrator, so bad that it makes it difficult to get through the whole book. He mispronounces "rinpoche" every single time; he emphasizes the wrong word in virtually every sentence. It is grating to listen to him. Buy the book or borrow it from a library!

Would be better to read the book...

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Good narrator. Fascinating story. Well written. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to it and couldn't wait to go on my walk again so I could continue.

Excellent

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An excellent book, which I highly recommend.
If you are interested in the history of China’s occupation of Tibet, the Dalai Lama and all the persons around him, you have to read this book.
The narrator, mr. Nishikawa, did an excellent job.
My thank
Is to all involved, JK.

EXCELLENT

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This book is very important if you want to learn more about the history of the Tibetan conflict with China. The names of the people are complex and not easy to keep track of for this American reader but the political timeline and perspective of the writer, who is the older brother of His Holiness, is important to understand.

Important historical understanding

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Interesting subject matter. A good autobiography, but oh my god, the man reading the book gives a terrible performance. Don't know if I will be able to make it through to the end. He accents every 4th or 5th syllable whether or not it is needed. He mispronounces English and Tibetan words. A robot could do a better job of reading

Worst Narrator I have heard to date

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I think all of Dalai Lama's brothers are interesting, though not always for good reasons. Gyalo Thondup in particular is a fascinating character because of his role in more than half a century when Tibet was in complete turmoil. I think he wrote this to the best of his memory and it gives the reader a good picture of Tibet recent history through the lens of Gyalo Thondup.

Very interesting

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This was a terrific and informative story, and the framing by the writer who was hired by Gyalo Thondup was thought-provoking. The female narrator was good. The male narrator was very frustrating. He hardly knew how to pronounce the Tibetan names, and “Takster” and “Rinpoche” in particular were forcibly and awkwardly pronounced the entire time, which broke into the experience of the story because the narrator In a first person story would have pronounced these words as naturally as breathing. Instead, they were laboriously pronounced, and it really interrupted the story. I almost didn’t keep listening because it bugged me so much, but I managed to get past it and enjoy the rest. It’s well worth reading, but I do wish they paid more attention to the narrator.

Fascinating story, frustrating male narrator

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I do not pretend to know much about Tibet, but this memoir of the Dalai Lama’s brother comes across as a politically naive, self-serving, and a not totally credible history of modern Tibet and it’s dysfunctional relationship with Communist China. The author’s education in China, his relationships there, and his understanding of Chinese culture (as flawed as it was) might have been of great benefit to Tibet, but it appears to me that together they compromised his loyalties to his country and culture. Note: the narration of this audiobook was stilted and detracted from the content.

Disappointing

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Thondup is not a religious fanatic. He is an unhappy and angry power-wealth fanatic. He is boastful, critical of others, and laudatory of himself. He blames the CIA, China, India, but not the shamefully cruel Tibetan theocracy of which he was a part, from which he had greatly benefited financially, and for which he desperately wished to continue. There are so many internal contradictions to his story that even his ghost writer had to go on record in saying she did not believing his story. For instance, while saying he was "just a poor Tibetan", he boasted that his family owned the largest house in town and feted all the theocratic luminaries that came to town. He boasted his uncle was connected to the previous Dalai Lama, had "10,000 camels", and that his grandmother was so sure that her son would be chosen as the next Dalai Lama, that she "died of grief", when that did not happen. Of course, Thondup made the choosing of his younger brother, as the 14th Dalai Lama, to be a divine, fair, redistributive, and egalitarian process; rather than a clearly opaque, phantasmagoric, and corrupt process, likely fought out among the Tibetan theocratic elites whose cruelty, greed, and dishonesty he described in detail at other times in the book when he chose to be critical and when he considered them his enemies.

While he said that China's "military invasion" of Tibet was an incomparable cruelty against the Tibetan theocratic elites, wherein "ordinary people" sadly lost hundreds of serfs and huge tracts of land and luxurious estates; he also said only around 120 of those resisting elites were injured or died in the process. He said that the majority of the Tibetans were joyous of the China's land reform, redistributing land to the 99%, and joyous of the outlawing of serfdom, and the government's forgiving of all debt contracts, most of which extended generations into the future. Contradicting his previous assertion, Thondup did let slip that a historic agreement was signed, months earlier in Beijing by the Dalai Lama, that allowed for a peaceful entry into Lhassa of the government troops, without a single shot being fired.

While saying that China was "lying" and that there had never been any imperialist power in Tibet, he also detailed British and CIA operatives living in the area, manning the only wireless connection to British India and from whom he had derived assistance in getting to and from India.

Although Thundup admitted to being a poor student most of his life, who enjoyed spending money on luxuries; it seems he would have at least done a few Google searches in preparation in writing a "historic book". He claimed that Tibet has always been independent of China and of all foreign powers. He claimed the Tibetans are completely different genetically and by language from the Chinese. Robert Ford, who lived in Tibet at that time and who was mentioned in the book, had blamed the Tibetans for never having asked to be "independent" or declared Tibet to be independent (see youtube). Genetically and language-wise, Tibetans are the closest relatives to the Han Chinese in the world. The first King of Tibet had married the niece of the emperor of China, in the 7th century, and had declared on a stele, which is still in Lhasa today, that "the two peoples will forever be one". That first Tibetan-Chinese empress also brought Buddhism to the Tibetan king, and is now considered a Buddhist deity in Tibet. Thondup also missed that Britain had invade Tibet in 1903 leaving in 1904 with an coerced, unfair, signed treaty from Tibetan elites, requiring a large extraction of silver.

I watched many of a huge trove of private Youtube, Tiktok, and Bilibili productions about Tibet. It seems to me Tibetans in China, are living a much more modern, egalitarian, secular, educated, and prosperous lives than the resisting Tibetans still living under theocratic rule in India. While it may be true that centuries of Buddhism indoctrination, made the common Tibetans, in the 1950's, unable to accept any denigration of the Tibetan theocratic elites whom they had been taught to revere and to obey; denigration of Han elites was probably even more common and more severe, in those day, in an extremely impoverished China, after a century of foreign military aggression and foreign financial extraction, desperate for egalitarianism. I think history has already spoken in favor of the 1950's the government's decisions in land redistribution to the Tibetan serfs, and its decision in bringing Tibetan theocracy under modern secular laws.

Polemic blaming everyone. Not believable

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