Telling Me My Stories

At age nine, Kunzang Choden was sent to a boarding school in Kalimpong. No one else in the school spoke the only language that she knew then, Bhumtangkha. Every night she would lie in bed and whisper to herself all that she had seen during the day and repeat the English words and phrases she had heard. She soothed herself to sleep by telling herself the stories she knew from home. Kunzang was orphaned young and her early life was shaped by loss and absence. Written in a series of remembered episodes and musings, this memoir moves between her past in a remote Bhutanese village, the schools she was sent to in India and her present, where she is living once again in her childhood home—Ogyen Choling, now transformed into a museum honouring the legacy of her ancestors. Kunzang’s memories of a privileged upbringing in a landed household are recollections of a long-gone Bhutan. In a bid to join the modern world Bhutan underwent momentous changes in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Telling Me My Stories is an important historical record of fading and soon-to-be-forgotten social structures, lifeways and beliefs. It’s also the story of a family that faces these currents of large­scale social change recounted in a voice both entertaining and intimate.