Source: Sinosphere, NYT (8/24/16)
How a Hong Kong Filmmaker Came Across a New Kind of Tibetan Business
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By EDWARD WONG
A worker inspecting a yak wool scarf at the Norlha textiles workshop in Gansu Province. Credit: Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times
BEIJING — Several years ago, Ruby Yang, an Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker based in Hong Kong, began working with Siemens, the German engineering company, on a corporate video about sustainable development.
She and the company’s representatives decided to try to find a social enterprise in China’s far west, which encompasses the vast Tibetan plateau. Ms. Yang said the company allowed her creative control, with the only major requirement being that the film illustrate how electricity was helping the region, where Siemens had been working with electricity companies.
Her research led her to Norlha, a textile workshop in the village of Zorge Ritoma, in a region of Gansu Province known as Amdo to Tibetans. The workshop had been founded around 2006 by a Tibetan-American family. It employed many women from the village, which was made up of nomadic households. Ms. Yang traveled to Zorge Ritoma for three days of preproduction, then returned to shoot for eight days in May 2012. She finished the video that August.
For various reasons, Siemens did not use the film for its original intended purpose. But Kim Yeshi, who founded the workshop with her daughter, Dechen, persuaded Siemens to allow an 11-minute version of Ms. Yang’s video to be posted online.
I heard about the workshop from Ms. Yang while she was making the film. In July, I traveled to the Sangke Grasslands to meet with the Yeshi family and to take a look at their new social enterprise, Norden, a luxury campsite near the Buddhist monastery of Labrang. The purpose of the campsite is to raise revenue for Norlha, the textile workshop, which is a short drive away.
In a telephone interview, Ms. Yang shared her thoughts on what she learned while shooting at Norlha in 2012:
“It’s a way for nomads to transition to modern life. Some of the families, especially women, can have a stable job. It’s very difficult for women to find a job outside of the village. They have to travel so far. In the village, they now have a job that makes decent money. And it also helps for the men. Now the nomads are changing. The younger people might not want to be a nomad anymore. If one member of the family can have a stable income while another person decides to become a nomad, the family can be better off. That’s modern life. One goes into modern industry.
“The products they make are absolutely beautiful. They are taking the traditional skills they have and marketing it to the outside world. Few people know nomads can make such beautiful products. People don’t know they have been doing it for centuries.
“I was able to some spend time with the nomads. Even though a lot of them haven’t had a real education, a lot of the people in the workshop, they know how to do these things. And they have only had a few years of education.
“In Hong Kong, people spend hours and hours on tutoring, on studying for exams, on trying to get into the best schools. And they might not learn anything. Here, they don’t have much schooling, but they are doing the best job.
“I also noticed that a lot of them, when they weave, they also pray. They have their prayer beads and pray with those when they don’t need to use both hands for their work.
“The thing is, they don’t have to leave the village. They can walk to the workshop in five minutes. I think that’s so important for them, so they can be with their family. They can have a job and spend time with their family. If they have to go to the city and have to leave their children, they don’t necessarily have the income to hire a babysitter.
“For a lot of nomads to go to the city, to go to modern life, I don’t think they like it. It’s a big shock for them. It’s too huge a shock.”