*2024 Openbook Award

*2024 Golden Tripod Award

Driven to test and overcome her limits as a writer and adventurer, travel author Chen Fei-Fei has made multiple visits to Tibet over two decades, witnessing its changing cultural and social tapestries and using history to better understand this ancient nation’s history and the desires and aspirations of its people.

Nation on Ice is the culmination of over a dozen years of work and exploration by seasoned traveler and author Chen Fei-Fei. When protests and demonstrations erupt across Tibet in 2008, she scraps a nearly finished manuscript on her experiences in the region to truly research its rich culture and history. Her return visit in 2019 focuses on bringing to light the heritage treasures of this once-proud nation and on witnessing the changes over the past twenty years.

This work tracks Chen’s 2019 return journey through Tibet, recording chronologically her observations and interactions at each stop on the way as well as how things have changed over just two decades. By comparing and contrasting her own observations with the oft-differing perspectives of Western and Chinese scholars on the details of Tibetan history, she crafts a refreshingly readable, honest, and enlightening take on timeless Tibet. Her 2019 excursion through the Roof of the World overlaps with both Chinese and Tibetan New Years – a time of year rife with social and political tensions when Chinese public security agencies closely monitor the activities of both Tibetans and foreign visitors.

Different from 2008, she finds temples bereft of monks, former grazing lands occupied by shopping arcades and mines, rich touchstones of Tibetan heritage and culture trinketized for tourist consumption, and local history contorted and skewed to fit the official Party line. Tibetans, now second-class citizens in their own country and concerned about losing even more, are clearly more guarded about voicing their true feelings.

Chen Fei-Fei writes of Tibet’s present and past and about her own observations over two decades in flowing, well-constructed prose. Today, China’s heightened restrictions on travel to the region make it difficult to explore. The palpable image of Tibet presented in Nation on Ice gives readers rare insight into a land too-often off today’s travel radar, creating new and emotive connections with the outside world."