a frenzy of tangled umbrellas and lowered self esteem when the first
comments out of her mouth are, "oh you look so /healthy/, maybe you eat
too much American food".
Students, friends, random passersby, all of Asia... I did not gain
weight this summer. Jenda, O-nea ribe, really. If I'm fat now, I was fat
before.
Never mind... on through the crowds the slick slippery of stone that
rarely sees rain, the damp push of clockwise motion. Gingerly step past
the beggars stooped on the stairs and push aside a curtain to a highly
recommended tea house, the best chow mein in Lhasa... though I beg to
differ. Nothing remarkable about this small room. In fact, everything
smacked of normalcy (the current definition of which may be more
illuminating than intended) with the multi-patterned benches, small boy
swinging singing in and out of the door, containers of chili paste
scattered on sticky tables, a Jackie Chan comedy blaring away on a TV
wedged in the corner, strangers sitting as close as relatives waiting
for bowls of noodles to come one by one out of the greasy kitchen.
Believe it or not, normalcy reigned.
Until the curtain door flapped open and a young Tibetan man took a
nearby seat. At a glance I knew that I knew this boy, so familiar his
face, but nothing in me could remember where I might have known him
from. As I politely avoided his stares and focused on the pictures my
friend was showing me my mind searched through ever crevice of memory,
every English Corner meeting attended, every student's relative's house
visited, every awkward conversation avoided or messily engaged in... all
the searching, sweeping away of memories cobwebs... nothing. A massive,
unsettling blank.
Finally, in an effort to put to rest what normal people simply ignore, I
lean over the table to the young man and said in slow precise English,
"Excuse me, do I know you?"
A quick "Ting bu dong" (Chinese for: I don't understand) and I was
baffled. My friend thought this was hilarious and I beg her to ask the
man where I know him from in a language that he can understand. She
obliges from amusement and hear this story, which unfolded in Chinese,
Tibetan, and English:
He did know me. We had been on the same bus one morning to Gaynden
monastery. He remembered that I was with Tibetan girls. And then the
storm of that day came back to me like a hurricane... that was the day
when my students got sick on the bus ride up there, the day that they
had bowed before everything that shone, the day that we had been
harassed by a loud group of men in a tea house desperate to take a
picture with me, the day that we had stopped at some nondescript temple
for more prostrating opportunity... and sure enough in the midst of all
of that, this boy had in fact been there... his face floating in and out
of all of my memories of that day.
His name is Jia Tso, he graduated from Tibet Medical College last year,
he is from a Tibetan area of Sichuan province, he thinks I am too young
to be a teacher, he wonders why most foreigners are so ugly but I am so
beautiful. For all I know he is still sitting in the tea house where we
left him drinking coke through a straw shortly after the conversation
took that turn.
The drizzle had cleared and in the cool damp I couldn't help but marvel
at a city where in a forgotten alley tea house one can run into a man
from a very random bus trip to a monastery. AND BE REMEMBERED. A face
so familiar. Am I becoming part of this city? Or am I memorable only
because I am so strange? Is strange what it means to be here?
Speaking of strange: less than ten minutes after the forgotten memory
encounter, I chanced to find a five kuai note laying on the ground. Do
not fear friends, it was promptly spent on a thermos of tea as I enjoyed
the rest of the afternoon with a different friend who has selflessly
made it her mission to teach me Tibetan. Again, normalcy, as loaded as
that word is, reigned.
