Broken days

Some things are broken. Some entire days are broken.

I walked a long, dirty road stained with nasty to get to a small, dark room now crowded with familiar. My friend sat with her cousin watching a documentary on the laptop. I shuffled clothes and books around on a bed to make space to sit. Her sister walked through the door with bulging bags of vegetables. The stove was lit to make tea.

The documentary was about the quest to find a lama's reincarnated self. You became cold as the monk traversed snowy heights. You became disappointed when he arrived at empty villages. You became shocked when the chubby child chose the correct beads. But you were never forgiven, you were never ransomed, you never became free...


Finding this child is more important than a thousand of my own lives the monk said, teary eyed.

My friend and her sister had seen it more than a dozen times and could quote it. The cousin was transfixed. I was sinking deep into depression as the lostness of an entire people group clamped down on my heart. Before my friend had left for Beijing she had been dreaming of another Word, a better one. Now she was offering carrot cake crumbs to a picture of a demon with human skulls around his neck.

They paused the documentary to take a break for lunch. The picture was paused on the visage of their most famous lama. When the grandmother came in and caught sight of the computer screen she literally froze in what appeared to be awe and wouldn't eat, speak, or blink until the screensaver came on. At which point she started breathing again. I shuddered clinking my chopsticks hard against the bowl. The food tasted like ashes.

Afterward, she walked me to the street corner. The sky was as low as my spirit. You are my only best friend she said and soon you will go. 

The sky dribbled with sorrow.

An hour of buying random gifts with my teammate and getting a Tibetan man to knock forty yuan off a blanket by appealing in Tibetan to his better nature left me with a bag of ground meat walking towards a bus stop, tired.

Walking right into a teacher from our school who I had seen several times, always exchanged smiles with, but never spoken to. Are you going to the school? I asked in Tibetan, assuming that if he was teaching at our school he wasn't able to speak English. He seemed only a little surprised, suggested we get a taxi, changed his mind when our bus pulled up a moment later, jumped on, finding two seats for us near the back.

The bus ride was really just a conversation that made me smile for its awkward use of random bits of language that will make me sick for this place when I'm gone. I found out that he was from Lhasa, had studied Chinese in Beijing, and was pretty much miserable with it. I waited while his confusion of words rushed to my ears and looked at this man who was trapped. His muddle of languages only enhanced his obvious inner struggles with the life he was living.


I'm happy today that we could talk I told him in Tibetan as we neared our school. But my speaking is so poor he muttered.

Back at home I went about the entirely too complicated task of cooking an American meal for my monk friend who had organized our birthday party. On the menu: sloppy joes, mashed potatoes, deviled eggs, and peas. He arrived half an hour late, gobbled it all up, and changed chairs to lean back and stretch it out. After a lighthearted announcement from him that he was only a two day a week monk, I and my teammate agreed to walk him back to the monastery because the evening was beautiful.


How do you feel about leaving soon Kelly, he asked. Nea simpa sulibulichasha I quickly answered.

My heart has become messy.

The walk back was notable for the man walking towards us with his shirt pulled up scratching his nipples in the dusk. My teammate needed to make a quick stop at the copy shop near our school gate and I sat down on something that only after three years in Lhasa I was confident was meant for sitting. Between us we were two yuan short for the copies and in nervous stumbling random Chinese words tried to explain the dilemma to the copy shop people who know and, apparently, love us... luckily, they are our friends, and what's two yuan between friends?

Mei guan xi she said, which I took to mean: no matter.

Maybe I am the one broken.  

Leave me, Noise.

The windows rattled a little bit from the bass blaring from the speakers located at the school across the street. The ensuing roar was a louder volume than I felt comfortable listening to my own music in my house. Visions of small children with bleeding ears and a future fraught with certain deafness danced in my pounding head. Some man directly under my window took to slamming metal pipes around. Dogs barked. A dump truck backed up with an insane bleep bleep bleep for nearly ten minutes. My eyelids began to twitch in sync with the scream of whistles piercing the morning. When sound of the bathroom faucet dripping began to assault my already tenderized ears I had to wonder if there wasn't any silent thing left in all the world. 

This noise level would continue nearly non-stop for the next two days. 

******************************************************

The foriegn teachers' presence was requested as part of a judging panel for an English song compeition. Good thing too, otherwise the charasmatic boy with the large hair convincingly singing the tune of 'we will rock you' without a single correctly pronounced English word woud have walked away with the gold. The high pitched, tragically misprounounced songs were, luckily, loud enough to cover my stunned giggles... but quite unluckily, also loud enough to make my already sore ears sting. The whine of a ill handled microphone ricocheted in my head.

*****************************************

English teachers in China make much of classroom repetition. The few remaining students still willing to attend class after already taking and passing their job placement exams in my otherwise abandoned classroom were no exception. Loud enough to make up for their missing classmates, they chanted conversation clips in unison and the ringing in my ears went up a notch. Then suddenly a long word, their confidence wilted in shame to the back of the classroom, the chanting turned to a very obvious mumble before dissolving into nervous laughter. Though my ears sighed in momentary relief, I scolded them, "Do not be afraid of long words!" and we practiced 'unfortunately' together and their confidence returned with vengeance. 

*****************************

She had returned from nearly eleven months in Beijing, thinner, paler, less prone to silliness, but still herself under a large, beige sun hat. We ate sha momo's and I strained to hear her against the din of the small, though still busy, tea house. Chop sticks clinked against metal bowls, thermoses slammed on tables, tea was slurped, large spit wads where hocked on the floor, and I held a hand over one ear in a vain attempt to muffle all that I didn't want to hear. I have a dream that one day you will get married and come back to Lhasa and I can teach your children she half laughed in an admission that made me instantly remember all of the reasons I had missed her. The sting in my ears had given way to a dull tingle that I still couldn't shake and we walked hand in hand back to school trailing dreams like too many balloons behind us. 

***************

I shook my head. The small forgotten kitchen corner of a smaller tea house was the quietest place I had been in days and I was just beginning to feel the edges of my headache soften. Okay then we stay here my small as a mouse friend decided. Somewhere a baby wailed and I winced. The throaty laughter of the tea house owner crowded the room and my friend pointed to a poster on the wall. She began its story in English but gave up and quickly went into Tibetan and I couldn't tell if I was able to understand the story of Buddha in Tibetan because of the Tibetan or because I already knew the story. He saw all the people no food, no drink, no bed and his heart was empty of happiness and he left his kingdom and sat under a tree... She intoned sweetly like a bedtime story for a child. I sipped tea and tilted my head, letting the pounding headache drip out of my ear and onto my shoulder.

**********

A row on the bus nearly made me late to meet a former student for dinner. His voice little more than a hoarse fog we nonetheless declared our hunger found a deserted upper room in a nearby Chinese restaurant and I quized him on TOFEL questions and gave him tips for practicing and phone numbers of other friends sure to help him. He wheezed profuse thank you's and I called it a quick night after handing him a bag of cough drops from America. You have sympathy for my throat he said in a way that I took to mean gratitude.

*****

Trucks rumble, honk by on the street outside. Dogs take turns populating the night with sound. Every now and then a cell phone blares a Tibetan pop song. The very house creaks and the faucet still drips. Everything makes noise, that's how it proves to itself that it exists. 

But I am convinced, ears still swimming, humming with liquid noise, that I'll never be able to make sense of this day or any part of the Kingdom story here until I hear it in the silence.

So. Shhhhhh.....................

These days are just that...

This story calls for a cup of tea. If you don't have one, get one, sit down, because there is no ending to this story. Let the rain rinse the windows as the sound of it cleanses your soul. For the first time in three years, it has rained the entire day.

I will tell you a 26th birthday story...

************************

My student's text message Dear Kelly! Happy Birthday!!! Wish you happy everyday!!! bleeped in my ear waking me up to a day that was the same as the day before only, perhaps, slightly cooler. A knock at my door left a card full of tenderness from my new teammate out in the crisp morning air. I took a deep breath, the world felt clean.

The highlight of the morning's class was teaching the phrase 'couch potato' to the stunning delight of all my students. What does a potato do, class? Nothing Ms. Kelly. Then don't be like the potato.

I met a student at the school gate and we walked across the street to buy an assortment of snacks that made me smile at their Tibetan normalcy: orange juice drink, rice cakes, bland cookies, sunflower seeds, jello cups. Birthday lunch.Three years ago I had met her at the same school gate for the first time and we shyly, bumblingly went to have butter tea and communicated only through glances and smiles. This was the girl whose long, black braid remains stained in my mind as an image prostrate before a golden statue. She had broken my heart then, and won it countless times since.

Our bag of goodies arrayed on the grass between us and we sat in a corner of a small park blessedly quiet. We sat snacking, chatting, dreaming, and looking at clouds. When a grouchy gardener made us get off the grass we moved to a bench instead to continue our time together. I learned the Tibetan word for relax.

The sky went gray and we walked slowly back. In her dorm room decorated by eight girls worth of stickers, she handed me a small bag. I thought a long time about this gift, she told me. I thanked her without opening it and left.

Inside the bag: a picture of our two faces in a frame decorated with teddy bears and scrawled with: I will always miss you my best friend... a letter labeled 'Ms. Kelly's birthday card' and inscribed with, among other sweet things, two wishes: I wish that 1. come true your dream 2. come to Tibet again. 

Oh that wishes were as easy to come by as cups of tea.

Three years ago I met a monk and, finding out that he didn't have a birthday, gave him mine. So we became very good friends. As I waited for instructions on where to meet him for our shared birthday dinner the phone rang: Ms. Kelly, today is your birthday! Are you busy now? I want to have birthday dinner with you... when I explained to my former student that I already had plans he responded breezily, oh but I am Tibetan I live in now... no matter, another time.

We got into a taxi whose driver was from Shigatze and thought it was hilarious that I asumed he could then play the dramian. He couldn't. When we got out of the taxi we were in an alley in the middle of nowhere on the east side of the city and the birthday monk rushed outside to greet us.

Too much food was ordered and the room slowly filled with an odd assortment of birthday guests to the amusement of the waitresses clearly straight from the countryside. Two current monks, a former monk, a Chinese couple, and two foreigners shared a meal, then shared too many songs, then shared laughter, then shared a taxi, then shared a mango chocolate cake I had made back at my house, then shared photos, all on a shared birthday. As the evening got late, the monk who shared my birthday gave me a gift wall hanging of a lady and yak and mountains. Oh Kelly it took me a very long time to think of this gift, he bemoaned. Three languages which have become the subtitles of my life, filled the margins since everyone who had joined the party wrote birthday wishes on it.

In English, the birthday monk had written: If you were born in Tibet, then your mother tongue is mine, your culture is mine... but these are different from yours. Anyway I'm very happy to know you in Tibet. Happy Birthday Kelly. 
It is now hanging on my wall. 

They left into a night dark and damp with rain.
They left saying, call us soon Kelly.

I returned to a tussled living room and a plate smeared with cake remains.

***********************

The rain no longer lashes the windows, and my cup of tea is dry, that was my 26th birthday story and I don't know its ending. There is no moral, no theme that I know. It is a story of just life and a day unraveling and a single additional step towards a Father on a path with no map.

So many of these days are just that.

A song of moments.

I woke up this morning with hiccups and the sky felt like an ocean and the breeze licked my face with coolness.

Who crafts moments swollen with such peace? Who accounts for the touch of lives brushing briefly against each other? Who writes stories in the quiet that take shape in the noise? 

If I could write a story that would connect the stories from only this week it would be beautiful, moving, amusing, exhausting... it would read like life and you would be older having finished it.

Instead I write a song of moments, and dedicate it to a much better Author.

In praise of the Who:

It was the watermelons that made us giggle,

perhaps the taste of the word on our lips,

enhanced by the sight of them rolling on the street,

we three bound together with the cord of amusement.

It was the memories that made us smile,

our eyes glazed as we returned to the past,

a relationship built from time and cups of tea,

this student of mine with a long, black braid.

It was the bare office where one man sat,

Staring in silence at a pale computer screen,

there entered a foreigner bearing stories galore,

a text, a joke, and a face of stone melted. 

It was the pizza, recipe now memorized,

that drew the three teachers into my home,

perhaps loosening their jaws to let secrets spill out,

to be pooled up in a foreigners ears.

It was the shy, broken English of a student slurping noodles, 

that made me giggle as a story formed, 

of another teacher drawing him out of the class, 

to ask if he watched dirty movies on the internet.

It was the way the beggar walked with me, 

arms leaving black rings around my legs, 

their faces tilted upward as I washed them with a towelette, 

then hands outstreched to be cleaned as well. 

It was a newspaper shred from a nearby desk, 

my students article that filled me with pride, 

the depth of ideas strained to be expressed, 

caused all the grammatical errors to fade. 

It was the steaming stack of yellow pancakes, 

on a metal bench in a crowded, narrow street, 

and the way I had to instruct my Tibetan friend, 

how to purchase them, that sweetened their taste.

It was their mumbled Tibetan phrases of pleasure, 

from a simple dinner cooked for friends, 

that made me miss them deeply, immediately, 

I know you will return, they declared. 

It was the mixture of people's hearts revealed, 

our lives dribbling, staining each other's with color, 

that survive as a collage of praise and great worth, 

in the eyes of the Artisan who crafts such design.

Relate to me

The sky is blue and a breeze softens the glare of the sun, the mountains are painted in a thousand shifting shades and the car horns seem distant, the trees burst with green and I absorb it in stillness. Maybe this is shalom.

And like an old woman with a faded photo album resting dustily in her lap, scenes from the past few days turn idly in my mind:

-A lunch of too much randomly ordered food in a restaurant with shockingly pink walls and two students who slurp noodles vigorously and announce that I am the only teacher who has ever had lunch with them like this, before using English as slippery as the noodles to explain their social woes and family stories to a teacher nearly as pink as the walls from stiffled giggles and the honor of being with them.

-A walk past the gate grandfather squatting in the bushes as he sheepishly points down at something unseen. Suspicious, and caught in a moment of not know quite what to do since squatting in bushes ought to be a private affair, a glance in the direction of the pointing reveals a small white bunny. It's mine, explains the grandfather holding it out, it's name is bunny. I will give it a better name, I offer, and promptly named it Tashi.

-A walk back from the closest thing to a quesadilla this hemisphere has to offer arm in arm with a colleague looks like the snaking conversation of everything from classes, to lilac bushes, to meals,to babies with the appearance of bread, to plans, to homes, to futures... all disappearing into the warm evening air leaving only the scent of relationship deepened.

-A tea on a sparkling afternoon with a girl who only recently returned to Lhasa after a five year stay in America met at a bus stop on a day too random to remember. Ourselves oddly reflective in that strange coming and going of life and she expressed her conviction that it was god who must have allowed us to meet then, alongside the certainty of my future return. I poured cooled tea on the ground and we hugged as we departed.

-A split second decision of whether to try to sneak by the tumbling beggar children or not decided by their impeccable vision and ecstatic shouts of "HELLO!". I scoop them up in open arms that didn't betray the possibility of avoidance as they demanded to see my recently printed photographs in hand. We crowded together over the photos and I explained the characters in them, but their explanations were better as they pointed at my face in the pictures "look, there's Hello, look, Hello, it's you." I wiped their cracked bleeding noses and bought some snacks in a feeble attempt to care for the woundedness of their filth stained bodies I have come to adore.

As the scenes shift... now dappled with shadows from trees, now obscured by dust, now crowded out by the throb of people, now dampened with tea, now covered in spice, now lost in the chaos of sheer noise... my soul shakes a little and steadies itself in the realization that these images are the who and the how of relationship. And in a mystery so profound I dare not contemplate it long, I relate to them. They relate to me.

The defense of such Incarnation touches a tender spot deep within me and I am awed by it as it appears before me in all of its wondrous agony and joy. 

And, like the old woman with the photo album whose pictures sting with memories so vivid as to be recent, I am loathe to lay it aside.

Falling is more efficient

It was nearly six am when we met outside the Johkang Temple and the air was already tainted with incense. We were informed by a man I couldn't see in the darkness that there were three seats left exactly and so we got on the crowded bus. After my student inquired as to whether I had eaten lunch or not yet, I promptly fell asleep against the grungy, faded seat in front of me.

When I awoke it was to ice cold breezes and mountain passes covered with snow. I realized with immediate terror that my t-shirt and fleece jacket were hardly suitable. My ears popped and my fingers began to chap as my eyes watered in the glare from the snow.

We got off the bus and my two students were accosted by alarmingly forceful women selling frostbitten bags of incense. Ganden monastery looked appropriately dingy in contrast to the startling whiteness of the snow. After a bowl of warm noodles in a relic of a teahouse we dutifully made our way through a few dank rooms filled with idols and darkness before my students got bored. Let's go to see something really Tibetan, one remarked, gesturing to the snow covered mountains, to my joy at answered requests and relief at loosened chains. 

Snow ball fights, slippery passes, breath-taking views, and a few random moments of hilarity later and we decided not to wait for the afternoon bus but instead to walk down to visit another former student who was teaching at a primary school at the foot of the mountain. The road looked like a snake had swallowed something both jagged and loopy and it wasn't long before my students began to bemoan our fate and ask nearby yak for rides down. The yak slowly blinked in the snow. It is more efficient to fall down this mountain, declared one student, shaking snow and mud off his shoes.

So we flagged down a grinning Tibetan driver who seemed amused that I could sing along to the songs on his radio as we wound our way down and he dropped us off at my former student's school.The school looked more like a construction site and the children giggled wildly as I crossed the muddy yard arm in arm with their new teacher. Her home was sparse and messy but otherwise comfortable and we boiled potatoes together with fatty meat and cracked walnuts as snacks. Getting to spend time with her was like all the sunshine that our day had thus far lacked.

We ate lunch in an extremely hospitable families' small restaurant nearby and saw the buses coming zig zag down the road back to Lhasa later that afternoon. As we sprinted to the foot of the mountain waving our bus tickets in an effort to stop the buses, I bid my student farewell and hoped that I might see her once more before I leave. Our bus driver miraculously remembered us and stopped just long enough for us to squeeze on. We crashed into our stained seats and, exhausted, fell very nearly asleep as it rattled back to Lhasa.

As my drowsy head bumped against the smudged window of the bus I thought about the jagged, loopy, mostly obscured road of my future. I know I will walk it slowly step by snowy, muddy step, and I know I don't walk it alone and I know there will be people I must meet along the way... but I'm inclined at this point to agree with my student... to simply fall would be much more efficient.

The old man didn't know, couldn't have known...

Yesterday was a story of such desperate sadness, extreme exhaustion, unique momenthood, and tender joy so mingled I fail to think of an adequate opening line, or a description full enough to be genuine, or a possible meaning for such a collage... stories, days, can be frustrating that way... but tell them, live them, we must. 

When the old man drinking a Coke, like it was the most delicious thing he'd ever ingested, while people in bathrobes meandered around, grinned at our company it was clear he had no upper teeth. I had to physically restrain my desire to hug him. So toothless old people are endearing to me.

This is him. You'll probably want to hug him too.

He sipped his Coke and didn't know that we had arrived at the school gate to meet our eager and hilarious students, who had come equipped with a duffel bag of snacks, at six-thirty that pitch black morning only to wait nearly two hours there for the sun to come up and our driver, who was willing in that clever driver way to pile eleven people in a van that only seated five, to arrive.

He scratched his ankle with a wrinkled hand and couldn't have imagined that the van wasn't able to carry two foreign teachers and eight giggly girl students energized from hours of singing up to the first monastery we visited that day. So some of them got out and walked. And I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have realized the bile that rose and lodged in the back of my throat surly mirroring the tears in their Creator's eyes as eight beautiful Tibetan girls prostrated before hunks of metal and faded photographs and the morning turned into afternoon.

This old man slid over on his concrete bench and had no idea that I had fallen asleep on the shoulder of a student who insisted on holding my hand as she transformed herself into an unceasing jukebox and had woken up to this nunnery nestled in the filthy garbage laden crevice of some mountain like a return to my first trip out of Lhasa three years ago. I was greeted by yak climbing crumbling stairs, emaciated mangy dogs staring listlessly at bones, crippled nuns, and an odd assortment of semi dressed people crowding into two frothy hot spring holes.

It was a refuge for refuse. And so we found ourselves in the company of this old man.

He let out a belch that flavored the air and made my typically shy student with hardly any English at all burst into peels of uncontrollable laughter and didn't know that we would end up as guests in her family's house after a long drive back through the barren mountain passes on a bumpy one lane road. He couldn't have understood the honor of being poured one more cup of bland butter tea from the calloused hands of a damp eyed father or the tenderness of being served heaping plate after plate of meat dumplings surely costing this farming family a small fortune simply because I had made it known at some point in the distant past that they were my favorite food.

He tilted his head to one side and stared at me as he finished his Coke and had no idea that we would be visiting one more small monastery after our profusion of gratitude to my student's family that came no where close to being adequate, nor could he know that it would be deserted except for the untold horrors of watching eight beautiful Tibetan girls go into ecstasies over being touched by a reincarnated lama who was really just a man like any other. I shuddered and couldn't watch lest I collapse under the weight of despair and the sun set casting long shadows in the small, paint and butter stained courtyard.

This old man blinked hard in the glare of a sky white with clouds and vanished through a splintery door and never could have guessed that such a day was shared and to be shared. A day of baby goats and rippling streams, of vulture cries and sweet tasting bushes, of laugher and translation and pictures, a day of songs and sweat, of idols and bondage, of illusion and evil, and a Holy presence as small as the squeeze of a student's hand in mine.

All the things he didn't know, couldn't have known...

I dare not consider all the things about this day that I don't know... though surely therein lie my most throbbing, heart wrenching hopes for this people, these students, and this dear old man.