The timeline...

7 am: I awoke to what sounded like a bulldozer driving in circles around my bed and realized groggily that it was just a fly roughly the size of a quarter. My ears still tingled from the English-song-competition-followed-by-KTV-with-the-leaders evening of magic. My head throbbed with anger at so loud an uninvited guest at so early an hour and I wondered why flies weren't created to be silent. But the morning sky was cool.

9 am: I walked into a classroom and was shocked by more than half the students in attendance. I looked at one boy who I hadn't seen anywhere near class for over nine months, blinked hard, and he was still there.

10.37 am: I finished class three minutes early and walked outside to the quickly warming day and saw a former class of my students sitting in the shade some distance away. "God bless you Ms. Kelly" one boy yelled to my surprise and delight. Even sleep deprived, I know He has.

10.46 am: I made a cup of tea and poured it into a jar I could carry with me. I knew there was no way I would make it through the rest of the day without a cup of tea.

11 am: I sat waiting for a colleague to go oven shopping with me on a bench near our main office. A student, who has recently changed his style to looking something like Jon Travolta in Grease, came to sit on the bench with me. Normally sullen and distant he openly confesed his frustration with the job he'd been given, and his desire to take a tour guide exam, though he never removed his MP3 earbuds.

Noon: We, finally, found an oven. But we didn't buy it. Go figure.

12.45 pm: I sat around a tiny table with two Chinese colleagues eating what amounted to a Chinese rendition of what in America might have been a chicken salad. They had so wanted ranch sauce, demanded I make it for them, and so we dipped bits of vegetable and chicken into it with chopsticks to eat.

2.15 pm: Another bulldozer invaded my room and my sleep, and met with the same crushing result as the first one. I don't know how they got in without opening the door, and I can't remember the last time I was so angry.

3 pm: I tried to rub the sleep off my face as I blundered down the hall to my neighbors house to ask for help to send my last two boxes back to America. He sat drinking tea with another neighbor and the two of them laughed at my sleepy half awake condition. I leaned back into the pumpkin shaped pillow and enjoyed their company.

3:45 pm: I watched a man seal my boxes with shocking dexterity and thought: here is the only efficient man in all of China. Nearly 600 yuan later my over twenty kilos worth of things that at the moment were important to me were on their way to America.

4 pm: I leaned against a bus stop and pondered the shattering blows to my own heart as I listened to my neighbor speak of everything broken in his life and the world. It has been a long time since I have so clearly seen the result of the Fall. I wanted to weep, but paid for our bus tickets instead.

4.15 pm: I became the amusement of the bus when I surprised two middle school girls by telling them in crystal clear Tibetan that really I wasn't 'SO' beautiful.

4.55 pm: I glanced at my watch and felt sad that I had to dash out of my neighbor's house where he had been pouring me tea and continuing to chat as if we had never left that exact position hours earlier. Promising to have a few last events together before I left in surprise at how the Father can change an odd, grumpy man into a dear and helpful friend.

5.40 pm: Three Americans and a Korean left a Tibetan restaurant because they weren't serving any meat during this holy month of Sacadawa.

7.30 pm: I had to forcibly restrain what threatened to be a flood of tears as I commanded our Korean brother over a table littered with dinner remains to not forget his first call and the brokenness of these people. They were words that I myself needed to hear.

8.45 pm: I refused to say good-bye to the man who would tomorrow return to Korea with his family and chose instead to say see you later because it was my wish and their's that that be more accurate.

9.10 pm: My student saw me return home in the dusk and stopped me in the street to chat. Eerily close to her was a small, eager looking Chinese boy. We had the following conversation:
I: Who is this boy?
My student: He? I don't know... hehehe
Boy: FRIEND
My student: haha. No.
I: See you in class tomorrow.

9.17 pm: I searched through layers of dust thick enough to make my skin crawl for my friend;s house key she'd hidden above her door. I needed to get into her house to pick up the oven we didn't buy earlier that day. Apparently, the oven buying process is beyond my understanding of shopping.

10 pm: A phone call from a dear dear Lhasa friend like water to my soul. Refreshing, encouraging, so much light.

Midnight: now.

Sleep comes slowly when there is too much to process in a day and only 18 days remaining anyway... tears come quicker.

Everything I know about mercy...

A year ago I knew that mercy was the same color blue as a clear Lhasa sky and sounded exactly like the tinkling cow bells from the ditch outside my window. 

I've learned a thing or two about mercy since. 

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

Mercy feels like a low cloud of fog on a cool morning and takes your breath away like the beginnings of a green or purple tint to mountains you've memorized as brown and you have to strain and blink to make sure you're not just wishing it so.

And mercy tastes like tea poured from dented thermoses into questionable cups and fish hot pot so spicy your stomach burns in anticipation. It smells like a rainfall and cut grass and a breeze rolling directly off of snow capped mountains.

And I know that my Father is merciful when my students write essays to me entitled: Take Care Teacher, and words get lodged in my throat and I can't say them and I'm overwhelmed with stillness knowing that I don't have to because my face communicates perfectly the state of my heart.

And I know His mercy is deep when my boxes are packed by peace and I don't feel rushed though time continually mocks me like an arrogant child and the birds sitting on the power line running frighteningly close to my window sing as if only to me.

And I know that His mercy is extravagant when I think about the cold, dark days He's brought me out of and the way He fixes it so that I am reminded that He is still at work in my students and friends lives and the process is slow because step by often weary step is the only way to walk through life.

My Father's mercy runs down my face like tears, redemptive, like watermelon juice, sweet and cool, like a shower that cleans my soul. It fills my ears like a whisper, tender, like wind in the trees, gentle, like a symphony that plays the story of my walk. It fills the space around me like air, ever-present, like perfume, fragrant and light, like a warrior that encircles me with protection.

His mercy is a jungle, an ocean, an umbrella, a boat, a tower. It is shade, sunshine, and rain. It is the perfect amount of spice on your one kuai bag of fried potatoes and a fresh loco momo. His mercy was, is, and always will be.

Oh yes, when my days are full and my mornings are free and steam eases my mind as it slips off my tea I know with all my being that He's merciful to me. 

The word that must not be spoken.

You can't make me say it. I won't.

How am I supposed to say it to the friend who taught me everything I know about making noodles and living as a Believer in a family dedicated to idols, who now sends frantic text messages: "are you still here? are you free? we must meet!"? Can I bear it?  Can she?

And can those words really form on my lips to the student who returns after a year away teaching to knock at my door and beg me join her for dinner as she sits starry eyed reminescing about the good old days when I was their best teacher and everyone agreed I was beautiful not only because of your dimples Ms. Kelly she asserts. When the one firm fact that she remembers about me is that I study the Word on Sundays can I really say to her what I don't want to say to anyone?

Who can expect me to say what needs to be said, what is soon coming, to the sisters who throw hours away just to have me over to the junky room where they live and teach me to cook things and promise to send me anything they can afford in the midst of their poverty from Lhasa, should I crave bags of tsampa and spice when I'm gone. She sat engrossed in the Book she'd dreamed about I'd only just now been able to give her, and I couldn't think of a less appropriate time to say it... so I gladly didn't.

I tried to say it to the friends over dinner, but my attempt was weak and they blew it off demanding yet another closing party. I was glad for that too because I nearly choked thinking about the words in my throat as I listened to their amusing banter and memorized their laughter, a vain attempt to save it for a gray day later. I bought a documentary about the history of your Father, one started, and I liked it, very good.

Can I help but to refuse to say it to the man who I know adjusted his glasses and coughed a little right before I answered the phone and he, ever too formal, invited me to try fish hot pot again. I hope you don't mind he mumbled nearly drowned out in my ecstatic agreement, no he will never hear those words from me, because I'm not going to say it.

And the nun who I've been trying to contact for days who called me on an unfamiliar phone number who upon hearing the news of my time line burst into near howls of unintelligible Tibetan though I didn't come anywhere close to saying it to her... would I even dream of it now?

What exactly do I tell the classrooms full of students who have faithfully attended and been my family and my pride for these three years, who have written me into their lives, introduced me to their families, taught me more about themselves than there is things to know about English, and kept all my most lonely moments at bay? I know what I won't say...

And you can be sure that my friend who promised to go oven shopping with me, who grabbed my arm at the school gate and demanded that I accompany her on a dinner date with a man whom you could feel the strange coming from as she totally ignored him and spoke to me in English the entire time saying Kelly you are my sunshine, my boat, my umbrella, you are my lucky... who's eyes I couldn't bear to look into as they filled with tears when I demanded that she come with me to the airport... you can be quite sure friends, she'll never hear me say it.

She won't and neither will my friends who I miss until I can see them the next week, nor the grocery family who give me free nearly everything, nor the beggar children who learned my name, nor the gate grandfather who thinks I'm related to him, nor anyone else because I'm not going to say it.

I will do it. I must. It is right. The way is my Father's.

But I'm not going to say it.

The end of a dinner...

Worth: A journal entry from a student I no longer teach

One walks on a strange road. Listening to a strange song. Missing a strange person. This is a true life. 

I think it is worth to remember something that I had done or had thought. 

I promised to write a poem to Ms. Kelly. 

But I don't know how to write. Perhaps she will go back. I'm so sad. As a student, she helped me do more thing. I'm very luck to become her student. She teached me for two years. But she always play with us. When I am in trouble, she will give me a hand. When I quarreled with Jia Hai Mou she helped us to adjust our problem. Till we had dinner with her. She told us that she would go back. All of students feel sad. 

But every dinner will go to an end. No matter how good it is. I think that is the most worth. No matter it had been over.

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

After a quiet dinner with a flustered, over-worked colleague we flagged down a taxi in the cool evening dim. 

The price was too high. We shut the door and walked the direction we wanted to go instead. 

After a while, it became quite dark. We flagged down another taxi. I got in. The driver pulled a u-turn in a busy intersection and I watched my colleague walk back home through pools of street light.

The taxi seemed to wade through a city on its way to sleep. When the driver changed a song on the radio I was enjoying I muttered, in Tibetan, how I actually liked the last song.


Oh really? he said and quickly changed it back. Then a conversation unraveled of laughter and memories and familiarity that was like a bed time story I knew and had been longing to hear again from someone else who knew it too...


I know you. I remember you because I used to work for the buses. Do you know me? If I speak slowly you can understand me right? For ten days I worked on 501 and ten days on 502 and then ten days I would rest. Those buses were so fast, the drivers were crazy. It was a good job. Now I am a taxi driver but this work is not good. Too tired. So many of the bus drivers know you. Only two foreigners on the route. I'm so happy to talk to you. I wanted to talk to you but didn't even though I saw you many times. Are you happy in Lhasa? I have a friend who also used to work for buses. She knows you. She often talks about you and has a picture of you and says how you can speak Tibetan and are so beautiful. 

Is your friend's name Dawa?


Yes. 

I can't believe it! Long time I didn't see her. I miss her. How is she?


She doesn't live near Sera anymore. She lives in the Barkhor. She is well, lives with her husband. Now she is pregnant, she will soon have a baby. 

So happy!

The driver pulled up somewhat reluctantly at our school gate. Students milled about in the dark. The meter read 14 yuan. 


Here is your school. Please, you only pay ten yuan. 

Really? I asked. But I knew he was serious.

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

I am walking on a strange road, listening to a strange song, missing all kinds of strange people, and mourning the end of a dinner that is of very great worth to me. 

This is a true life.

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.