The fittings

We will eat quickly, she said, then I want you to try on a Tibetan Chuba.

When Tibetan friends get that tone in their voice it would be vanity to refuse. So I stretched on the rickety bench, grabbed another cabbage dumpling with my chopsticks and eyed the flies bouncing lazily into the sheer sheet wrapped around the otherwise open nunnery tea house.

She had just bought a new, very pink, sun hat which her boyfriend now held on his knee. Do you like this hat? I asked him. This one eh? he asked back, then, in Tibetan, it looks like she picked it up from the ground. She glared at him while I nearly choked with laugher and tea.

We ate quickly.

Let's go, she said, arranging her picked up off the ground hat neatly on her head, but first I want you to see something. I sighed as we three darted down an alley towards what I knew was a temple which I was tired of having to see. But when we arrived, instead of golden colored idols sitting in rows, she pointed out to me pots of flowers. It's a beautiful garden, I know you like flowers, she said. I beamed with delight and freedom.

We ended up wandering around the alleys of downtown Lhasa, in and out of Tibetan clothing shops as she bemoaned the fact that they only sold grandmother cloth. We arrived at a shop the size of a closet and she let go of my elbow and said here, now you must choose a color you like. 

A ream of turquoise cloth later and a coral colored shirt to match and she was satisfied only once the addition of a striped apron made the ensemble complete. As I stood being awkwardly measured by a small Tibetan girl, who continually commented on the good shape of my body, my friend's boyfriend paced a little staring at his sandals. I think the colors are very perfect, he said.

It's so special they agreed, and we arranged to pick it up a few days later.

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First we we shop for a surprise, my colleague said, then have lunch.

When Tibetan friends get that tone in their voice it would be vanity to refuse. So I and two colleagues got on a bus on a too hot afternoon and I cradled a jar of ice water on my knees. We got off the bus and again entered the labyrinth of downtown Lhasa alleys, occasionally scraping someone with the edge of our umbrellas, only to end up in a small shop roughly the size of a closet filled with cloth and a small woman with a tape measure around her neck. I smiled. Surprise! they said.


Pick a good color they said and we rummaged through a stack of cloth in dozens of different patterns and colors. This time I chose a purpleish maroon one with some gold details and my friends bubbled with delight. Now for the shirt, and they dragged me two steps to the other wall of the shop. Before I even had a chance to survey the options one colleague had decided for me on a white sheer shirt with blots like oil spills all over it. So beautiful! they said nodding eagerly.

The woman with the tape measure put me in the shirt and threw the ream of cloth over my shoulder. A Tibetan grandfather spinning a rusty looking wheel tilted his hat back as he rested in the shade of the shop and surveyed the goings on. When I made eye contact with him he gave me a toothless grin and a thumbs up. Is it beautiful? I asked him. So beautiful, he said and shuffled away.

As I stood with my arms out, once again being awkwardly measured while the woman commented on the shape of my body my friends nodded in silent approval. We thought a long time about this surprise they said and asked the woman to choose a striped apron to complete the ensemble.

It's so special, they agreed and we arranged to pick it up a few days later.

We ate a uniquely Tibetan lunch of luhbi, fried potatoes, patsuhmogu, loco momo's and a Tibetan rendition of a samosa. As we sat chatting and picking through our odd assortment of plastic bags of food in a restaurant that was so narrow one could almost reach the opposite wall from where you sat, I considered my two recent fittings...

Until this past week, I have never had the experience of being fitted for anything that was made just for me as a gift. Now, I've had it twice.

And I agree wholeheartedly with my friends: it's so special.

Sunflower Seeds

It's as if I'm seeing everything in these last two weeks in Lhasa through glasses that have the opposite of their intended effect and blur things. A tint of something sad shades nearly every moment and little weights attach themselves to my words so that they sometimes, unexpectedly, stick in my throat. Though my walls are almost bare I can still see the places where the pictures had hung.

I have not yet dusted off the suitcases. 

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

I walked into my student's relatives house only to be greeted by an ensemble of Tibetans that looked as though they might have walked right off the plateu away from their yak herds not an hour before. I sat next to one smiling woman who grabbed my hand and leaned towards me, in a moment of mutual vulnerability, to tap my forehead with hers. There is something about an embrace of foreheads that is uniquely endearing and I vowed to do it more often.

As I and she and a small group of her relatives piled into the car another woman leaned in the window and grabbed my hand drawing it teary-eyed to her forehead. She is sad because this is only her first time to see you and you will leave soon my student offered as an explanation. All the people I only met once flitted through my mind like ghosts of butterflies.

When we arrived at her small village in the middle of gentle looking mountain ridges and fields so green they made your mouth water we filed out of the car and into the kitchen where her mother, an older rendition of my student, stood pouring fresh, warm milk into small bowls. I would later meet the cows.

My first moment in the kitchen time stood still. Her mother's eyes watered over and she pinched her mouth shut and the look that she gave me tried to speak, speak ten thousand beautiful things, that I couldn't understand. It was as if all of the stories her daughter had likely told her about me just materialized in front of her and she couldn't decide if I were real.

When her brother bounded into the kitchen moments later and caught sight of me, he leaped backward out of the room in a nervous giggle. It would take the rest of the day as he, like a nervous animal, would watch me from a distance and alternately come too close to me and then dart away before he decided I was, relatively, safe.

We walked around the garden, ate too much bread, drank milk that tasted like every good thing I had forgotten, or never known, that milk should taste like, swished flies away, watched her mother work the loom, laughed and took pictures. It felt so natural, normal, peaceful, to be just a part of a family again, even a family unlike any I have ever been a part of. Her mother disappeared for a moment and came back with a bundle of cloth.

My mother worked very hard to make this for you. Try it on. Does it fit? She had never seen you so she only guessed. This takes a long time to make. I think it fits well. Never wash it with water. Do you like it? 

And I found myself in a Tibetan jacket made just for me which smelled exactly like the sheep's back they sheared the wool from. And I took up the mother's dye stained, calloused hands in my own and I couldn't look her in the eye. How could anything I've ever done deserve the amount of labor from this one jacket of infinite worth to me?

We walked down the empty nearly paved streets to the local monastery to visit her uncle, a monk of thirty years, and became the first, and likely last, foreign guest to ever visit the tiny place. Obviously proud, her uncle and his monk friends showed us every single room and we drank tea and were kadad in a room reserved for their highest teacher, should he ever return from exile and show up in the middle of the countryside for a visit. The chances are much higher that I would return. A wrinkled, grinning grandfather whose ears stuck out at odd angles neglected his endless rotations around an oversized prayer wheel for a moment.

As we piled back into the car hours later full on milk, and laughter, and sunshine, and family, my student's mother stood by the car window. I clutched the bag of jacket like a precious jewel in my lap and opened my mouth to say anything at all. And I couldn't. My words had made a swift getaway somwhere between the last drop of milk and the car. And I blinked hard several times and her mother waited, and before I could make a second attempt she patted my hand through the window and said, Zeama, it's time to go. So we left, making dust clouds in the otherwise clear and spotless day.

I leaned into my student and couldn't speak until we had arrived back in Lhasa. And I can't now remember anything I said then.

When I got home I immediately put the jacket on again. It does fit well. And I even found some sunflower seeds in the pockets like memories of too many odd things now heartbreakingly familiar...

... like all the things I can't take back with me.

This is my Tibet

The beginning of the end.

Today I hugged the grocery lady from behind. She laughed and her husband took another drag on his cigarette before smiling broadly. Then she started speaking to me in her fierce Sichuan Chinese and I called down the street to my friend begging her to come over and translate.


Before you leave for the summer, she said holding my hand tightly, make sure to come over and take whatever things you want for the trip. It was what she said to me every year, and I saddened thinking of all the fruit and vegetables and laughter and hand squeezes and smiles and even the odd meal they'd given to me free of charge over the years. Tell her that I'm sad because I don't know when I will come back, I begged my friend to translate. She did.

Then the grocery lady burst into tears. I did too.

What could we do but cry?

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. 

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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.