Living for the Other...

I rushed back with news from the teachers office that this Sunday was
actually Wednesday and thus, in a way only made possible by the Chinese,
we would be having classes. With the sheer drizzle of the
uncharacteristically gray sky and my mind a swirl of confusion over the
days and recently learned Tibetan food items including "monk cake" I
nearly missed the shy student who I had in classes last year who was
waiting at my house fifteen minutes before our scheduled tea time.

I nearly missed her, but I had not forgotten her.

It was providence which had allowed such a time to be set up, it was a
random trip to buy three potatoes which allowed me to run into her, it
was a years worth of insistence that we have tea that accumulated to
this moment, it was her shy giggles and sweet notes and question asked
with lowered eyes "do you want to know my story?" which provoked such
insistence for a tea time. And now, it was happening.

In the damp cool of the morning we dodged the freshmen doing military
training in distracted clumps outside my building, we scampered out
through the school gate and started the hike over to Sera Monastery
because "tea houses near school have many students, I am shy." We
predictably decided on sweet tea and made our way over to some unsteady
benches under a tree heavy with wet. Our conversation, vaguely
reminiscent of a trip round the world, touched on many things: how she
was the first in her family to go to college, how her best friend
studies in inland China, how she often feels lonely, how I am so nice,
how she wonders if her decisions are correct or if she is a fool, how
potatoes are her favorite vegetable, how she thinks she is too young for
a boyfriend, how she is saddened by the pressure from other students to
have one, how Beijing is the capital of China and potatoes, bu shi, the
Potala is the capital of Lhasa, how it is her dream to talk to a
foreigner and now her dream has come true.

The salty spice of the potatoes washed down with the milky sweet of the
tea and the low clouds rolling overhead shaking drops of rain from the
overhanging tree. The staggering mountains and crumbling buildings seem
to converge and how many times did she say 'Teacher this is my difficult
to forget day'?

Why?

'Because teacher, today I am with you.'
How many difficult to forget days does one need before one recognizes
the One who never forgets? Will her next difficult to forget day have
the same sweet tea and potatoes that she eats everyday? When she meets
Him, because He is obviously very close to her, will she also find Him
difficult to forget? Once she has long forgotten me and all the English
she has ever learned will she find the Spirit which makes me so
memorable difficult to forget?

May He be impossible to forget.

I have seen:

A Tibetan man as old as time with Aviator sunglasses

The freckles on an egg like stars in the sky

Herds of livestock like ants dotting lime green hills

Roads so high one drives through the clouds

Four ducks traverse a wilderness

A lake so blue and wide one mistakes it for the sky with the dizzying
feeling of walking upside down

Bread escape into the waves like a renegade lifeboat

A woman in a long wool coat standing before a frozen carcass in the low
light of dawn

As many shades of green as the human eye can process

Three filthy siblings who do not know where they are from but only that
they are hungry

Chinese people have entire conversations with bits of bread and cakes
barely clinging to the inside of their mouths

Stones and caves that appear to be rigid versions of a child's mound of
pockmarked play dough

Villages mistaken for postcards a blink and then gone

I must have seen a thousand yaks.

The thin pages of my notebook fluttered in the cool breeze and dipped
into some sweet milk tea mishaps on the concrete block which served as a
table. The long strokes of the fountain pen looked like a well made bed
on the paper and as I, with snail-like dexterity, penned the next letter
my unswervingly optimistic and dedicated friend patiently offered advice
and antidotes in soft belabored English as cool as the blue ink on the
page.

The sun filtering through the trees of the courtyard outside of Sera
Monastery left shifting dappled marks on my face and paper and as I
blinked in the glare an entire class of novice monks surrounded our study.

Having just finished their own Tibetan script lessons, nothing could
have amused them so much as such a foreigner learning at the rate of a
child half their age. They offer advice, repeating from the ridges of
forced memory the very phrases my friend had been teaching. They squat
and crowd the small table and paper in the shuffle knocking tea cups and
fingering old notebooks. They repeat letters slowly to me, they beg me
to hold the pen differently, they give me one of their own pens. Their
robes are too big for them and the smell as though never been washed.
Soon they will doff the public navy colored robes for some bright maroon
ones of their own, if they pass the test. They grin and laugh and
chatter and take turns practicing the letters themselves. They can't be
older than fifteen years and as I glance through the now shadow now
light at their faces I realize that they are as distinct as the letters
which I practice though can barely read.

Where have these boys come from? How long have they been here? What is
their future?

They are called away by an older monk, presumably their instructor. But
wait, a moment later one named Nawang returns sans robe to offer us some
of his own study materials. Out of a plastic notebook with Snow White
stickers on the inside he pulls page after page of practice sentences in
various different scripts which he begs to give me along with his pen.
As quickly as this surprise gift giving spree begins he disappears up
the crumbling steps away into a nearby tea house.

Learning this language has been one of the single greatest blessings of
my time here. What do I have that I did not receive?

The puffy white clouds sliding across a piercingly blue sky offer a
delicious contrast to the silken threads of the spider's web delicately
clinging to my window.

My stomach really hurts. I am pained but not surprised what with the
combination of corn pancakes topped with sprinkles, spicy fish and tofu
soup, fried noodles and vegetables, hairy chunks of yak meat, and MSG,
not to mention enough sweet tea, butter tea, salt tea, and milk tea to
flood a small valley, having been ingested in the past few days. So it's
only crackers and sprite for now... okay what's a little more tea?

My body's rejection of my dietary habits have given me a blessed chance
to pause.

I once read somewhere that the Creator of all things is not only that,
He is apt to create anything. These past few days I've become convinced
of that reality... I live in the crevice of blinding contrasts that defy
the rule that the opposite and equal cannot both be true in the same
space. They can, and they are.

The same school that does not provide student housing with running water
is undergoing a curriculum revamp that requires their Chinese teachers
to learn Western educational techniques. Teacher's who never speak
English can, in English, attempt to persuade you to go to Karaoke with
them. This same country which wears western fast food chains like cheap
jewelry cannot seem to make a chocolate bar. The same street that hums
and honks at all hours of the day and night with traffic is periodically
forced to a standstill by lazy cows batting their eyes in the glare of
the afternoon sun. There are temples dedicated to the gods of alcohol
surprising the unsuspecting cyclist on a less traveled street and cars
with DVD players installed in the dashboard. Streets are marked with
human feces and frequented by students wearing the latest shoe fashions.
The same city that designs to build an underground walkway through busy
intersections cannot seem to clothe or feed it's ragged children. The
landscape is staggeringly majestic and the homes are pitifully bare. The
women's fingers are raw and chapped but such brands cannot hide her
illiteracy. Workers come to call minutes before class begins only to
drill holes through the door and leave, scatterings of sawdust and the
lingering smell of cigarette smoke the only evidence that my TV might
one day be upgraded to digital. I usually have access to internet but
cheese is as scare as if I lived on the ocean floor. Students who are
too shy to look directly at you can recite with poignant clarity Maya
Angelou's poem "I know why the caged bird sings". Our school's football
field is adorned with replicas of space rockets and our classrooms boast
only cracked chalkboards. Visiting celebrities and wealthy tourists come
and go and the dust barely shudders.

In this small valley, this upward palm of the earth, everything exists.
Demons and angels battle it out in the streets alongside small children
with shreds for shoes playing jump rope and eating hot dogs on sticks.
Sweet popcorn is sold from splintered and stained wooden half shelters
next to incense and tiny buddha's to be worn around the neck as a charm.
I am just as likely to be asked if I have any spare change as where I
wash my body. Plans are constructed out of strings as thin as the
spider's and change like the clouds slip sliding across the sky.

And what a beautiful sky it is. What an alarming Creator He is. May He
mold me into someone as capable of understanding and surviving in and
loving such contrast as those who have been in its midst all their lives
and no longer recognize the incongruities. And may He fix my stomach
that way too.

I should have known that it was going to be different when the text
messages started at 11:30 the night before.

"Miss Kelly I think you are very careful and good teacher"
"I am always happy to be your student"
"Happy teachers day to you"

Today was Teacher's Day... but for everything that I understand about
the world it could have been Wacky Day.
Here is an inconclusive list of everything wacky I saw or experienced
today:
- a smoke filled apartment building due to some wok experimentation
- a co-worker enter a banquet with wads of tissue stuck up her nose
- a lady clipping her fingernails at the banquet table
- a man pour foam from his beer on the carpeted floor
- the vice president of our school massacre a popular chinese tune
- people just picking up random open bottles from nearby tables to take
a swig
- a teacher who I've never heard speak English try to persuade me to go
to KTV
- a fruit basket that required two students to carry it
- a mind numbing array of "banquet" attire: everything from sweatshirts
to chupas to suits to jeans
- a beggar woman point to my students wad of cash when he said "I've no
money"
- a 9:30p visitation from a group of students wishing to give me a gift
- etc

Teacher's Day: a chance to be blown away by the adoration and kindness
of your students and the rapidity with which your co-workers get trashed
at a banquet. Happy Wacky Day everyone!

In 2nd Samuel it is recorded that David had such a resounding victory
over the Philistine forces that they abandoned their idols. David, in
rapture of He who ordained such a flood-like success, named the place
Ba'al Perazim.

Ba'al Perazim: the literal Hebrew meaning is "Owner of Breakings Through".

An alternate translation is "The One Bursts Out".
And that's exactly what He does.

Last semester I taught four classes. It was alarming to see
relationships built on less than two dozen shared words, to watch as the
Spirit stretched across vast communicative gaps to meet students at
their aches and their joys. It was a blessing, it was an encouragement,
it was grace in action. It was three of the four classes.

Last semester I watched tortured and helpless as one of my classes went
into steady decline, which resulted in eight students failing and more
than a few awkwardly jagged relationships. I began this semester with
such a battle still on my hands. The past two classes with them was a
fight for their attention, motivation, and obedience. I left each period
with my insides in knots and mouthfuls of petitions. The forces that I
am up against in that class seem far more than I can understand or
possibly face.

But maybe I had simply forgotten Ba'al Perazim, the owner of breakings
through.

This morning I walked out of the school gate to do some errands for the
day, my mind certainly a scrolling list of things I needed to buy and
time I had in which to do it, when I found myself, much to my inner
trembling, walking right into a group of girls from that class. Within a
moment I had been handed a pop sickle and was being asked in Tibetan if
I had time to go drink tea. Now? Yes, now Ms. Kelly.

Ba'al Perazim: He bursts out.

And this coming from students who had deliberately not attended my class
for the bulk of last semester, students who had failed, who had been
caught cheating on their exams, students who were listless at best in
class. So in a hazy moment of decision I agree to go... and spend the
next hour and half looking at pictures on cell phones of family members,
drinking syrupy sweet milk tea, chatting about summer, about holidays,
about anything they can come up with, using a strange but not unusual
combination of Tibetan and English to express mundane things as well as
hint at the more important.

Then the thermos ran dry and we stood up to leave...

Ba'al Perazim: He bursts out.

As we step stumble out the door into the blazing sunlight these
students, students who I had only in my wildest dreams ever had positive
contact with, the apex of relationship being a brief verbal exchange,
begin to urge insistently... next time Ms. Kelly, if you have free time
Ms. Kelly, Ms. Kelly please have tea with us again.

Amazing. I'm thinking about renaming the street.

May He continue to be honored as the owner of all breakings through and
have the opportunity to burst out in such a way that these girls, like
the Philistines of David's time, abandon their idols.

In the highly unusual drizzle of a Lhasa afternoon I greet my friend in
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.