Working Overtime

This weekend, an article I wrote was accepted by the Sichuan Travel Guide Magazine, a quarterly magazine which was recently started by the administrator of iHotPot.com. The article will be published in about a month in their Spring edition. iHotPot (titled the Shu Kingdom Guide) is a forum for expats primarily living in Chengdu. I, of course, do not live in Chengdu, and my piece focuses on my experiences celebrating the frigid Tibetan New Year with the nomads of the Zongta Grassland.

Losar marked the beginning of the Year of the Fire Boar, and isn't that little SuperPig cute?

I will post the article here after the publication hits the stands. It will also be available on iHotPot.com at that time. If anyone would like to read the unedited draft before then (Mom), please email me and I'll send it to you in the good faith that you will not scoop the magazine.

柔中有刚

So it's been over six months since I first began this job in Kangding County. I realized recently that I've never related exactly the inside-out turn of events that led me here. I promise I'll keep it short.

It begins back in late August. After the teachings in McLeod Ganj in Himachal Pradesh, Mike and I traveled for a week with Neil Guidry and his group of Tulane social work graduate students. In addition to the two of us, we were accompanied by a Jordanian woman and a girl from Rochester, NY. The winding jeep rides through the bright Himalayan foothills were filled with idle chatter. Neil sat in the front with the driver (in case his Thai "Press Pass" was needed to bypass toll stops), Mike, Nada, and Meg occupied the bench seat, and yours truly, the wannabe minstrel, strummed his miniature backpacking guitar in the rear.

As many of you know I returned to Asia without much of a plan, chasing a dream that I wasn't sure existed. I just wanted to get back to China to practice my Mandarin, and to hopefully work for an NGO doing something that could help me feel like I was moving in a direction, any direction. Teaching English would be something to fall back on. I hadn't made any real progress, though I met a couple of the right people at the temple in McLeod, and before I left I bounced ideas off of the requisite professors and friends.

While lamenting the lameness of English instruction, one of those friends, Olivia, mentioned that she did enjoy meeting the teachers of a group called the Bridge Fund. They didn't have to put up with run of the mill Chinese classes, which are notorious for rote learning, apathy, and poor spoken English. Moreover, they worked with Tibetans in some of the more remote areas of Greater Tibet.

When allowing my mouth to wander through the list of half-baked job ideas I had created, I mentioned the Bridge Fund to Meg and the others. Meg immediately mentioned that she was personal friends with the founder and director of the organization, a woman named Monica. Meg lives deep in Qinghai, a province that borders the Tibetan Autonomous Region in the PRC. She teaches some small children in order to pursue her practice in her lama's hometown.

Splitting from the others, Meg, Mike and I traveled to Bir so that he could make good on an invitation to meet the Neten Chokling Rinpoche and his consort Tenzin in their home. That evening Meg showed me photos from her computer of the deep green valleys of Qinghai in the summertime. Tiny Tibetan children swam freely in the rivers. She informed me that not far from there, in a town called Jyegu (Yushu), a Bridge Fund school had been established.

The following day we both emailed Monica. I didn't send a formal resume, only a description of my experience and my reasons for wanting to work with Tibetans. A short time later I received an email that the NGO needed a position filled in Dartsedo (Kangding), and that I was to email the China Director of the Bridge Fund to work out the details of the job. Two weeks (and a number of visa-related headaches) later, I found myself completely unqualified in front of an eager group of twenty-nine high school juniors.

I found out from the class's previous English instructor some time later that she had gone through an extensive hiring process. A man named Carlos had been hired to the job, but dropped out unexpectedly weeks before the term was to begin. Via a notable chain of coincidences the Bridge Fund hired me to my current job. It felt effortless. Some have called it karma. For once in my life, I trusted Fate and She delivered. Not until around Thanksgiving did I fully realize my good fortune.

Since then I mentioned to a close friend that I hope to move through life without effort. He was somewhat put off: becoming successful or achieving one's goals often requires a great deal of effort. I'm forced to agree with him, for fear of becoming passive and reactionary and unable to act to improve my life. On the other hand, I can't see the future. I find that in the periods that feel the most certain, things are changing the fastest. How does one live progressively and flexibly without worrying about what lies ahead?

Three and a half years ago I spent a long week of all-day martial arts training in Dali in Yunnan Province. The smooth motions of kungfu are powerful indeed, but they must be lithe and tempered with grace and flexibility. I still remember what the martial artist traced in the dust of the exercise yard to hammer this point home:

柔中有刚

Amidst Yielding Lies Strength

p.s.: Today is the Ides of March. For my American audience, I offer a warning. Because I am thirteen hours ahead, as I publish this you are enjoying that memorable set of strange dreams that delights us before we begin the day. I have all but finished my day. I awoke to a message from an old friend pointing out my shortcomings: inconsiderate carelessness on my part translated into a mark of deep disrespect and betrayal. Though I know I am basically self-centered and exhibit a number of pig-like tendencies, when it becomes obvious to others my ego can't help but be burned. All day long. Please tread with caution on this, the day of Caesar's death.

Open Threads

I slept most of the way up the mountains to meet my nomad friends in Aba Prefecture last week. The evening before had gone fairly late into the night (or early into the morning) and in spite of the bumpy switchbacks I was asleep for the first five hours. I stuffed myself with twice-cooked pork and rice at the dusty roadside lunch stand. Further down the road I noticed the snowmelt that had run down the wooded hillside into the shadow of the lee of the mountain. In the colder air, the water had refrozen into columns of ice, still and static yet textured with the look of bubbling liquid motion. The rice from lunch put me back to sleep.

I woke to a completely different landscape. The firs on the green cliffs had been replaced by a treeless shallow valley, tan and rocky and unencumbered. Yaks idly grazed. The surroundings seemed high, although from every direction one could see only higher hills and distant mountains. The low clouds or the thin air gave off the impression of elevation, or perhaps it was mere association upon seeing the woolly beasts of burden.

The following morning I opened the curtain for sunrise. My watch read 8:15. Fat crystals of ice covered the glass. As the ocher rays bent across the hard grassland the frost began to break up on the inside of the window. The ice crystals became fuzzy at the edges. They weeped into dirty wet drops at the bottom of the panes, and refroze once out of the light into amber icicles beside the bed. I picked up Frank Kingdon Ward's In the Land of Blue Poppies, given to me for the moment by Mike to lend me "perspective on living out there:"

It may be remarked, however, that though there is a season set apart for harvest, yet there are always seeds; just as, in the ups and downs of the collector's life, there are always flowers.

The nomadic brother of the Sichuan director of the Bridge Fund, with whom I had been staying, helped me find a cheap truck to Drago's village. The monk I sat beside eagerly shook my hand as we parted ways in Longri Xiang, where I found Drago. For two days with Drago I enjoyed easy rural life. There is little to do in the wintertime on the plateau. Many nomads come out of the plains to wait out the cold months, with little else to do but collect yak patties to fuel the wood stoves. We walked around the small town talking. Brown and white were everywhere: dull tans and drowsy grays, and brown masquerading as green on the shrubby spruce. Near the small gompa, merely a sagging collection of wooden prayer wheels along a circumambulation route, we met a Belgian researcher and her Tibetan friend traveling from Xining in Qinghai Province.

She had been away from Europe studying nomadic folk music for years. She felt that because she had been in such a special cultural place for so long that she could in no way simply turn around and walk away from it. I thought of Chris in New Orleans and Michael in Nepal, and my students at the edge of Kham.

The time crawled through two nights. I missed the day's car to Hongyuan in the morning, and rode out midday on a postal motorcycle. We threaded through the open plain, flanked in by the low snowy peaks to the south and the rising northern grasslands. He let me off at the intersection of the Longri Valley and the Sichuanese road from Chengdu to Aba and Hongyuan.

A teenage nomad was sitting on the painted concrete sign that marked the roads and the town. He was from Xining, far in Northern Amdo, and had come to Sichuan to save money herding yaks. He said to me that he had no parents and had lived in Nepal. I told him about visiting Mike and the monasteries around Kathmandu. He offered me his mala, dark orange prayer beads made of thin plastic, and taught me to count the number of mantras by moving a loop of thread along the beads. As I searched for something to give him in return, I found a black cord, one of many blessed by Lama Wangdu and given to Mike in Nepal.

Earlier that day my Hindu bracelet from the Ganges River had broken. The red yarn threads had opened as I washed socks on the porch of Drago's familial home. Michael and I had gone to the Ganges at Haridwar in Northern India on August 29 last summer, one year after the New Orleans hurricane and one day before I crossed into Nepal for the first time. A young brahmin on the river said prayers as we made our holy baths, giving us blessed prasad and water from the river to be taken to the wife and children of Mike's deceased tabla drum teacher. Last month in Lelegaon, Nepal, our friend Shyem told me that having a string from a priest for that long is unusual. I had left it to fall off on its own. I had intended to throw the yarn from the Ganges back into a river when it finally broke, but the stream is frozen at ten thousand feet in the Longri Valley. I burned it instead.

Only a few hours the bracelet had expired, now suddenly replaced by a string of Buddhist beads. I deliberately hadn't bought beads while in Nepal. I didn't feel right deciding whether to own a holy item as a souvenir. I felt I should simply wait, and if any were given to me in the future to accept them humbly. That gift would be a sort of karmic indicator, the necessary temporal condition for starting to recite Om mani padme hums. On the other side of the road the land sloped down beneath the herds and faded to cloudy mountains at the dark foot of the valley. I took a ride in a white van with a handful of Tibetans.

My student's English name is Lisa, but her Tibetan name Lotus (Wanma in Amdo; Pema in standard Tibetan) is more fitting. Her family has a winter home outside Hongyuan, the namesake of an upper county in the Prefecture. The dwelling is framed with solid logs, its braced roof angled against the wind. The dry grass shook fiercely at dusk and dusty powdered snow began to fall.

Her parents offered yak dumplings, though Lotus isn't eating meat over the next two weeks--including the new year Losar--due to the death of her older maternal uncle. The days moved slowly. Her parents gave me a deep golden Tibetan overshirt, and collared with thick colored material. Their generosity impressed me deeply. Later that night the weather cleared, and in my Nepali touque, scarf, and wool coat quietly found Drako the Dragon between the two Dippers in the northern sky. Though half a world from Louisiana and Colorado, the winter constellations of the northern hemisphere do not vary along the latitude lines to China and Tibet. The evening before I left, Lotus's cousin Potala gave me a ceremonial strip of silk and an image of an instructive meditating dakini goddess.

Soon I will be going back to Kangding from Chengdu, and moving through to Kham to celebrate the Lunar New Year with other Tibetan nomads on the snowy grassland. I have had much time to reflect on returning to the states in the summer. I have relaxed a bit by being with new friends in Chengdu and Amdo, and curiously as I miss Louisiana less I become more confident on returning in half a year. I intend to be back at the Teacher's College by the beginning of March.

Back on the Plateau

A week ago when I flew into Chengdu I found that most or all of my friends were out of pocket (sick, traveling), so I went to the local supertourist bar to see whom I could recognize. One Guinness and one Beck later I finally recognized someone, a Spanish girl named Ira who challenged me to a game of fuzball. As we were playing on what surely is one of the only tables in Sichuan, possibly China, an American kid wearing a hoodie and some hemp challenged her. He had plans to go to a bar aptly named Hemphouse, and seeing as the place we were at was dead anyway, I went too.

Two bars, two clubs, and a bottle of Absolut later I found myself crashed out on his couch. It turns out that he and his fellow students are mostly pretty hip, and I felt rather fortunate in putting my trust in luck and having it work out. In my experience, when hitting a bar stag things can either turn out really great or really terrible. This was a great night which turned into a great week.

Yesterday I finally got around to leaving Chengdu for a bit, taking the ten hour bus ride up to Aba Prefecture. My buddy Drako, who works for A. Rinpoche, lives about sixty kilometers from the Hongyuan County seat, Hongyuan. I\'m in Hongyuan now, having just spurned a ride to Drako\'s home because of the obviousness of the ripoff. Last night and presumably tonight I will stay again with Tsedrup, the younger brother of Gabzung, the Sichuan Program Director for the Bridge Fund.

I had heard it\'s cold up here, and even though this year is a mild winter Tsedrup gave me five blankets to keep me warm last night. For good measure under the blankets I slipped the fleece blanket given to me by Steve Clark before he died. I was able to stay relatively warm, and the clear full (or almost full) moon poured brightly through the curtains of the second storey window. As I fell asleep I urged the round moon to set quickly, so as not to block out all of the stars which I knew hid in the moonlight of that solid night.

This morning there was ice in my Nalgene. Tsedrup\'s son Dorje Ningju has showed me the town, and without him I\'d be lost in this fairly small town. He speaks some Sichuan Dialect, of which I understand less, but considering my Amdo Tibetan is basically nonexistent we\'re making do just fine.

The phone numbers for Lisa, my student from Hongyuan and ostensibly my reason for coming, are all bogus. Lisa is Tsedrup\'s niece, though I get very confused very quickly when it comes to nomad family trees due to the number of young mothers, mixed families, and men who marry a girl and later her sister. Tsedrup is herding this afternoon, and I hope tonight he\'ll be able to show me Lisa\'s home.

Tsedrup offered to bring me out to help them herd, but I slept too late and my horse-riding skills are kind of nonexistent. Some of my other students have offered to teach me, in addition to learning to downshift on a motorcycle.

By next Friday I hope to return to Chengdu. One of my new American friends is turning 21. I\'ll leave soon after that, stopping at home in Guza to shower and wash clothes. At that point it will be off to the Kham part of the Plateau to ring in the new year with a couple of my favorite nomad students. They\'re second cousins, I think.

"The Answer, My Friend,"

Spent the last four days outside of the valley.

Chris and a friend and I saw Pokhara, which has a stunning view of the Annapurna, allegedly. Some mist and fog restricted our vision to near ridges and deep valleys and whatnot. As Chris remarked, "That John Denver's full of shit." Pokhara is some kind of heavy tourist spot in the fall and spring, and seeing as it's January it was pretty lazy, though not cold. We did some boating across the lake and walked up to a pagoda on a hill.

On Wednesday we met Mike in Bhandipur. He's been volunteering for a Film Festival, and they showed a couple films in the small brick square of the hilly Nepali village. "Ujeli" is a lo-fi flick, a story about a Nepali girl married out of grade school. Nepalis laughed at jokes I didn't understand but I was more than satisfied with participating in a local showing of indigenous, low-budget, socially-oriented cinema. They followed it with a documentary about a geologist working fifty years ago in a much more virgin Nepal

After seeing an impressive mineral cave with cathedral sized chambers we watched the dull sun dissolve into the foggy horizon. On our last night our proprietor, Khrisna Pradhan, played some surprisingly loyal Bob Dylan to me on his harmonium. He's a retired English teacher. I felt like a young Magister Ludi. Cigarette smoke poured from his nose and mouth and the fingers pumping the airbox.

Yesterday we rode back to Kathmandu on the roof of a long public bus. We crammed inside when the sun went down and the road became too cold. Cars and buses jammed the city streets as we returned to the capital. We walked a bit and cabbed a little, and ate Korean food and went to bed dirty, at home.

Accomplishment

The group's back in Kathmandu after spending a few days hiking around the Shivapuri forest north of the city. The five of us (my brothers, cousin Will, and a Fulbrighter from Rice named Ian) went to the Royal Hana Japanese Gardens last night for hot baths and Japanese cuisine to celebrate, to unwind, to whatever. The food was tasty and later I passed out easily at the guesthouse with Enter the Dragon playing on Mike's Mac.

The hiking wasn't long--over three days we probably covered only twenty miles--but it was a good deal of up and down. Shivapuri peak lies at about only 2700 meters, but as we crested the rim of the ridge we were able to clearly view the Annapurna and Everest ranges. It's certainly incredible to stand at the top of a mountain and see such peaks from a distance, realizing those mountaintops are three times as high as the cliff upon which one stands. Being above the smog and dust of the Kathmandu valley gave me enough time to get over my sniffles, and after having slept in this morning I'm feelin' good.

We started typically late Sunday afternoon. It was an easy hike to Nagigompa, a nunnery bearing the name of the female snake deities, the nagi. We took tea and decided on thin information to try to get to a hermitage before dark. Our de facto tour guide, Mike, busted his ass to make certain that someone arrived before dark. A bit under the weather, Ian lagged at the back with William. We reached the hermitage in time, passing a stone and concrete pool studded with Shiva phalli and tiger heads with the forest silently dusking around us.

One of the two yogis fed us a meal of rice, potatoes, and vegetables. He refrained from even the starches, as he's on a strict diet of vegetables. Babaji, or "honored father," cooked under a large metal hood in his low hermitage constructed of dung and wood. Buried in dusky blankets, we slept five abreast crammed between the fire pit on one side and piles of radishes and rice on the other.

In the morning we hit the peak. We found a young, thin Nepali loitering at the grassy top, drying his dewy sleeping blankets. Frost lined the shadow of the shrine on the mountaintop. He was about our age, a student of modern art taking a few years off to meditate in the mountains. He showed us his cave, made by a previous yogi. It was cold at the mouth of his cave; although he has a distant view of the Himalayas, the sun never hits the nothern side of his mountain.

That night we walked to Chissapani, and enjoyed the local alcohols raksi and chang with a couple of girls from Vermont. The hike the next morning was strictly downhill, and by the time we reached the exit of the forest our knees and thighs were thoroughly inflamed. It was wonderful.

Now Chris and Will have full plates adjusting travel plans, combating their travel agents from across the globe. Suffice it to say, by inquiring as to the possibility of a flight extension Chris got his flight canceled, and is now battling to arrange something that puts him back in the US by February. Chris is carefully crafting a rebuttal at this moment. That said, it'll be nice to have him around for another couple of weeks.

Slides from my Vacation

Adjusting from one foreign culture to another has taken me a few days. I made it to Nepal on New Year's Eve Eve, and because I woke up for my flight from China at 3am Kathmandu time it was a wasted day. The ride was a holiday, though. I stayed near the handful of Nepalis returning home from Chengdu via Lhasa, and we celebrated with Yanjing beer as we crossed the Himalayas, returning to their homeland. The Tibet side of the mountain rim was cloudless, leaving the northern view of Everest clear and unmistakable. The aircraft followed a long crescent clockwise around the mountain group, through a reasonable pass lying to its west.
Nepal was an ocean of clouds, and soon we were decending into the foggy Kathmandu valley.

Michael grabbed me from the airport on his motorcycle. The change in face of the streets struck me immediately. Kathmandu has so many beautifully carved window facades and authentic clothing. It's also quite a bit dustier than the Chinese towns I'm used to. And the Chinese have this love affair going with decorating the outsides of buildings with bathroom tile. I met brother Chris soon enough. He looks good. I've missed those two kids, possibly most of all, since leaving New Orleans in August.

New Years--what can one say? It felt like Mardi Gras here, no less because of the wall to wall throngs of jumping and dancing Nepalis in the tourist-by-day bar-by-night district of town. I get the feeling "Open Container Law" wouldn't translate well into Nepali, and it felt natural to relax again about having a good time in 'da town. The new year turned over for us, however, in a typical Nepali bar, with men dancing to traditional music. Chris and I drank whisky and noted the anticlimax.

Later we found ourselves at what Chris described as a "Space Bar," both out of place and anachronistic. I felt dissociated again, as I had just two nights before, where in Chengdu I inadvertently invited myself to a banquet hotpot dinner in honor of a gallery opening. I enjoyed the company of the university and professional painters of Chengdu eating swan stomach and watching a private concert of Sichuanese folk dances, and later relaxed in the restuarant owner's wife's studio. She paints "man woman city scenes," heavy on the lavendar. Unnotable canvases but for the certain details they lacked: her husband's face was pale and undefined; the skyline of Chengdu imprecise and redundant.

A couple of nights after the new year we went to a classical Hindi (more formal than the Nepali folk music) conert in honor of the full moon. The tabla, sitar, and harmonium masters played in Pashpati, a Lord Shivatemple complex draped in moon shadows and hidden meaning.

Our cousin arrived on Thursday, and we've already been quite busy seeing a few mainstream visitor places. A museum in they royal Patan square provided some great remediation to Hindu gods and Buddhist images. We rambled about the Swayambu stupa, meaning "self-arising," and teeming with monkeys. William has also been a nice addition to our group. His interest in English etymology and European mythology counterpoints nicely with Mike's knowledge of local religious symbolism and language.

He also knows how to relax and have a good time.

Day Six

[This is the final segment of an eight-part creative non-fiction travel journal. Soon, you won't need 10mg of Ritalin and a cup of coffee to make it through my blog.]

A handful of Dorje's middle school friends shouted from the monastic alley up through woodwork of the second story window. The black sky gave no indication that it was six o'clock, and I failed to see the old monk as we hurriedly collected our belongings and met them downstairs. I remained quiet as we picked our way down the hill and back into the Chinese tile and Tibetan wood fusion that is Daofu. I'm often quiet when I first meet strangers in China, remaining somewhat reserved in employing my language skills (or lack thereof) until a relative level of comfort has developed. Rising before dawn, especially in such cold, pains me greatly. This Saturday morning was no exception as we walked to the store where the night before we had stashed my pack and bags of apples and walnuts, yak butter and tsampa.

I ventured to ask Dorje about our travel accommodation. He was enjoying bantering with his old friends, and his terse response about a cousin's truck insufficiently allayed my concern. I chose to remain silent for the most part, as I tend to do when I'm slightly annoyed and without effort to mount resistance. We trudged a kilometer or more to the yard that served as Daofu's equivalent of a truckstop. A shabby black dog was chained near the first of the trucks, and barked aggressively as we arrived. No other people could be seen. Dorje looked around a bit, and I headed to the toilet before anyone showed up to collect the fee of five jiao (six cents), according to the sloppy red characters painted on a wall.

Soon the pre-dawn sun began to illuminate the tired-looking truckyard. A pile of logs had been stacked beside a steel machine that looked like a cross between a steam engine and a time machine. Seven o'clock soon approached, the time that the day's only bus to Kangding would be leaving Daofu's tiny bus station. Dorje and his friends and I stood shivering on the sidewalk beside the entrance to the yard. Soon it was decided that we should locate some breafast, which was easily accomplished in the form of a tea and baozi (steamed buns filled with meat) hut not far from the truckstop.

We returned to our preassigned curb. A slim young monk stood near us, also waiting for truck drivers to show up to ask for a ride. It is traditional for Buddhist monks to wear maroon or saffron robes. He donned a yellow Marlboro racing jacket. Our group continued to stand for two more hours. I was unsure of what we were waiting for, though I chose to appear slightly standoffish as opposed to laboriously extracting details from Dorje. Soon a man began to chainsaw the logs into smaller sections appropriate for chopping into firewood. He was wearing sandals and I kept imagining him cutting off his feet. A well-dressed Chinese man wearing some kind of sports outfit and trekking boots showed up in a filthy car, and a couple of workers thoroughly washed the car and it's tires. I soon discovered that the unidentifiable machine was for pressing vegetable oil, which I assumed was also the reason the man was chopping firewood.

[If you think this narrative is plodding and uneventful, imagine how I felt.] Dorje mistook my perturbation as general coldness, and he gestured me into a small single room building that served as the caretaker's home and office. I was offered a place near the small wood-burning stove, and I began to warm myself. A tiny kitten was leashed beneath a bed. [I have seen more cats on leashes in China in the past two months than I've seen in my entire life in America.] Relatively soon, a number of people began preparing a blue truck for departure from the truckstop, and Dorje's friends climbed in the back. I began telling them goodbye until Dorje climbed in with a couple of young children and a middle-aged Tibetan man, and I was offered shotgun. It was well after half past nine.

My mood began to improve immediately as the large rig slowly pushed it's way out of Daofu and into the surrounding countryside. I wearily stared at the amber hills, rustic stone cottages and low fences covered in sod and flanked by stacks of thin firewood. The truck blew by a number of people waving palms down for it to stop, the Chinese version of thumbing for a ride. Within a half an hour, though, it picked up another student of mine, a bright round-faced Tibetan girl named Lamei Deji (Hannah).

The truck moved slowly around the curves of the highway, but the shotgun position of the blue big-rig afforded me a much more impressive view of the surrounding countryside than the bus from Kangding had. Additionally, being positioned ahead of the front axle as opposed to on top of the rear axle significantly diminished the discomfort of the pot-holed road. I wondered how Hannah and the other students were fairing in the bed of the truck, bouncing like so many yaks.

I rather enjoy the way that Tibetans tend to decorate their cars and motorcycles. A few pictures of lamas, including the Big Man On The Plateau, were taped above the driver's' side visor. Twists of colored silk hung from the rear-view mirror. I began to warm up to my fellow passengers, and I learned that the Tibetan man which whom I was sharing a seat was a Thanka painter.

Dorje layed on the small bed behind the row of seats, with a preteen boy and a grammar school-aged girl. Soon the attention of the passengers shifted to her, and I noticed that she was crying. She had become embarrassed for throwing up a bit out of the window. The man next to me was beside the window, and we lifted her from the back to sit on his lap so she could lean out the large passenger window if necessary. Dorje produced some more local walnuts, and she began to feel better as she munched on the white meat of the nuts. The insides of her nostrils were coated with scabby blood.

Once she cheered up, though, she was a delight. Her Mandarin accent was perhaps the best of the six of us in the front of the truck (Dorje knows standard Mandarin well but retains a largely Daofu accent), and my range of conversational topics generally matches those of an eight year-old. I discovered she was from Kangding, visiting Daofu "for fun." I disproved her father's assertion that all foreigners have blue eyes and blond hair, and she ran her fingers up and down my arm-hair. Her name was Drolma, and she even had an English name, Vera. She sang ABC's songs and one called "Good Morning, Teacher," the lyrics of which are basically "good morning, teacher" over and over. We drove straight to Tagong.

I hadn't had the opportunity to enjoy Tagong on the way up, and as we stopped to rest a moment Dorje's friends, Dorje, Hannah and I went to the local and super-famous Tagong Monastery. It cost ten yuan for me to enter, though the rest of them got in for free. Drolma scampered in behind us. We only had time to circumambulate one shrine room [through the small door in the white facade at the right of the photograph I did not take], and their large paintings of Guru Rinpoche and other revered Tibetan Buddhist sages was impressive and of a style I hadn't yet encountered. The incidentals of the monastery are hundreds of years old.


I offered Hannah my new toque (the Canadian term for a knitted winter hat; pronounced "tewk") and grabbed some skewered roast potatoes as we climbed back into the truck and left Tagong. The driver had purchased a number of drinks, and I was offered a terrible Chinese knockoff of Red Bull. The scenery began to change from the rolling ochre mountains to more wooded and open plains. Soon we arrived at a three-road crossroads, which marked the point at which the Tibet-Sichuan highway splits into its northern and souther routes. Turning right would have taken us west to LiThang, and soon thereafter into Tibet. Turning around would have sent us past Daofu to Derge, with northern Tibet close ahead. We turned right, and followed the traditional road back to China, back to Kangding.

[I find the term Sichuan-Tibet Highway to be somewhat misleading. Gloriously filled with potholes and composed of little more than rock and dirt in some places, the road gives new meaning to the word "highway." Most of you should envision Alexandria Senior High's parking lot before 1999, the US-59 Montrose Exit construction in Houston, or Toulouse St. near St. John's Bayou in New Orleans for comparison.]

As we approached Xinduqiao, the truck, and another rig with which we were caravaning, pulled to a stop and a handful of men disembarked. Dorje's friends had also reached their destination, a middle school in Xinduqiao. I learned that the trucks were thinning out the passengers in the cab because of a rumored traffic checkpoint on the road ahead. Apparently there is a regulation forbidding having more than four passengers in the cab of a truck at once, and the Tibetan men where unwilling to press their luck with the authorities. The men would walk and meet us for lunch at a restaurant a few kilometers down the road.

We arrived at the restaurant and waited for at least a half an hour for the men to arrive. I could see them from quite a length down the road, because they were all wearing a combination of navy blue and orange [the school colors of my elementary alma-mater, J.B. Nachman], colors that seem to be quite popular in this part of the world. A crippled cow and her calf ambled about the side of the restaurant's parking lot. The men arrived and we lunched together quickly. I insisted afterwards that Hannah join us in the cab. She appeared stiff from shivering in the back.

Two men had been switching as drivers on the journey. We started with Dorje's older cousin as a driver, and then a man from one of the other trucks took over in our truck. This man's name was Tashi, though to me he appeared to be the long lost Tibetan brother of the O'Doyle (O'Doyle Rules!) family. He was quite large and had a rather dopey expression on his shiny face. He allowed the young boy to sit on his lap and steer the rig, reminding me of just how annoying boys between the ages of ten and twelve can be.

I asked Drolma what her Zodiac birth animal was. She replied, "Wo shu niu," which means that she was an ox. I offered that I was birthed under the Zodiac sign of the boar. I offered my personal interpretation that boars are very clever. Tashi O'Doyle immediately began to tease the young girl. The word shu, a verb which means "am the birth animal," sounds quite a bit like shi (pronounced "sure"), which means "to be." Tashi asked her in astonishment if she was an ox.

She became obstinate. "I'm a person not an ox!," but Tashi insisted that she was an ox. She had been talking to the yaks out of the window, which only gave Tashi more evidence that she indeed was a cow of some kind. Soon she offered that her mother was birthed under the sign of the dog, which only made things more interesting.

"Your mother is a dog?" inquired Tashi. This, of course, is insulting in most languages. Young Drolma became quite angry, using this opportunity to test the limits of appropriate behavior with adults to shout at Tashi.

"You're a dog!" she shouted at Tashi. He seemed to enjoy the conversation, and I found it rather funny myself. He almost pushed her to the point of crying. She continued insisting that her mother was a person, and not a dog. When Tashi discovered that her father was a rooster he became incredulous.

"How does a dog and a rooster have a cow for a child?" and so on in this manner for a long time. Later, Tashi began to convince the girl that everyone had paid for the ride but her. In fact, the reason that all of the students and other passengers were enduring the slow ride through the countryside was precisely because it was free. I even played along, saying that I had payed too.

Tashi threatened to throw her out of the cab if the poor girl didn't surrender all of the money her mother had given her for snacks on the trip. She was upset, and accused him of being a dakuan, an interesting Chinese term that means roughly nouveau-riche. It was clear to me that he was nothing of the sort.

We crossed the mountain pass that marks the final descent into Kangding. The change in scenery is impressive. From the top, one can look west towards Tibet to see tan mountains and shrubby grasslands. Looking east, one views the jagged green river valleys of China. Snow-capped peaks can been seen in either direction.

The truck rolled wearily down to Kangding, and rested for a while at the other end of town as Drolma's and her brother's parents arrived to take them home. It was past seven o'clock, but we hadn't eaten lunch until almost three so no one was hungry. The thanka painter disappeared for a bit and returned with a Tibetan woman, who shared the front seat with the two of us. It made for a cramped return trip to Guza, but I insisted that it was no trouble because of the short duration of the final leg back home. The driver and the painter would be driving clear to Chengdu that night, and I'm certain they couldn't have arrived earlier than two in the morning.

We snaked through the steep greenery that reminded me of the view from my teacher's apartment at Kangding Normal Teacher's College. I was rather excited about returning home, and I still had a bit of work to do as I had class with the students the following day. I disdained the idea of class at eight o'clock on a Sunday morning. I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw the large sign advertising Wasigou, the far side of the small town that contains the crossroads to the Teacher's college. Not halfway through the one-street podunk community, though, a uniformed traffic cop signaled the truck to stop. Dorje and Hannah quickly hid beneath a blanket behind the seats, and the painter sat in front of the woman to block the policeman's view of her. I was happy to see my students had such good instincts when it came to the authorities. I smiled politely.

The driver and the cop bantered for a bit in some extremely rough Sichuanese. I may have heard the driver ask the traffic officer if they were in Japan with all these strict rules, but I could have been imagining it. Either way, the cop asked him to get his paperwork together for review in an office.

The painter appeared concerned. I wondered if I should grab my things and walk the remainder of the distance to the school. The painter got out to see if the driver needed any help, or perhaps just to lend some moral support to the Tibetan and an extra set of eyes in the office. The Tibetan woman counted whispered prayers on the beads in her left hand.

I found myself imagining what would happen if the police found a reason to arrest or beat Tashi O'Doyle. I had already spent a good deal of the afternoon narrating the events of the day to myself for later recollection and documentation. I had even coined a clever pun for my blog title, KhamAbiding. I fantasized about the emotional weight of having a comedic character like Tashi become a tragic figure just as my narrative drew to a close.

Idle thought has little impact on objective reality, but it actively defines our intentions and perception of the world around us. I chided myself for secretly wishing something terrible would happen for the sake of a story to my friends. Tashi returned after a long twenty minutes. He breathed a long sigh of relief, and we drove in silence to the crossroads of Wasigou and Guza. Hannah, Dorje, and I got of the truck, thanked the men, and organized our things. I gave the painter a handful of cigarettes from the pack I received from the tourists from Chongqing.

We didn't have to wait long for a minibus to take us to the college. The reader can likely imagine the rest of the story. Dorje gave me a bit of tsampa, walnuts, apples and butter for my apartment. I hadn't showered in exactly a week, and bearded in my dirty clothes, toque, and newly broken in hiking shoes I felt more rugged than I had in two years. I admired my reflection in the window of the school canteen as I purchased some bottled water to assuage the thirst I had built from the fake red-bull and riding ten hours in the rig.

I have finally moved beyond all of my fantasies of becoming a trucker in the American West. Being a foreign guest in Western China, on the other hand, is a highly underrated activity.

Day Five

[Beach Boys, Pet Sounds]

When writing, as when living, some periods are felt to exist merely as filler, sections experienced in reflection of what has transpired and in anticipation of the (un)expected. Friday in Daofu represents just such a day. It was the exact middle of the eighth lunar month (October 6), and consequently over a thousand million Chinese people were celebrating the Mid-August Lantern Festival. The full moon arrives in the middle of the lunar calendar. Chinese people consider the full moons that fall near the Autumnal Equinox to be the largest and the brightest of the year. The full moon classically symbolizes familial and romantic separation, so if possible, Chinese families travel from all corners of the country to reunite. The families cook a large dinner, drink teas, and stuff themselves silly with moon-cakes, the classic symbol of the full moon.

Although my students are Tibetan, many of them expressed in their diaries a longing to be with their families on this day. The October National Day Holiday lasts for only seven days, and because it takes at least two days for many of my students to travel from Kangding to their hometowns scattered across Ganzi Prefecture, few of them were able to return home. In the case of separation, one gazes at the full moon and imagines that one's mother or brother or lover is also viewing the moon with longing (kind of like Fievel Mousekewitz. Did you know that An American Tail was the first full length animated feature released by Universal Pictures? And that the Mousekewitzes are Russian Jews? I [heart] Wikipedia).

Dorje and I decided to take the day very slowly. We slept late, ate slowly and fully, and played with the dog for a couple of hours. There was little reason to leave the house. At lunchtime the family ate boiled yak meat. Yak meat is often very tough, and they let it boil for a couple of hours in the morning. I still found the meat nearly impossible to tear off of the bone and chew into a palatable bolus. Chinese and Tibetan people also enjoy eating gristle and tough fat, which has not been the culture in America since the Second World War. I felt somewhat disrespectful as I discarded some of tearthe hardest fat and tendon with my bones, though Dorje reassured me that it was nothing to worry about.

I spent the afternoon perusing the stations their satellite had to offer. Bloomberg News and some terrible British video-game channel were the only English language stations available. I learned for the first time that I actually kind of enjoy watching economic news, delightfully dryer than either C-SPAN or Oscar Wilde. From the Bloomberg ticker I discovered that Denny Hastert had resisted calls to resign over some unnamed Republican scandal. I would not find out the details of MAF54's explicit instant messages until the start of the following week.

I asked Dorje if we needed to purchase bus tickets for the following morning. He assured me that he would find a ride for us in one of the large blue rigs that transport all kinds of ridiculous things around China. I was skeptical, but he hadn't failed me yet.

We unleashed Jake, the Shandong dog raised by Dorje's previous teacher, a woman from New Zealand. I really enjoy dogs that can jump, and he's a fairly good sized blond something-or-other. He is smart, but I got the feeling he hadn't been trained to perform any tricks, at least not with the kind of commands that we use in America. He wouldn't sit or fetch. I bet that dog won't hunt.

At the slowest part of the late afternoon I learned from broken Chinese that Dorje's uncle, the monk, was preparing to return to the monastery. I also discovered that Dorje and I were to go with him. I scrambled to collect my belongings and my disposable camera (from last Christmas--did you know they have expiration dates?) and asked the family for a group photo, which didn't exactly happen as I had planned. The monk was already sitting on the road and grandma didn't seem very inclined to go downstairs. Dorje took the photo of us in front of the ancestral home, which developed into a distant grainy shot of Dorje's nun sister and mother looking expressionless, and his father with his arm around me. We sat on the windy road and waited for a taxi.

Soon we were in town, braving the cold in a brightly lit, undecorated restaurant. The establishment was noticeably ordinary. We at a large bowl of clay-pot soup, which is an assortment of fungus, cabbage, and meats. We also had fish-fragrant eggplant, recommended as a foreigner delight. I often get these kinds of hit-and-miss suggestions, and while I do like this dish they overcooked the eggplant. This is also the way I was turned onto my favorite dish, dry-fried green (four-seasons) beans. People often recommend tomato and egg soup as a dish loved by foreigners. Tomato and egg soup, as the name may suggest, is noticeably ordinary.

Soon Dorje told me that he was leaving to secure our ride for the following morning. The three of us would be staying the night in the monastery. This new excited me terribly. Although sleeping in a monastery hasn't been as important to me as it has been to my twin brother, I've always thought it would be cool to crash at one. Dorje left, and in a light drizzle the fiftyish monk and I trudged through a light rain and heavy wind to the monastery.

Daofu's monastery is quite unique. It is a complex of buildings at the top of the village, creating a patchwork of yellow mud and wood buildings. It doesn't look much like a monastery, and it's a little difficult to tell where the townspeople's homes end and the monastery begins. It was also very dark. On the way up the hill, the monk stopped to purchase a large bottle of Sprite for himself and his guests. As we got inside the labyrinth of alleys that creates the mosaic of a monastery, he stopped suddenly and squatted towards the side of the alley. It was very dark, and difficult to see exactly what he was doing, but I came to understand that he was somehow peeing without seeming to lift his robe in the slightest. I was impressed.

We soon arrived at his building, and he went ahead across the ground floor to turn one of the only lights in the abode. It dimly illuminated the bottom floor from the second story. I followed him, walking across the dirt floor and taking note of a large wooden beam in the middle of the room. There were bits of wood, hay, and stone strewn about the room, though no sign of any animals. The stairs to the second story were customarily steep, like an angled ladder with thick, wide slats.

A hallway/foyer upstairs was also strewn with wood, and a corner was completely blackened from the wood-burning stove. A side room that seemed to be built into the side of the hill contained the toilet, a wooden rectangle set into the dirt that opened into a larger dirt hole beneath it. The hallway opened directly onto an upstairs patio balcony, which despite the slight rain afforded a wonderful view of the Daofu's florescent evening sky and the surrounding mountains.

The monk's room was quite nice. The floor, walls, and ceiling were wooden. The ceiling was painted blue with the same thick red logs as rafters as in Dorje's family's home. The monk had a number of butter lamps and water-offering bowls, and one of the walls was almost completely covered with pictures of various lamas. Everyone's favorite High Lama In Exile was a centerpiece of his collection, as was the former Panchen Lama, beaming out from beyond his previous incarnation's grave with his characteristically chubby smile. There was also a poster of a very attractive Tibetan woman holding prayer beads hands pressed together in front of her chest. I tried to make it seem I wasn't gawking, though I was definitely surprised.

The monk and I spoke a bit, though it was difficult to get through even elementary conversations about the coldest wintertime cities in Ganzi Prefecture. Even when people in Daofu switch from their native tongue to Chinese, the Sichuan style of speaking is also often difficult to decipher for a Mandarin speaker. He offered me Sprite, but after one bowl's worth I was ready for some straight hot water. My stomach was rather active, and I was cold and exhausted. He chanted silently to himself and turned a microwave-sized prayer wheel on the table. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to sit halfway between reality-like dreams and dreamlike reality.

Dorje returned after the monk had turned off the light and retired to a separate room. I was asleep, and woke slightly for him to tell me that we would be rising at six o'clock the following morning to catch a truck back to Kangding.

[Alice in Chains, Alice in Chains (Tripod)]

Day Four

In prewaking half-dream I pleasantly listened to the atonal singing and staggered recitation of the fourth-graders in the adjacent room. In the misty dark of the previous evening I hadn't realized that Gonga Sonam's bedroom was a fixture in one of the student dormitories. I didn't mind the children, and I enjoyed my normal course of absurd waking dreams as Sonam and his roommates prepared themselves for class. A county official was coming to inspect the school, so although Sonam didn't have a class during the first block, he nonetheless had to get himself ready.

Thursday turned out to be the most amazing day of the vacation, and it began with the most incredible moment of the trip. Sonam greeted me as I stopped pretending to be asleep, and directed me to look out of the window. From the bed I could only make out low hanging white clouds. Behind and beneath the clouds I could still only see white. I rose on my elbows and my gaze met with an expanse of whiteness on the ground as well. During the still night, the year's first snow fell on the small mountain town of Yuke.

I hurried to get out of bed. The air was not nearly as cold as the evening or afternoon of the previous day. There was a calm about the morning after the snowfall that cut the icy air, and allowed the dull warmth of an igloo to pervade the community. Snow sat on the grass that I didn't pee on the night before, the roofs of the uniquely colorful frontier cabins, and every part of the impoverished primary school. It was, for lack of a better word, inspirational.

I ate a breakfast of Ramen-style noodles on the iron stove-box. I enjoy the way that Dorje would eat them in a metal bowl sitting on top of the wood-burning stove, and my bowl had been prepared in a similar manner. It bubbled slightly as I ate my steaming breakfast. I drank a bit of tea, and waited for Dorje to return from playing with the children, somewhere out of sight.

Soon he returned and I let him convince me to wander down to the local hot spring. It was very close; we walked a bit down the main road past the road's "bridge," and soon we found it on the other side of the river. We carefully crossed a snowy log footbridge and approached a large, stone building with a number of weathered wooden doors. Dorje commented that it would be a kuai for us each to enter, but without paying we slipped into the middle of three doors.

The pool was low, divided into two by a yellowing concrete wall. It smelled of rust and sulfur. We disrobed our many layers and eased into the water. It wasn't very hot, but it felt pleasant after walking in the fresh snow. There wasn't any steam. I relaxed and looked up. The most interesting aspect of the bathhouse was certainly its ceiling. The wooden rafters had rustic, reassuring spiderwebs at the joints. The ceramic shingles were loosely arranged, allowing light to stream into the room. It not only acted as a skylight in the low-tech baths, but the light struck bits of dust suspended in the fresh morning air, illuminating them in illusory shafts of light. I hope to remember this detail always.

We had entered the center bath because Dorje felt it was the cleanest. Soon we heard voices in the adjacent chamber, and an old set of eyes peered at us through cracks in the wooden wall. The next pool, although purportedly not as clean, was significantly hotter than the one in which we presently bathed. Some other people, with children, wanted our room, so we scrambled to put our underwear on before they came inside. We quickly ran across the snow with our clothes in our arms, steam rising off the drops of water on our backs. We went into the new room, but this time I felt the need to leave my underwear on as there were a number of other men in the room.

One of the men was an old worker. He looked oddly fit for a man his age. Another man was fat. The fat man wore no clothes and scrubbed himself with a stained washcloth. Dorje and I got into the baths quickly. I was still wearing my new stocking hat. We began an idling dialog with them, though I had difficulty following their rough dialects.

[The reader may be concerned about my lack of discomfort at this part of the story. A neo-Freudian literary analyst would have decried my lack of self-awareness of its homoerotic undertones, although my relationship with Dorje is certainly more innocent than Robinson Crusoe's affair with a brown boy named Friday. I can accept the reader's concern, primarily because of what happened next. Moreover, I apologize to those that revere postmodern academic theory (especially post-colonialism) for some of my following comments and witticisms. But let's be honest; Daniel Defoe sucks.]

The door opened and three Tibetan women slipped inside. Dorje would later tell me that the women's pool is very cold, and recently some of the younger women were flaunting convention and following the warmth, regardless of sex. I'm all for equality, especially when it comes to bathing. The fat man arranged his washcloth triangularly on his loins, not that it made much of a difference. As those of you that have sat in a pool with a naked man (and who hasn't?) already know, refraction and shadow cast the genitals effectively invisible. From the vantage point of the women above the pool, however, the view is much more (or less, depending upon your point of view) accommodating.

The women helped each other remove their Tibetan dresses, which consist of a number of large pieces of material wrapped around the body. Because I was trying to only look at them indirectly, the only respectful way in my country, I couldn't clearly see if they were wearing bras. My guess is that these forward thinking women of the Tibetan cultural avant guard were not. Most nomadic women see no need for them. They removed everything but their hair ties and underwear.

The group of men continued chatting, although fitfully. At one point Dorje and I moved near the opening at which the hot water sprang from beneath the ground. I put my legs deep inside and opened my toes with the clean, therapeutic stream. Soon Dorje offered to wash my back, and after he scrubbed me I returned the favor. My attention was mostly on the girls, though. I feigned incognito, which is to say I played the I'm-Not-Looking-At- You-But-I'm-Trying-To-Sneak-Looks-At-You-Without-You-Seeing-Me-Though- I-Want-You-To-Know-I'm-Trying-To-Look-At-You-Anyway Game, a personal favorite of mine.

One of the dakinis, who was very flat chested and cute and who had a small growth of some kind on the right side of her neck, looked at me through her opened toes and the steam of the bath. Her and one of her friends each had a single gold tooth replacing a maxillary lateral incisor. Dorje supinated his body completely, stretching almost flat on his back with his face above the water to fully receive the effects of the bath. After a while, though, I felt I had cleaned enough dirt off of me and picked up enough sulfur and rust to call it quits. Dorje's and my fingers were raisins.

We awkwardly dressed, trying to hide our bare asses with our jackets as we removed our wet drawers and put on our pants. I knew that they would not dry in the cold by the time we needed to leave, and I was not looking forward to riding the motorcycle commando back to Daofu. In our haste I forgot my soapdish, even though we hadn't used the soap in the first place. The snow had largely melted. Dorje and I spoke excitedly as we walked back to the primary school.

"Don't tell anyone about the women in the hot spring," he asked me in his accented English. I pressed him on why not. "Because it not our custom for the men and women to have a bath together." I promised him I wouldn't tell his sister or the students in our class in Guza. I also told him that I would definitely tell all of my friends in America. I was excited. "It is very bad for us to look at women in Buddhism," he remarked. He asked me how long I had had my tattoo, and after telling him that I got it four years ago (wow!) I said that I thought a fiery Dharma Protector would make an excellent tat. He responded that good Buddhists shouldn't have tattoos.

"Why not," I asked, "I have seen a lot of Tibetans with tattoos of dragons and all sorts of things." Tibetan men and women, especially nomads, like to wear colorful accessories, like feathers in their hats, yarn in their hair, or earrings and heavy stone necklaces.

Dorje appeared slightly austere. "In Buddhism, our body is not our own. It is borrowed. We should treat it like it is not our own, because when we die, we will give it back." I agreed with his logic, though I feel the indiscretions of my past are completely excusable. On the other hand, I hadn't removed my Chenrezig medallion when we got in the baths, and when we were getting out I noticed that most of the other Tibetans had taken off the necklaces that their lamas had given them. That was three strikes against the Three Jewels; I realized that I was not a very good Buddhist. It was certainly no surprise. Vanity led me to my trespasses, and I still do not know the Tantric antidote to pride. I do know that it prevents one from seeing one's faults, and is related to the jealousy that prevents one from rejoicing in the accomplishments of others. I'm also a jealous guy.

When we arrived at the school, Sonam had finished whatever duties the morning required of him, and I invited him to walk around town with us. It is a short walk, and he led us to a couple of old, small temples. Each had a handful of large prayer wheels, suspended from the ceiling. We turned them clockwise. I made seven rotations in the smaller temple, and in a larger temple we completed three full circumambulations. I learned from Michael that three and seven are auspicious numbers in Tibetan Buddhism. It's also good to add a few extras, in case the aspiration or intent or one's mind was not in the correct place during one of them. For screw-ups, you could say.

We left the back of the town and walked into a large meadow. Tibetans almost exclusively call meadows "the grassland" in English. By now the snow had melted from everywhere except the yak paddies. I am uncertain as to what it is about dried piles of yakshit that prevents snow from melting. We walked to a shrine in the meadow. It was a small, cubic stone structure with countless poles coming out of the top. A colorful flag was attached to each pole. About five meters away from the tower of flags sat an altar covered with partially burnt juniper boughs. Dorje, Sonam, and a number of my other students are fond of calling these shrines "the mountain gods." It is a holdover, I discovered later, from the indigenous Tibetan religion called Bön.

"We do not pray at the mountain gods," Sonam explained. "If you pray at a mountain god, when you go to the next mountain god it will know." We also did not do korwa around the shrine. "The next mountain god will feel very jealous, and you will have bad luck." I earnestly searched my soul, and discovered that I indeed did not have any desire to pray at the Shrine of the Mountain God.

I don't remember what we ate for lunch. Soon afterwards we pulled the motorcycle away from the primary school among a horde of children shouting, "Goodbye!" and "Good Evening!" and "Hello!" The town's workers had already completed the section of road in front of the school, and we quickly rolled out of town. Near the "bridge," we passed the old man from the hot spring. I had to walk the length of the makeshift bridge once again.

Soon after leaving town Dorje offered to teach me to drive the motorcycle. The sky was still cloudy from the snowfall, but the pine-covered hills were beautiful. Everything in the valley was alive with an alpine lushness that I hadn't considered possible. I had already been daydreaming about the many similarities between Steven T. McQueen and Yours Truly, so I of course agreed to an impromptu lesson. I'll spare you the details for once; suffice it to say that it is not difficult on flat, traffic-free roads. I'm very good at shifting up. Hills are a bit tricky. I'm terrible at down-shifting, and I stalled it a couple of times.

As we approached the pass, low clouds began to blow over the edge of the mountains. There was still a large amount of snow in the upper areas, and the road was wet. Dorje rode slow and carefully, but I became anxious as the last bit of blue sky was enveloped by dark clouds. It began to hail as we approached the pass. I hadn't heard any lightning, but I was nervous to say the least. As we passed between the peaks, the wind became almost unbearable, and I was on the back of the bike. Dorje had no goggles, so I'm sure he was in a great deal of pain. Small bits of hail began to hit my cheeks, and piles of it were mounting where my thighs pressed against Dorje's back. He did an excellent job steering the bike.

I daydreamed idly, mostly about what it would be like to write an autobiographical novel. I would embellish it dramatically, and give it a self-important title like "500 Days." It would chronicle the 500 so-odd days between the April Fool's Day in which my friends and I found a dead guy at the Rice Stadium and last August, when I watched a Nepali man be cremated at a riverside ghat. Death is so dramatic when it happens to people other than you. I would use everyone's real names, and they'd be very upset because of my propensity to speak truthful hyperbole. My roommates in the Houston Heights would receive special treatment, because of how much I now realize I cared for them, despite their and my imperfections. Shuchin and Lamar and Nath would be major characters as well, and I'd deal heavily with my stint in the Houston underworld, my dead-end job, and the self-made vicissitudes of my relationship with April. In the course of six months I visited Hermann Memorial Hospital three times; Jay contracted pneumonia, Sonny suffered a heart attack, and Nath hurt. Sonny passed a month after I moved to New Orleans. The story would investigate the conflicting determinisms of karma and postmodern existential atheism (two things about which I know very little but claim to know a lot), in much the same vein as Yukio Mishima's Runaway Horses.

About halfway down the side towards Daofu, he was ready for a break. We pulled off at a small group of buildings on a plateau on the hillside. We found an opening in the fence and pulled it up to a black tent. Inside, a woman and her daughter were tending a fire. There was a large pot of tea at a constant low boil. We sat down beside the fire, and they served us tea. Soon a young man with long curly hair and an adult monk joined us in the tent, and Dorje dried his wet gloves next to the embers. My toes were frozen. I drank black tea, and Dorje had milk tea. We gave the woman some candy for the children, although I didn't see any children around. By the time we rose stiffly, it had ceased raining.

We rolled happily down the hill into Daofu. Dorje had to run a quick errand in town, so he left me with a distant aunt at a roadside stall. She offered me a bit of tea, and explained (after quite a bit of trying) that the following day was the Chinese Moon Festival. She offered me moon cakes, which were rather delicious in fact, though I couldn't eat them as fast as she asked me to.

On our way back to Dorje's home, we caught up with his parents and uncle receiving a ride on the back of a tractor. It was fun for them to see us on the motorcycle after our journey. It began to rain a bit, but I was elated. It was not yet dark, and soon after we returned to his home we had dinner. I was too exhausted to remember anything of significance that evening. It's very likely that nothing really happened. Nothing ever does.

Day Three: Part Two

The townspeople of Yuke are in the process of building a bridge over the small river. Currently, all traffic from the small mountain must endure a short makeshift crossing of planks and logs, barely wide enough for the motorcycle. I had to dismount as Dorje spun it across the earthen banks and flimsy boards. Entering Yuke, however, was worth the small inconvenience. "The word for this kind of place," I explained to Dorje, "is 'Fronteir.'" In addition to the bridge project, workers were "resurfacing" the main drag in town. Large craggly stones were assembled in the floor of the road, and then covered by gravel and an upper layer of dirt. A curious pounding machine flattened the new, concrete-less road.

From the outside Yuke looks rather small, a neat conglomeration of wooden homes and a single Chinese style structure (replete with the Red Flag), the local primary school. As we rode across the unfinished road through town, numerous Tibetan pedestrians and monks waved greetings to us. I imagine that few foreigners make their way down that road from Daofu, despite its stunning natural beauty, and in spite of the stares I enjoyed the relatively warm reception. We immediately headed to the school, where Dorje's sister works as a Chinese teacher. She unlocked the gate for us, and we went inside to rest and eat.

We were starving. It was past one o'clock, so everyone had eaten and the students and most teachers were in class. Dorje's sister helped us to their left-overs, and we also brought some food out of the rough sack that we had strapped to the back of the hog. One of the plastic bags containing cold spicy noodles had broken. It was no matter to Dorje and the rest; they scooped it together onto a plate and served it as if nothing had happened. I, on the other hand, attempted to stick mainly to the relatively fresh food left from lunch.

The room had a wood stove, similar to the one in Dorje's home. Yuke sits at around four thousand kilometers, and was significantly colder than Daofu. I kept my new hat on as we drank tea and relaxed from the journey, warming ourselves by the fire. After a while we decided to walk explore the small town. When the children saw us, they crowded and pressed around me, saying simple non sequiturs like "Good Evening!" and "Good Morning!," and trying to hold my hand or kick me in the butt. Most of them had ruddy cheeks from numerous winters, and nostrils permanently crusted with snot. Down to the first grade the students lived at the school away from their mostly nomadic families. We finally dislodged them all and made our way through town.

There aren't many things in Yuke other than the unique mountian homes and the beautiful mountains. It certainly was enough. After walking a short ways we found ourselves in the back of town at the monastery, a towering single-roomed square building of stone that faces away from the rest of the community. Around the courtyard there were men stripping large logs and preparing them for lumber. Later I learned that they would be building simple living quarters for the monks of the six year old gompa. We went inside, prostrated three times, and seated ourselves in the back among the little children and the old ladies that had brought them at the back of the colorful room.

The group had come to listen to the monks chant and play their horns and drums. The group sat in six rows, three facing three with the large drum in the center. In one of the middle rows, a beautiful adolescent boy with long straight hair and a golden jacket sat among the other monk. Some of the older monks dozed toward the back. Dorje explained that the boy with long hair was probably a Rinpoche, a "Precious Jewel," a thulku or reincarnated high lama from the past. He also explained to me that I had been prostrating incorrectly. Since first learning to sit still at the Zen Club at Rice University, I have pressed my palms flatly together with my left thumb sitting over the right thumb. Dorje explained that I should leave an empty space between my palms, and not allow any fingers to cross the others.

Soon a monk came over to us, and offered to show us around the monastery. I was a bit embarrassed as we had already been attracting (distracting?) a lot of attention from the monks. The man was Hannah's uncle, and Dorje and I recognized him from the thukpa shop in Daofu that her cousin owns. We agreed to the tour, and he began by showing bringing us to the rear of the hall. There was a large statue of Padmasambhava, the Guru Rinpoche, in a rear section of the hall that was surrounded by workers painting thanka on the walls around the icon. Dorje informed me that it had been "made of" a deceased lama, which disturbed me somewhat until I realized that he meant to say that it was "made by" (the financial offerings of) a previous lama. In fact, the new monastery and the housing project is underwritten by some wealthy lamas and practitioners that have taken the Yuke community under their care.

He next showed us the thanka, or paintings, that surrounded the perimeter of the hall. Each colorfully and stylistically depict a Buddha, Rinpoche, deity, or Dharma protector important to their lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. Soon we came across Chenrezig, an immanation of Avolakiteshvara, the Guardian of Compassion. Some suggest the he takes the female form of GuanYin in Chinese Buddhism, and Kannon in Japan. When Michael and I visited Lama Wangdu with Ian McCormick in Kathmandu, He gave us each a colored metal medallion to wear around our necks. I was blessed with one of Chenrezig. Michael told me that the Lama had said it was because I have a "white heart." Chenrezig has four arms, two of which are holding a mediation mudra (hand gesture) and two of which are pressed together at his sternum. His hands are slightly parted, as if he is holding something very special...

Soon we returned to the school after circumambulating the gompa a few times. We ate dinner with Dorje's sister and one of her friends. The conversation drifted between Mandarin and the dialect of Daofu, with a bit of English here and there. Although the girls were not English teachers, English is a requirement on all teaching and government examinations in China. After a while a young man named Gonga Sonam joined us. He was a recent graduate of the Bridge Fund program, and had just begun at the school as a Tibetan teacher. He was only twenty, deciding not to take the exams to go to University. He was a little concerned with his school placement; when requesting to teach in Daofu county, he had not expected to be placed so far into the countryside. He said if he was a judge's son, he could easily get moved, but since he didn't know anyone there was a chance he'd be teaching in Daofu for the next three of four decades. The eligible batchelorettes in Yuke are few and far between.

Dorje and I took a bit of time to watch the children as they ate their dinner. Each child gets noodles for dinner, enhanced with a bit of cooked cabbage floating around the soup. Although it is a simple meal, they are welcome to as many helpings as they like. Dorje said that for lunch they get some vegetables, although he wasn't certain. Meat is expensive. Dorje felt that watching the poor students was good for us both: "It really makes my heart open." He asked me about certain words in English, begging me translate terms like "depressed economy," "development," and "resources."

I took the opportunity to dispel a myth that I hear constantly as I travel in China, that all people in America are rich. I explained to him that although even dishwashers make at least $800 a month, which is quite a good salary in China [a little more than what I'm making as a foreign instructor, incidentally], it is rarely enough to live on in America. I explained to him that rent, health and automotive insurance, gasoline, a car note, energy bills, and basic living expenses generally add up to over $800 per month; even for a person living on their own, making a living on the minimum wage is extremely difficult. We also went into credit card debt a bit. People in developing countries tend to focus on the higher wages that people in developed countries earn for even the most menial tasks. They often forget the fact that an inflated economy means that everything costs a lot more, too.

Soon the sun set and it became dark, much darker than I expected, actually. A light drizzle moistened the deep night. Yuke does not have a central power grid. Sometimes they stoke up the generator at the school, but not this evening, apparently. Gonga returned with a few beers for the two of us, and Pepsis for the girls and Dorje. Students in the Bridge Fund are not allowed to drink booze. I've been drinking a lot less myself. Beside the stove, the five of us chatted by candlelight about numerous useless topics as ate sunflower seeds and some god-awful hard-candy.

I stopped after one beer, as I was concerned about a relapse of my morning headache, which by now I was ready to attribute to the altitude. Gonga offered to let me sleep in the extra bed in his room, which he shared with two other teachers. As I got into bed, Gonga threw an extra blanket on top of me and Dorje actually tucked me in, on all sides. They acted very concerned that I would be too cold during the night. I assured them that I had fared much worse in my old sleeping bag and thin ground pad in the mountains of Colorado and New Mexico. I pulled my hat on tight. Gonga told me that if I needed to pee during the night, just to step outside and go in the grass. I certainly had no problem with that. It was not yet midnight, but I fell asleep quickly, and did not need to get up until breakfast.

Day Three: Part One

I awoke to a low sun filtered through thin white curtains. The day promised warmth, a welcome change from the drizzly chill of the previous afternoon. I washed, stretched a bit, and sat cross-legged on the couchbed for about ten minutes. I stared blankly at the opposite wall, trying to ignore the patterns of gold paint traced amid patches of pink and green and blue that make up the majority of the designs around the walls of the home. I finished packing away the sweaters and hats we had horded for the upcoming journey, and readied myself for breakfast.

I had a dull headache as I ate the endless stream of boiled eggs presented to me. It was an annoying throb, unusual because I hadn't had anything to drink since Kangding three nights before. I drank extra bowls of water, and after Dorje finished his tsampa I grabbed the bag and we headed to the back of the house to check out the motorcycle he had borrowed. He informed me that he used to drive bikes very recklessly in the days of his rebellious youth. About two years ago, at the age of sixteen, he realized the emotional trouble he was causing his parents and decided to "change his heart." Now he is one of the top students in my class, and a conscientious Buddhist.

The bike was red, and had a colored Tibetan snow lion etched below the seat on the back panel. It reminded me of Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace's freewheeling hog from the film The Rockers. He kicked the foot starter, and the engine whined but refused to turn over. After a few more tries, Dorje asked me to push the bike as he tried the ignition. Soon the right throttle handle came completely loose. Dorje was not pleased, and decisively unscrewed the steel nuts that held in place the thin cable that runs from the chassis to the throttle. The wire slipped easily out of the handle, clearly frayed at its end. By twisting the skinny steel cable around his fingers, he was able to get it to start as I, pack on my back, pushed the motorcycle all the way down the rocky driveway and into the thin highway. He gassed it up the road a bit, and spun around to pick me up. As I mounted the hog, I could see that the wire was already causing his fingers to turn bright red.

We rode the five clicks to Daofu with high spirits after our potentially abortive obstacle. This was the second time in five days that I had been on the back of a motorcycle, out of perhaps five times in my entire life. It was far more pleasant than whipping through Chengdu, and certainly beat the hell out of drunkenly crossing Houston on the back of a rice rocket. In a cabin in the Himalayan foothills of India Michael had recounted a story about his trip from New Orleans to D.C. in a busted jeep. He moralized his story by saying, "if it seems that everything is trying to keep you from doing something, then perhaps you shouldn't do it." My headache was growing more persistant, but my spirits had risen considerably.

As Dorje had the bike repaired in a roadside shop in Daofu, I ducked into a local drug store and purchase some headache medicine. After resisting the shopkeepers attempts at selling me some extra cold medicine, I took a few of the pills with a cup of hot water and rejoined Dorje by the bike. He was having it serviced fully for the trip. I watched the motor oil pool on the sidewalk as a couple of young Tibetan men were having a tape deck installed on their roadhog. Their motorcycle was decked out with colored carpet on the seat and streamers on the handlebars. Dorje bought some white gloves, the same as the technicians were using to repair the bikes. We mounted, crossed town for some petrol, and turned on a paved road rising steeply from the town's main road. Soon it became a rocky dirt road.

As we snaked up the hill, I asked him if the road would be so bad the entire way to Yuke, the nomad community to which we were headed. He said no, and I remarked that it must be a shortcut. He said he understood, which was clearly not the case as the road would only get less smooth from then on. I thought it was a good time to explain to Dorje the English language concept of the open road. Freedom, Captain America riding his chopper across an unencumbered New Mexico, limitless possibility, the Zen of a moment. Soon we were eye level with the hillside mantras. I began to see the way in which Daofu sits within an accommodating valley, as the rest of the countryside rolls and slopes through grassland and forest on average a good thousand feet above the river below. It was breathtaking. Stunning prehistoric mountains started to peer from above the more gentle and still autumn grasslands. My headache was gone, and we made numerous stops to pee and to bundle up as the wind and air grew more frigid. I could see snow above the pines. We curved numerous times around progressively more threatening bends. I got my first look at the range that contained our pass to Yuke, a snowy razor edge of grey stone and patchy snow. The bike glided up the last few hundred meters and slipped through the aperture that separated this side from that.

The top of the pass sits at well over four thousand meters, and is marked with a couple of shrines to mountain deities. The vertical flags make a colorful contrast to the brown and grey, white and deep green that is evident at every angle. I forced Dorje to stop for a couple of pictures. By now my bag was empty as we had layered every sweater and jacket that we had brought. I was wearing two hats, and it was more than worth it. On the opposite side of the pass from which we had ascended, there was a thousand-plus foot drop into a pristine valley, alpine yet fertile, walled on the other side by an even higher strip of mountains and passes. Delta-like threads of blue-white snowmelt cut down it's face, the lifeblood of the plain below. A few black yak-fur tents dotted its grassy floor. We got back on the bike and rolled down the frozen path.

It took no time for the sub-tundra plain to fade into nomad plains, and soon we dipped below tree line. Vast triangular configurations of prayer flags melted with pines in both directions of the valley. Soon squatty horses and shaggy yaks could be seen grazing in fields beside the road. Crude fences appeared, and homesteads of frontier cabins and black tents established themselves in the ever more lush valley.

Dorje steered the bike off the road at one settlement to check out the tent, and although a hat was hung on a peg outside and smoke poured from the slit of a door, no one was to be seen. My legs had stiffened completely. Soon we passed through a real community, and within another ten clicks we had arrived at our destination, the small mountain town of Yuke. From the back of the motorcycle I felt very free and very fortunate.

It was the culmination of two months of blemish-free karma. I vowed not to forget the feeling once the karmic pendulum began its decent.

For the first time in a couple of years, I really felt there. Everything was totally with it, and my thoughts were with you through it all. I tried to enjoy it all for its own sake, for my sake alone. I couldn't help but anticipate recanting the tale, threatened by my own motivations of vanity. It is my pride and my ego, but it also the only gift I have for you now. This is my love.

Day Two

By the time I eased off the couch every member of Dorje's family had finished their prostrations in the adjoining shrine room. As I washed my face and teeth, hands and feet on the upper patio, which opens down the length of the long pastoral valley, I really noticed it's simple and meditative quality. I wondered if when growing up Dorje had ever gotten tired or failed to notice the gentle ochre hills backdropped by more impressive stoic snowcaps, or the practical grace of the wheat plots set against the idle river. I knew that in a weeks time I would not. I climbed to the roof to get a better view, and I allowed my thoughts to mingle with the morning incense smoke rising from his home, and ever other house, stupa, and mountain deity shrine I could see.

We breakfasted on tsampa, a staple of ground roasted barley mixed with the low-quality nomad brick tea to make a very palatable ball of dough. They offered me butter, dried cheese, and sugar for flavor, and insisted I eat more boiled eggs and drink more fresh unpasteurized milk than my weak and shrunken stomach could handle. They were very insistent, as they would be the entire week, and also very successful at making me rather bloated by the end of each mealtime. By the end of the meal my pants were covered in a fine barley powder from my amateurish attemps at molding my breakfast ball of dough.

Not long after breakfast word came upstairs that Dorje's robed uncle had invited a number of Chinese tourists from Chongqing to tour the home. I stood at the top of the steep stairs and listened to their clean hiking boots stamp out their ascent. Upon reaching the second floor they greeted me with a hearty "Tashi Deleg!" before realizing I did not look as Tibetan as the rest of the family. Everyone was introduced, and I enjoyed bantering with a couple of them as they toured the family home and the shrine room. One of the tourists pointed to the upstairs outhouse door and asked if it was a staircase. They seemed very happy to give their respects to The Venerable One, who's face peers from multiple directions in the elaborate wooden house. They gave gifts of terrible tasteless Chinese candy, and I was given a pack of cigarettes, a special Chongqing brand. I explained that I don't smoke, but they wouldn't take them back. "For bribing taxi drivers not to cheat me," I concluded to myself.

Soon the tourists moved on, giving Dorje's mother a ride so she wouldn't have make the hourlong walk to town. Dorje explained to me that his parents worked very hard and do not like to waste money. He hopes to learn English and make money abroad, so that they will not have to continue their manual, agricultural tasks into their old age. The hardships of half a century are already visible on his mother's dark wrinkled face, and his father's broad body and curled hands. As we waited for a cab to town, we turned a large prayer wheel suspended in a nearby earthen shack.

We met Hannah, my other student, in her cousin's noodle shop, and immediately set out for the monastery. We peered into each shrine room, and I was surprised and how many statues and images we continued to find. Many of the carvings made from colored yak butter had begun to melt with last summer's heat. I made a few donations here and there, and Dorje showed me the rooms set aside as "bedrooms" for the previous Panchen lama and the current Big Lama. I especially enjoyed His Picture set in a spiral of shiny plastic, making it appear as the focal point of some crazed hypnotist's device.

As we did one large korwa, a circumambulation, I snapped photos of the view of the city and the outside of the monastery. I prefer not to take pictures inside temples, though I'm not exactly sure why. I really love looking at the detailed thanka paintings, my favorites being the ones painted on black backgrounds with colorful subjects like burning skulls and vajrayoginis and protector dieties. I just feel a little strange snapping their photos. I also felt immediately ashamed when I clandestinely took the picture of a monk, about my age and wearing a brazil soccer jersey beneath his maroon robe, as he walked up a path between the low, mud buildings of the monastery. The complex is a rather beautiful combination of a simple monastic style and the specialized wooden structures of the Daofu area homes. I have heard them described as giant Tibetan chocolate cakes covered in white icing, but I don't really think that does them justice.

After lunching on the thick Tibetan noodles at the restaurant, we grabbed a cheap taxi across town to see the large Daofu stupa. It reminded me quite a bit of the one in Boudha, Kathmandu, at which Mike and I spent many an afternoon in ambling korwa. You could actully go inside of this one, climbing a series of narrow wooden ladders to get to each of the smaller, cocentric levels. From the inside, one can see the small buddhas placed in each small, glassy archer's window. At the top of the stupa we took the customary photographs in front of the Buddha Eyes and the mantra arranged on the hillside. Dorje and Hannah pointed out to me which local mountains were worthy of "mountain gods," hold-over deities from the pre-Buddhist religion called Bon that were recruited by Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava to protect the Dharma.

During the afternoon Dorje informed me that he had been asking around to borrow a motorcycle for us to ride up over one of the mountains to a local nomad community. His sister is an English teacher in a very small town called Yuke, and that afternoon I purchased a maroon stocking cap for $0.75 in anticipation of the ride. After saying goodbye to Hannah, we took a cab to an orphan school about halfway back to his house. The school was established by a network of do-gooders from Germany, and there was very tall and very friendly Swiss English teacher, near my age, on a two or three month stint in Daofu. The students were typically over-fond, and one of them with the English name Sunshine asked me if I knew Karma Sonam, one of the students in my program and a classmate of Dorje's. Karma is one of my favorite students, and his cousins Tashi Nema (Lucky Sun) and Tashi Dawa (Lucky Moon) offered to show me around. After seeing the thanka and weaving classrooms, Dorje and I set out to his home accompanied by four or five of the local schoolchildren.

We ate momos backed on the wood-fire and more thukpa soup, and put all of the warm clothes we would need in my backpack for the trip the following morning. I had no idea what to expect.

Day One

I set out for Kangding at about 6:00 Sunday evening. The road from Guza to Kangding winds for about half an hour through the green rocky river valley. I bantered a bit in rough Sichuanese with my taxi driver, asked him to drop me at the bus station so I could purchase tickets for Daofu for the following morning, and paid him the flat rate of ten yuan. Tenzin, another Bridge Fund instructor, had invited me to have dinner with him at his apartment, a flurry of vegetable dumplings being prepared by a giggling gaggle of six Tibetan teenagers. Tenzin is white, and technically an American (at least his passport says so). The son of a Tibetan-English translator of no little repute, Glenn H. Mullin, Tenzin was born in Northern India and spent his childhood between India, America, Nepal, and New Zealand. And his name really is Tenzin. I've seen his Georgia driver's license. He has taught for the Bridge Fund for five years now, and he's really become one of my closest friends and professional mentors. As such, we went out for beers after the girls cleaned up and left.

Tenzin and I tried a restaurant turned bar turned karioke club that his friend manages. Between the loud music and drunk highschoolers we decided to split, for a less crowded less popular thirtysomethings upstairs bar. We typically get invited to drink with Tibetans or Chinese people immediately upon sitting down, as we are generally the only foreigners around and we are a rather lonely looking pair. We attempted conversation with a Tibetan man from Danba, but his Kham Tibetan was different from Tenzin's, and his Chinese was different than mine. Traveling to Daofu would be the same: From standard Chinese, the Sichuan dialect is once removed, and from standard Tibetan, the Kham dialect is once removed. For places like Daofu and Danba, their local languages (from being relatively isolated half a century ago) a again removed from the local dialects.

Soon some Kangding drinking pals of Tenzin's called him and they showed up almost immediately. I asked a girl that was with them what she was drinking, and one of the men promptly informed me that she was his girlfriend. Insecure punk. Tenzin's friends are very goofy, but good natured and friendly. One of them showed me a picture in his cellphone of the former political leader of Tibet, the main man himself (currently kicking it in the green beauty of the Indian lower Himalayas). Tenzin jovially informed me that he is a traffic cop in Kangding. I guess official political loyalties don't run so deep.

I pestered Tenzin to go home and let us pass out at about midnight, as my bus was leaving at 6:00 the following (Monday) morning. I got up slightly before 5:30 and went looking for a cab. It was dark and there were no cars at the gate of Kangding Zhongxue (Middle School, i.e. High School), where Tenzin lives and teaches. I walked up the road to a few parked taxis next to men loading a work truck, and when I inquired as to the drivers the men told me they were sleeping. No surprise there. I began to become concerned that I'd miss the bus, and jogged up the road with my modest pack. After a while I saw a taxi approaching, followed it to its fare's destination, and directed him to the bus station.

Cars in China generally drive very quickly and recklessly. In my hurry I had probably located the only slow taxi driver in Sichuan. We ambled through the back mountain roads until he finally deposited me at the bus station. I hurried past the luggage scanner and onto the bus platform, searching vainly for about ten minutes. I could not find my bus, and it was already past 6:00. I began to feel some anxiety. I asked some passengers milling about at an empty bus stand, and they remarked casually that it had not come yet. Monday was perhaps the busiest travel day of the holiday, and most of the buses that leave Kangding depart for destinations only once daily, at 6:00 am. I walked out of the traffic entrance to the bus yard and found my bus among a long line of empty vehicles waiting to even get into the station.

I asked the driver if I could put my bag in the trunk. It was the only piece of luggage there. When I climbed on I notice five foreigners struggling to stack their overburdened packs in the aisle and on the seats beside them. They had, likely not by coincidence, been assigned the back row of five seats, slightly elevated. These seats are a blessing in an empty overnight bus on a smooth highway, as one can spread out and catch some sleep. They are notorious, however, or bumpy roads, as the back of the bus tends to amplify the vertical jerks of the potholes. I informed them that I had put my bags in the trunk, and they said that the driver hadn't let them. I asked the driver about it in Chinese, and I barely made out from his dialect that it was because they were not going all the way to Daofu, but rather stopping off at Tagong, a popular grassland community with an impressive, millennia-old monastery.

I didn't feel like sticking around to argue as I really needed "to see a man about a dog." I found the public squatter, and wasn't able to take my time as I like, still slightly anxious about the bus departure. I returned with plenty of time, and I attempted to get some sleep as the bus rolled out, well behind schedule. Soon, the foreigners engaged me in conversation. They were Polish, which I had secretly guessed but didn't want to ask because they could have been Russian or Check or Croatian and probably would have resented being called Poles. They were nice, after all, and dealt with their crappy seat and luggage situation in stride by calling the driver crazy in English, and one of the girls was astonished that I could read Mullin senior's book in spite of the bumpy ride. I was feeling a bit ragged, from my previous encounter in the squatter and my lack of water after drinking the night before and from skipping breakfast, which I hate.

The houses began to appear more squarish with facades bordered by wood, as opposed to the bathroom tiled external walls of modern Chinese architecture. I saw a few horses with colored yarn braided into their manes and tails, and embroidered rugs with pictures of dragons or snow lions serving as saddles. But as we entered the valley down the road that leads to Tagong I saw the first really beautiful picturesque views that trip, as magnificent as anything I've seen since Colorado and New Mexico and maybe flying over the Himalayas in September (views from planes are magnificent, but a little too alien for inspiration). The hills were green and amber, not as imposing as near Guza, and the sun shone along a clear stream (like really! Clear water does exist in China!) littered with large stones that led to the open grasslands of Tagong. In the distance I could some snowcaps, dark mountains with shining snowy crowns distant and formidable against the rolling meadows and ridges of lower Kham. I decided rather deliberately that my hunger and discomfort would not distract me from the beauty, and henceforth they did not.

The Poles hopped off at Tagong, the bus barely slowing down enough for them to lug their packs into a white and yellow ocean of tourists and a brown gulf of locals. Later I lunched on potatoes and pork, and fell asleep on the last leg of the trip as a couple of rough Tibetan herdsmen sat next to me smelling like strong butter. As I awoke the scenery was as impressive, but with more New England looking trees and low homesteads with haystacks, firewood stacks, and low stone walls capped by transplanted sod. I noticed a few mantras pieced on the distant hillsides, om mani padme hum and others that I didn't recognize. I knew I was close because I had seen them in pictures of Daofu in the past. The mantras as contructed with white stones, in much the same way that college towns put giant "M"s on the hillsides for Michigan State and the Colorado School of Mines, or how evangelical Christians in Central Louisiana fashion giant crosses near the highway in Louisiana.

I heard "Hello Teacher!" before I could see my two students outside of the bus, waiting for me. They were at the station, waiting for a while as the bus was rather behind schedule. I asked the driver to pop the trunk, and it swung open with a cloud of dust like a forgotten treasure chest in some deserted jungle. My bag, normally a stylishly rugged forest green and black affair, was completely tan from the fine dirt that had kicked up from the pocked road. I smiled a thank you at the driver, knocked off an insignificant slew of the dirt, and slung my belongings onto my back, which left two tan racing stripes against the stone grey of my suit coat.

My student Hannah (Namei Deji) has a cousin that owns a noodle shop across from the bus station in Daofu, and we relaxed there as a few Tibetans watched popular Tibetan singers belt out tunes from a VCD. I snacked on some thukpa noodles with bits of meat. Soon, I noticed a man on the VCD that I recognized, His Imminence Adzom Rinpoche himself. I realized that they were watching a copy of the very same VCD that had been given to me free of donation by Lisa and Drako in Chengdu two days before. The beef stuck in my teeth as I watched images of the Rinpoche alternate with pictures of cows getting their throats cut and snakes being skinned alive. Denouement: conscientious Buddhist purchased the animals from the market and set the luckless beasts free.

After a while Joseph (Dorje) and I made our way to his home. The houses in Daofu are very famous, and his parent's home is a classic example. It is set an an extremely pastoral "village" (a collection of seven to ten homes spread out among the farmland about five kilometers from home). His father inherited a plot for growing wheat and potatoes from Dorje's grandfather, in addition to a modest orchard of green and red apples. As we approached, his previous English teacher Catherine's dog Jake became very excited. Being raised by a New Zealander, he was ecstatic to see a white man. I met Dorje's parents, a regular Tibetan Gothic scene with floppy straw hats and classic dusty rural fashion. I was welcomed inside to meet the rest of the family. Dorje's grandmother is eighty-five and her principle interest is turning prayer wheels. She seems with it enough, at least when she responds the tough Daofu dialect shouts of the family members.

Dorje's uncle is a monk at the monastery in Daofu, and he was able to return to the house to celebrate the holiday with the family. He is the younger brother of Dorje's father, and spent the majority of his time plucking beard hairs with a metal clamp, spinning the prayer wheel, mumbling mantras and attending to the family shrine room. Dorje's older sister is a nun as well, and she was at home recovering from an operation. Her face is a beacon of light, her small eyebrows standing apart from the strong muscles of her forehead, in constant motion from her tireless propensity towards laughing and smiling. She spent a great deal of time singing in the shrine room, reading Tibetan books or preparing food wearing her robes over white and pink long johns beneath a tan corduroy jacket that would have made a great Goodwill find.

The house is large, with the downstairs dedicated to the animals, and washing and storage areas. The one staircase upstairs is very steep in the classic Daofu style. Everything is wooden and painted in beautiful Tibetan thanka style, and the ceilings are blue with bright red rafters. Snow lions and dragons peek from behind wall columns. The main hall/foyer of the house leads in to a number of rooms. Dorje and I stayed in the TV room, which connected the house to the shrine room. There are other sleeping rooms, but the center of family life concentrates in the kitchen (naturally). The roof of the kitchen is covered in plastic sheeting to protect the wood from smoke stains. Near the center of the room is a classic wood burning stove, where all of the cooking is performed. It is also the only source of heating in the home. Because of the high ceilings, Dorje's father told me it gets a little chilly in the winter. The toilet, a medieval side room with an open hole to the first floor and an archer's window to match, is across a second floor outside patio. In the corner of the patio is an altar for burning incense. There is also a metal ladder to the roof, which has vertical prayer flags on poles.

To the side of the foyer is a group of photos of the Great Spiritual and Political Leader that Dares not Speak His Name. I was a bit surprised to see his amiable, paternal face peering from behind his bespectacled old eyes. In America, there are many misconceptions about the stringency in which certain Chinese policies are enforced. Moreover, I spent my time in western Sichuan, which does not suffer from many of the prejudices of the Tibetan Autonomous Region and Lhasa. Also, the night before in Kangding, there was the aforementioned episode with Tenzin's traffic cop buddy.

That evening we dined on thukpa and they force fed me meat momos. I also drank milk tea, which I rather prefer to butter tea. We watched a little TV, aided by the family satellite dish. There were more channels in Arabic than English. I read a bit of Mullin's Gem's of Wisdom, snuggled into the colorful Tibetan style couchbed. Dorje turned off the television, prostrated three times on his couchbed, took off his clothes and killed the lights.