Me talking through my final essay "Snot and Untold Stories."

Hi Everyone!

 As I'm going through the drafting process, I am in need of some solid feedback.  Here is a jing video link (screen shot software) with me talking through my latest draft of "Snot and Untold Stories."  The entire draft is posted below.  Anyway, if you have any suggestions on the points that I raise, or additional feedback, I would appreciate it!

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Snot and Untold Stories

My host grandma was a snot-flinger.

            We would sit together each evening, my Tibetan host grandma and I, on the veranda of our second story housing complex, overlooking the lush Himalayan valley in Dharamsala, India.  As the sun would nestle into the horizon for the night and the stars would gradually pop out like watchful eyes in the indigo sky, savory smells of Sunam’s dinner simmering on the stove would sweep through the air.  While sitting out in the open air, the culmination of the day, I would read, sometimes scribbling down some fragmented thoughts in the dimming light, trying to be a real writer, while my host grandma would fumble with a string of ivory-colored prayer beads, occasionally flinging visible amounts of mucus off the second story of the balcony in a swift motion with the back of her hand.  The leftovers she smeared on the chair without shame.  She was an eighty, maybe ninety-year-old woman (no one from Tibet seemed to record their birthday) with unusually large pupils, wire-like hair parted in a thick, balding line right down the middle her head, and facial features oriented not unlike a Picasso portrait.

            This was our routine.  We would just sit in silence, of course.  I spoke no Tibetan, despite taking and getting an A in the preparation class for Tibetan back in the States the semester before coming, and she spoke no English.  Instead, we spoke through smiles and wild gestures like a game of charades.  It was a communication barrier so blatant it felt physical sometimes, reminding me that India, like all of us really, seemed to be unfairly divided by religion and language.  And yet, as disgusted as I was at first by her snot-flinging habits, a part of me just wanted to be close to her—to try, if I could, to absorb her story.

            As my three months in Dharamsala were drawing to a close, this desire became acute—not just with my host grandma, but with all of it.  My entire experience itself.  I had seen too much this time, and I knew it.  But what was worse was that I didn’t understand it.  I sat on the verandah, tapping my pen against my cheek, staring at my notebook, glancing up at my host grandma, and then I would clench my teeth, knowing that I was supposed to write a story. 

            But that story was ambiguous, becoming bigger than me, running away each time I crept up on it, almost like it was scared of being found out.  But why?

            Take Tibet.  I had never heard of Tibet before signing up for this field study program through my university.  I should feel ashamed to admit that, but I think most people my age, or maybe even most Westerners in general, haven’t.  Preparing for this adventure, I got a watered down, one-sided version of the story.  Communist China ruthlessly took over.  No one did anything to oppose it.  Some of the people, including the 14^th Dalai Lama, the spiritual and political leader of Tibet, left for India in 1959 as refugees, setting up headquarters in exile.   McLeod Ganj, the upper part of Dharamsala, where I had spent the summer, was just one of the many Tibetan settlements in India, but it is the home of the government and His Holiness.  From here, efforts were being made to raise awareness for the Tibetan situation, gaining support for a “Free Tibet,” slogan printed on t-shirts and backpacks and bumper stickers all over McLeod Ganj. 

            I would often talk about this with Tenzin, my host sister, when she would come back from a long day of work at a local guesthouse, exhausted, but never complaining, though we all knew that cleaning sheets and sweeping hotel rooms was not the job she wanted.  Tenzin was a certified nurse, but finding a job as a Tibetan, an “Other” on applications as far as citizenship goes (though she was born in India and had never seen Tibet), was difficult.  Sometimes she would come into my six by seven foot chalk-blue room and sit on the stiff, mattress-less bed (which took up half the room), as I would show her how to apply for jobs online.  She would get excited, clapping her hands, eyes growing wide at the possible job market now open to her.

             One night she came into my bedroom while I was reading the autobiography of the Dalai Lama, Freedom in Exile.  She was intrigued, so instead of job hunting, we talked about His Holiness and Tibet.  Somehow I gained the courage to ask the question I had wanted to ask all along.  “Do you think you will ever go back?  To Tibet?” 

            A smile spread across her round face and she said, “Of course!  His Holiness expects it in his lifetime.  We will all go back to Tibet.  It is our home.” 

            “But you have always lived here, in India.  Do you not consider this your home?”

            “Yes, but we do not belong here.  My home is Tibet.  I hope,” she paused, “that I will get to go home someday.”

            I did too.  I hoped so badly that there was some sense of justice in the universe that would free Tibet along with Tenzin and the rest of the Tibetan people.  I continued reading Freedom in Exile, saturated with the optimistic belief that all of these hopes would be fulfilled.  Yes, Tibet would be free.

            “But what about you Rachel?” Tenzin asked.  “Will you go back to America?”

            “Yes,” I said.  “I will.”

            “You are very lucky to be from such a great country.  We Buddhists do not believe in Heaven, but when I think of my mother, I hope she has had a fortunate reincarnation and lives in America.”  She then grabbed my hand and held it in hers, a sign of intimate friendship in India.

I continued to learn about what happened to Tibet.  The LHA, an institute for social work and education in the community of Dharamsala, sponsored weekly events where floods of Western tourists could get a sample of the atrocities that some of the locals faced.  They would invite ex-political prisoners to come as guest speakers, and one night I made arrangements with my host family to stay out after dark so that I could attend.

            The single room was packed and smelled like sweat and bare feet.  Westerners poured in and sat cross legged along the edges of the multi-colored, blanket-draped floor as the late-comers would fill in the center.  The event started half an hour late, which shouldn’t have bothered me in India, but I kept glancing at the clock, knowing that my host family was expecting me.

            Finally, a Tibetan kid about my age—topped with a Western fohawk hairstyle, wearing a polo shirt with a popped collar—stood at the front of the gathering with another Tibetan man beside him, who kept his gaze down and his hands in his pockets.  The younger of the two introduced the other, the ex-prisoner, Tashi, and said that he (the younger kid) would be the one translating the story for us.  They each were given a corded microphone before sitting in plastic chairs at the head of the room.

            After a long pause, Tashi began his tale.  His voice was level, quiet, and stoic, yet firm and eager to share his experience.  The younger kid translated.

            It was frustrating how difficult it was to pay attention to the speaker.  The fohawked kid was a terrible storyteller.  There was lots of hesitating and “um’s” to that obnoxious point where you start counting them up.  It was not easily packaged for the group of Westerners, who stared blank eyed around the room, picking at their toenails, or whispering to the person next to them.  I too was undeniably bored by the horrific story, feeling my legs cramp up and then fall asleep.  Yet, here was a man imprisoned for participating in a demonstration against the Chinese government for holding up a paper Tibetan flag (the one created by the Tibetans living in exile) that his friend had drawn.  When the Chinese captured him, he declared he was the artist to protect his friend.  They made him redraw it, asking “who told you, who told you?” and he couldn’t, so they crushed his hand with a chair.

            His friends and others were beat to the point of their life, or past, according to Tashi.  They were stripped naked and forced to stand in the bitter cold weather while Chinese soldiers dumped buckets of water on them till it froze.  The prisoners were denied any medication besides pain reliever, which killed one of Tashi’s close monk friends, and just as Tashi was beginning to talk about electrocution and the prisoners being forced to eating their own feces out of starvation I had to stand up in the middle of the story and leave.  I had to get home because my family would be worried.

            I felt awful leaving mid-sentence, mid-story.  I had heard similar tales before, but the reality of the hardship was hard to taste.  And this night, the way the story was delivered made it impossible to grasp.  It could not be translated. 

           

The day after my experience at the LHA I went to a conversation lab with some geshe monks, with whom I regularly helped with English, held in a one-roomed classroom just up the hill from the Dalai Lama’s temple.  I was paired up with my friend Nymgaul, a twenty-six year old monk with a missing front tooth, quick wit, and a habit for laughing at moments his elders considered inappropriate.  When Amanda, the British volunteer teacher, had us break up into pairs, I took the opportunity to talk to Nymgaul about his thoughts on Tibet.  Of all the geshes, he had the best English and was the most recent to flee Tibet, which was refreshing because I was not looking for the typical political rundown.  I wanted answers.

            “Ah.  Tibet.”  He clicked his tongue.  “I left when I was 19.  I fled first to Nepal, because that is where we go before we go to India, to get refugee status.”

            He started to snicker, crescendoing into his usual steady laugh, smiling all the while.  “I did not tell my family!  And they were so surprised when I called from Nepal!” he said.  “It is very, very dangerous.  If I would have been caught sneaking I would have been killed.”

            “You didn’t tell your family?” I asked, still shocked and needing it reaffirmed.

            “No!” he giggled, slapping his knees covered by maroon colored robes.  “But they are happy I did not tell them.  They would worry too much, and I am safe and happier here.  You cannot be a good monk in Tibet.”

            “Why is that?”

            He looked at me as if I asked if the sky was red or blue.  “Don’t you know?” he asked.  “You are American.  You can’t understand because you have a democracy.  Do you know communism?”

            “Yes.”  I wasn’t that ignorant, I thought.

            “In China you cannot worship with freedom.  You cannot do anything in China.  BBC and CNN, as well as all Tibetan radio stations are blocked.  There are cameras set up in every Internet café to monitor what people are doing. Google is paid to sensor their searches.  Life in Tibet is very difficult.”

            “But are you free to practice religion?  You joined the monastic life as a child, no?”

            “Yes, but you see, monasteries are all under watch.  It is very difficult. Everything is done in secret.  We do not have the, oh, what is the word.”  He paused, shouting across the room to his friend with a Tibetan-English dictionary.

            “Opportunities, that is the word.  We do not have opportunities to learn as we do here in India.  The monasteries are all under careful watch by the government.  We have to hide His Holiness’ pictures because the police will show up sometimes.  Sometimes they make us sign papers that say we do not support His Holiness or the Government in Exile.”

            “What happens if you don’t sign the papers?” I asked.

            Nymgaul looked down.  “People are beaten.  I’ve seen many people beaten who refuse to sign.  They are beaten in front of everyone.”  He looked up again, making eye contact.  “I always signed.  I was young and afraid of death.  I admire those who are brave enough to lay down their lives to protest, but I never could.”

            I didn’t say anything and let him continue.  “Some Tibetans are paid to say nice things about China on TV.  The ones in prison are threatened with death to say good things when the jails are investigated by foreigners, but every Tibetan knows they are not saying the truth.  When you oppose the Chinese government you first get a warning.  Second you go to jail.  Next, you get a longer life sentence, and last, they kill you.  That is how China works.  Not just with Tibetans.  With everyone.”

            “That’s awful,” I said.  Truthfully I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to not have those basic human rights—freedom of speech and religion and such.

            Nymgaul watched me for a moment, then smoothed his robes with the palms of his hands and continued.  “It is very difficult,” he repeated.  “China will be the next superpower.  In fact, I think China already is.  It is not good.  They even took a six year old child,” he said, referring to the missing Panchen Lama, the second in command next to the Dalai Lama whom the Chinese kidnapped.  “But of course, no one stopped China.”  He looked up.  “Not even America.”

           

Not even America.  Home of the free and a refuge for “your tired, your poor[1]” and all of that mumbo jumbo.  How is it, I thought, that I had managed to never even hear about Tibet?  That my education had somehow skipped right over Mao and all of that?  The conversation I had with Nymgaul weighed heavily on my mind as I started reading the book Tibet, Tibet by Patrick French.  Despite the boring sounding name, it was the most informative source I found on the “Tibetan situation.”  French did his homework, and his conclusion was convincing.  And by that I mean it finally told me the most likely truth—the informed, depressing truth. 

            Tibet is toast.  That the Dalai Lama had missed the narrow window of opportunity to reconcile with China in 1989.[2]  That no one, not even India, recognizes the Tibetan Government in Exile as a real government.  That India only offered 99 years of support for the Tibetan refugee population, which was halfway spent by now.  That the Dalai Lama was trying to retire from his political leadership duties.  That the United Nations had long since stopped paying attention, even though human rights, those words we love to sing, were still at present being violated. 

            Nope.  Instead, the U.S. buys all China’s stuff, and in turn, lets them buy all our debt. 

But yet, efforts to maintain awareness for the Tibetan situation existed.  One of those is the controversial, but local favorite, “Miss Tibet” beauty pageant held in Dharamsala each year.  A few of the students in my group and I decided to check it out.  We packed ourselves along the edges of the outdoor amphitheater and waited for an hour as a voice over the loudspeakers begged us to have patience through the “technical difficulties.”  It was dark by the time the event began, and the mosquitoes were out looking for dinner.

            The music blared as eight contestants walked onto the stage, decked out in Western, formal ball gowns.  One girl from Australia.  One from the U.S.  One from Switzerland.  Some from India.  None, technically, from Tibet—though they were all Tibetan.  The question and answer section came.  “Why do you do this?” one of the judges asked the 17-year-old contestant.  “Why are you participating in Miss Tibet?”  Because it was a “great honor” and “a chance to show the world that Tibet still exists!” she answered with a song of triumph in her voice.

            But the production shut down in the middle of the grand finale.  The power went out and the music died abruptly.  Darkness fell on the stage and the murmuring crowd grew loud, and when the situation proved that it was going to take awhile to fix, most of the audience shuffled out and went home for the night, not wanting to wait around to hear who won the contest.

            “So this is Tibet,” I thought to myself, looking around at the people around me to decide if I too should leave.  I couldn’t imagine what those foreign Tibetan girls were thinking up there on the stage lost in the darkness.  “This is what it has come to.”

In mid-July my group took a side trip to Amritsar to see the Sikh’s Golden Temple and the Pakistan border.  I had just learned about the Partition of India in 1947 to create Pakistan, a Muslim state first imagined by the Urdu poet Iqbal, and the million Hindus and Muslims and Sikh’s left dead in the aftermath of the split (another current event that was never mentioned at school) whose massacred bodies passed through the very same stations and trains in use today.  In order to get to Amritsar, we took a bus to Pathankot where a train would take us the duration of the journey.

            But with my luck, the bus trip was more than just a quiet bus trip.  Feeling slightly nauseous, I picked out a window seat, only to find out that this window seat was reserved for the spare tire, so I had to move to a new seat last minute.  The last seat available.

            “Hello,” said the man with sandy blonde hair already seated beside me as I dumped my backpack on the floor in front of me.

             “Hello—I hope I don’t barf on you.” I wasn’t feeling up to having a conversation with this stranger.

            He didn’t smile but kept talking to me.  “Where are you from?”

            “The United States.”

            “Ah, America.”

            “No.  The United States.”

            Despite the rough start, I had a great three-hour conversation with Charley, a 29 year-old, only child German guy completing an internship in Delhi, but taking some time off to travel around Northern India before leaving.  We started off talking about travel, religion, relationships, and then Germany.

            “Since World War the Second, we have been ashamed to be German,” Charley said.  “The older generation refused to talk about what happened with the Nazi’s, or didn’t believe it.  It is only recently that the German youth can feel proud of their country.  Football has helped.  It is the only time of year that we can wave our flags with pride.”

            Charley never smiled.

            “But what about your country?” he began.  “We had so much hope for Obama, but it appears that fell through.”

            I nodded my head and pretended that I knew just as much about my own nations politics as he did.

            “And I’ve been to Vietnam,” he said, hesitating before beginning again. “People like to point fingers at Nazi Germany and say that nothing like that would happen again, but it happens every day.  History repeats itself.”  At this, Charley looked out the window, and then bent down to get into his backpack under the ripped seat.  “Want a banana?”

            “No thanks.”

            He peeled the banana and started again.  “Your country did some terrible crimes in Vietnam.  Have you ever heard of the My Lai Massacre?”[3]

            “Remind me,” I said, again pretending that I knew what he was talking about.  It was unfortunate that we always had two weeks or less to talk about anything past WWII in school, and that Vietnam was so taboo that we didn’t even know why it was taboo to start with.

            “The Americans got wrong information.  Went around shooting innocent villagers.  They took the living and made them dig a ditch, then lined them up and shot them in it.  Made them dig their own graves.”  Charley spat indignantly out the window.  “Sounds an awful lot like Hitler to me.  Yet it is my country that is remorseful—too remorseful.  We cannot stop hanging our heads in shame.”

            I had no idea what Charley was talking about, but I vowed that I would learn.  I could not have been more disenchanted with my country than at that moment, and not just because of Vietnam—no country is perfect, and I was half sick of people assuming America was Eldorado— but that none of my formal education had prepared me to understand this moment, or India, or Tibet.  The America I knew was also a half told story.  Instead, my education focused on the “fundamentals.”  The Revolutionary War.  Democracy.  The American dream and the cowboys of the Wild West.  Human Rights.  George Washington’s wooden teeth.

            But his teeth were actually ivory.  Ivory!       

             

While I was in India, there were terrorist attacks on Bombay.  Probably from some Pakistanis, according to my India friend, Rita.  I watched the news reports being broadcasted on the TV over dinner in an incomprehensible language, but the images of the fire and sirens needed no translation.  

            Americans assume that Pakistan first and foremost hates the U.S., but probably because we are “self absorbed,” as the stereotype goes.  But Pakistan has always been after India.  There is their real enemy.  But no one at home heard about the terrorist bombings in the South.  No one bat an eye.  At times I feel Americans believe terrorism started and ended with the Twin Towers.

            To this day monks and nuns are shown on the TV, appearing in the New York Times, setting themselves on fire with gasoline and running out into the streets in Lhasa, though the Dalai Lama has pleaded for them to stop.  We don’t know why they keep doing it or what they are trying to say.  We only know that they are begging for the world’s attention in one, final, desperate move.

            Human rights.  Is that also a lie?  Right up there with Washington’s teeth and what they used to tell me about no one taking attendance at college, and how we would only be allowed to write in cursive?  The images of fading “Free Tibet” bumper stickers are scarred in my mind.  Tibet is a land of silence, a land of secrets, and a subject altogether “too political” to even talk about at my conservative university. 

            But what of Tibet?  What of America?  Of modern day holocausts and a liminal education system?  What about all of these stories and also my host grandma’s?  I can still see her, waving her cane at oncoming traffic trying to make her way to the temple, unable to communicate with the threatening, bustling modern world.  She will die soon, surely, and with that her unvoiced narrative.  She is a coffin of untold stories.  Stories that I never heard.  Tales of her struggles and heartbreak as she left her home and country with her religious leader, only to never return. 

            When I close my eyes I can imagine myself back on the verandah.  Grandma is sitting next to me, flinging snot off the balcony.  The cool mountain wind is picking up, and the pages of my notebook are rising up against my hand.  I anchor them down with my wrist.  Something inside me has woken up after a lifetime of sleep.  My pen is held in my limp hand, the paper blank in front of me.  I drop the pen.

            But yet, there was a story.  I felt the story, though I could not write it.  Like Tashi’s tale at the LHA, communism according to Nymgaul, or my host grandma’s Tibetan, it would not translate.

            But I was the witness to the untold story—the one I will never hear, let alone tell. 

                                                                                                            Yet, there was a story here.

                                                                                                .

---

[1] From the statement on the Statue of Liberty

[2] Tibet, Tibet by Patrick French regarding the opportunity to return to Tibet after the death of the 10^th Panchen Lama pg 114-115 and 299

[3] A 1968 mass murder from the Vietnam War.  It was lead by William Calley, a platoon leader in the Charlie Company, responsible for killing 347-504 unarmed civilians, mostly women, children, and elderly, were killed.  Many were raped, beaten, and tortured.