Ladybug’s Reviews > Old Demons, New Deities > Status Update

And the thing was, I had never seen a Tibetan begging before. Later I would realize that there were many other things I had never seen a Tibetan do I had never seen a Tibetan bus driver, or a honey-seller, or a milkman. Nor a Tibetan artist, a Tibetan actor, a Tibetan scientist. Tibetans were only certain things in this exile of ours.

He had spent most of his adult life working outside India, far away fr the local politics, far away fr the Tibetan community. If she had more questions about
Tibet, they should best be directed to the lama &
other relevant specialists. Her questions, persisted to
the point that he once warned her that if she asked him one more question, he would burn himself right then &there! "Silence is golden, Speech is bullshit."

More questions followed: Why do Tibetan statues depict deities embracing each other in such reckless abandon? Why does he think Tibetans r self immolating w/such frequency? Does he consider himself Tibetan, Indian, or Chinese? Her questions turned every meal into a press conference.

She was following her heart by swapping a highly selective &prestigious medical school for a course on Tibetan herbal treatment in the Indian Himalayas. He wondered if she was mentally sound. But then the monk told him that that it was quite hard to come across normal, functioning ppl in the decade that he had been in the West. "Relationships & mobile
phones, combine these two &they make
people completely crazy.”

Almost a year has passed and all I have to say can fit on one page. Is this happiness?
Karma reread the line out loud. Isering said it was harder to evaluate happiness with age. Maybe a new place and new life turned things upside down. Or perhaps happiness was only recognizable when it was replaced with something else.

"Come to think of it, letters r perhaps the most original forms of literatures. Do chance &fate mean the same thing?”
Tsering fretted they had used the wrong word: they should have written karma, not fate. Young Tibetans
attending English schools often thought of fate &karma as the same. The 2 r different. If u write good letters &help ppl, u will reap good karma. Fate does not work like that, it is not in ur hands

but he managed to whisper the sacred mantra: Om Mani Padme Hum. Hail the Jewel in the Lotus."
The sky was faintly tinged with the coming dawn,and from the East a single white crane winged its way overhead. The old man looked up and then closed his eyes….. he knew it had come to take him away.

"If the tree is cut, where will the spirit go?"
The old man put his rosary on his lap next to the prayer
wheel, rubbed his forehead, and looked at his dirty hand. "It will become a refugee again.”

The children were astounded. How could deities &spirits run away? Did they come hiding in amulets worn around necks or in charm boxes refugees brought w/them? Did they fly across the high mountains? Couldnt they stay back in the caves, rocks, and rivers in their homeland? Had any spirits died on the way, as hundreds of ppl had died on their tortuous flight into exile?

There were none. There were no Tibetan films, no Tibetan short stories, no Tibetan novels. Junot Diaz says, "U know how vampires have no reflections in the mirror! If u want to make a human being a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves." those of us who grew up in exile &in Tibet, w/o reflections. Why did we grow up as, to use Edwidge Danticat's phrase, "literary orphans"