Red Stars in the Sky

I've pretty much had my nose buried in books and laptop screens the last few days, trying to get my last story written, my midterm assignments in and study for the exam. Tomorrow my host family is taking me hiking, but other than that, fun is hard to come by. That's why Australia will be such an amazing relief! Yesterday I cooked pasta primavera for my host family and it was delicious. Sometimes food is really good here, but I have a hard time stomaching yak cheese with hair in it, greasy noodles and butter tea. But all in all, Dharamsala is making me fat and happy.

My host father, Robche, is a twelve year old girl. His high-pitch giggles and shrieks rip through the one-room home as his head tumbles into the lap of his wife. At twenty-five, she is only a couple years older than me but has taken on a most maternal air and continues to calmly mold dumplings, called momos in Tibetan, while ignoring the poking and prodding of her rambunctious husband. She gives me a meaningful look.
“When I think about old Tibetan culture, I laugh,” Robche says, erupting into another fit of giggles. He goes into a pantomime in Tibetan that involves things exploding, guns shooting and people gambling and eating food.
Lobsong, the nineteen-year-old boy sitting next to me, explains, “When the Chinese came to invade Tibet, they set off bombs. The Tibetan people thought, ‘what are these red stars in the sky?’ The Chinese came into the city and found the Tibetans playing card games and eating meat and drinking butter tea, and they shot them one by one. The Tibetans didn’t know their friends were dying, so they kept playing cards and one by one they all got shot. They didn’t know what a gun was. They said, ‘what is war?’”

“But I thought Tibetans used to be great warriors a long time ago,” I said.

Ropche fell into another fit of giggles. He pretended to swing something around and then let it go with a swishing sound he made with his mouth.

Lopsong told me, “The Chinese heard this sound and they thought, ‘oh. The Tibetans have a very dangerous weapon.'” Here he paused to laugh a little himself. “But it was only a rock inside a piece of cloth. The Tibetans came to challenge the Chinese with swords, thinking it would be easy. Before, one Tibetan man can fight six Chinese and win because every day he eats fresh yak meat with butter and Chinese people are so small, they just eat vegetables and a little meat. But this time the Chinese just shoot, bang bang bang, all the Tibetans dead.”

“That’s sad,” I said, despite myself. I couldn’t understand why I, an American, would be the only one who couldn’t find the humor in the modernization of warfare and the oppression of their own people.

“Yes, sad,” Lopsong agreed, looking annoyed at my seriousness, “but also funny. You know before Tibetans used to wash themselves only once a year. And every day they wear the same clothes, never washing the clothes. When the clothes break, they sew them, and then after a long time they get new. Old Tibetan culture so funny. That's why the Chinese could take Tibet so easy."

The two Tibetan men, both wearing jeans and button-up shirts, found this concept hilarious. They laughed and laughed until they were rolling around on the floor but I couldn’t even manage a polite laugh.

“But I don't get what's wrong with that," I said. “Now all these people are working long hours for little pay in factories to make more clothes that we don’t need. And maybe the Tibetans are ahead of everyone else in the world if they don’t know what guns and bombs are. Isn’t that a good thing?”

Now I’m not sure if any of this is true. I don't think Tibetans were that primative, and I still believe most of them are ahead of the rest of the world psycologically. The day before, Robche told me that the reason new refugees from Tibet were so rosy-cheeked was because they ate a lot of butter and drank clean water in Tibet. “Not like Dehli water,” he’d said. I tried to argue that it was the wind and cold because people in America also ate butter and drank clean water but didn’t all have red cheeks, so he tried to prove it with pictures. He showed me a photo of a woman who had just come from Tibet, fat and rosy-cheeked, and then a picture of her as an old woman, sunken and gray.
“Twenty years in India,” he’d said. “See what happened?”
“But isn’t she just older now?” I asked.
He pretended not to hear me and poured himself another cup of chang. Tibetans are only allowed to drink during Losar, and then they drink with gusto. He points to the Tibetan woman, our neighbor, who sits across from him in her traditional dress, her hair braided with yarn and her dress belted with a large silver buckle.

“She is natural Tibetan, very good,” he says. “My wife,” he says, pointing to my host mother who is wearing jeans and a faded t-shirt. “What is this? She Indian dressing, no good, no good.”

His wife looks at me in calm exasperation and Robche giggles again. The television blares loudly with no one watching, and I lose myself in my book again.