The first essay I ever wrote that I was proud of was about a kitchen.
I was fourteen, and a teacher at my school in Dharamsala — a Tibetan woman named Ani Sonam who taught Tibetan literature and had a way of assigning topics that seemed, at first, completely ordinary — had asked the class to write about a place that felt like home. Not the place you lived. A place that felt like home. She underlined the distinction.
I wrote about my grandmother’s kitchen in Lhasa, which I had not been inside since I was six years old.
The Problem of Two Languages
I grew up, as many Tibetans in exile do, in a permanent negotiation between languages. At school — the Tibetan Children’s Village, where most of my education happened — we studied in Tibetan for the early years and in English as we grew older. At home, my parents spoke Tibetan. In the market, in the tourist shops, in arguments, in lullabies: Tibetan. But the wider world pressed in through English: textbooks, the internet, the news, the volunteers from Europe and America who came through Dharamsala on their way to somewhere else.
For a long time I wrote as if the two languages were separate rooms I stepped between, leaving one behind when I entered the other. What I did not understand then was that this threshold — the in-between place, the space of crossing — was where the most interesting things were happening.
Ani Sonam’s assignment taught me that. I wrote about my grandmother’s kitchen in English, because I thought English was the language for school assignments. But halfway through the essay I found myself using a Tibetan word — nganla — because there was no English word for the particular kind of warmth I was trying to describe. Not physical warmth. Something closer to the feeling of being known completely by a place.
I left the word in. Ani Sonam gave the essay full marks and wrote in the margin: You are already a writer. You just don’t know it yet.
What Writing Does
I have thought about what she meant by that for a long time.
I think she meant that I had already discovered — instinctively, without knowing it — what writing is actually for. Not for recording events. Not for demonstrating what you know. But for finding out what you think, and what you feel, by the act of putting words down and watching what comes next.
My grandmother’s kitchen, as I wrote about it, became more real to me than it had ever been as a memory. The smell of butter tea. The wooden shelf where she kept a small bronze Tara figurine. The way the light came through the single window in the morning and fell across the clay floor in a stripe. I had not thought about these things consciously for years. Writing summoned them.
This is what writing does, I think: it is a form of attention. And attention — real attention, the kind that costs you something — is a form of love.
In Dharamsala
Dharamsala is a strange and wonderful place to be a writer. It is a small hill town that has become, over seventy years of Tibetan exile, a kind of capital in a different sense than any city I know of — not a capital of territory, but a capital of memory and intention. The Tibetan government-in-exile is here. The Dalai Lama’s residence is here. Thousands of Tibetans who were born in Tibet and crossed into India, and thousands more who were born in India to parents who made that crossing, all live within a few kilometres of each other, in a community that is constantly negotiating what it means to keep something alive in conditions of displacement.
For a writer, this is endlessly interesting and sometimes overwhelming. There is so much to pay attention to.
I have been writing in this place, in one form or another, for more than fifteen years. This blog is the latest version of that practice — looser and more personal than anything I have published elsewhere, a place to think in public.
A Note on Language
I write in both Tibetan and English. Some posts here will be in English; others will be in Tibetan. A few will mix the two, because sometimes that is the only honest way to do it.
If you are a Tibetan reader who finds the English posts easier to read than the Tibetan ones, I understand completely. The same is sometimes true for me. We are all, in different ways, still finding our way between the rooms.
If anything here resonates with you, I would be glad to hear from you. You can reach me through the about page.