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Two women and a monk | page 1, 2
Next he asked us if we would like to try Tibetan food -- tsampa -- which I recognized as the name of a
Tibetan restaurant on East Ninth Street in New York. I
was envisioning a dream of a dish, a feather-light
dumpling or a sweet ambrosia whose name alone could
carry a trendy dining establishment. Tsampa, we
discovered, was in fact a ball of raw barley flour
mixed with hot water and yak butter. We were supposed
to take a bite out of the ball, which was the
approximate size and weight of a shot put, then
wash it down with a gulp of hot water. Odzer offered
to add some yak butter to our water, but we demurred.
"This no Mongolian food," said Odzer, as if this was
somehow to his credit. "Tibetan monk eat. No
Mongolian." Young monks, eight years old or so, kept peering into the
window to catch a glimpse of the foreigners, or
perhaps to see someone act like they were enjoying
eating tsampa. If we caught them looking, they giggled
and ran away. If we didn't catch them looking, they
would yell "Hello!" until we noticed them, and then
giggle and run away. We chatted haltingly with Odzer,
who frequently left the room when he couldn't find the
word he wanted, and then re-entered after a brief
absence so we could restart the conversation at
another less sticky point. His absences also gave us a
chance to store uneaten chunks of tsampa in our
pockets. At last the rice appeared, along with a plate of tofu
and some unfamiliar mixed vegetables, including a
fleshy, zucchini-like gourd and several leafy greens.
Odzer insisted he was not a good cook, but his was one
of the best meals I had in China. We sat and ate in
silence, while a teenage monk practiced his prayers
outside, occasionally interrupting his droning with
what must have been a muttered Tibetan curse, and
starting again. After lunch Odzer took us on a hike around the hilly
perimeter of the monastery. We passed by an elderly
woman, poorly dressed, prostrating herself on the
ground. She wore pads on her knees and an additional
pair around her hands, like fingerless mittens. She
took a step, dove down into push-up position, extended
her arms all the way forward, slid up onto her knees
and then stood again. Odzer explained that these
pilgrims travel the entire hilltop circuit in this
manner, chanting prayers all the while. It took us,
walking fairly rapidly, almost an hour to complete the
trip, during which time we encountered four more
elderly pilgrims, all women, performing the same
penance. The monks merely make a point of stopping at
all the altars. In the evening we helped Odzer with his English
homework. He wrote notes in the margins of his
textbook in Mongolian, a curling, vertical script.
Odzer spoke Chinese and Tibetan as well. Three times
a week, Odzer told us, he takes English lessons from
an American man in Xining. Odzer was very curious
about America. He had heard of New York City, but not
Texas, though he seemed amused by our rendition of
cowboys and Indians. He copied down our addresses and
we took his. Odzer knew a monk who had been to Canada
and he very much wanted to go there. "Why?" we asked. "Why do you want to go to Canada?" Usually Odzer was very shy about answering "Why" questions, and left the
room in embarrassment. But this time he did not
hesitate. "Because," he said, "it's like Paradise."
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