Tales from Tibet.

original

This is a yak. Really, though, it's a གཡག, which is my very favorite word in Tibetan. I get to use it all the time because my native Tibetan professor, T.J.-la, knows a lot about yaks. My favorite thing to do in his class is to listen to various strains of what he emphatically calls "the story of YAK," which is long and full of surprises. As a teenager T.J.-la entered a Buddhist monastery to become a monk, but ended his training to cross the Himalayas on a yak to escape Chinese military forces in 1959. With "a few luckies" he made it out after a month of travel, during which villagers begged the transient group to stay in their houses, as it is culturally unacceptable to rob people hosting guests. Once out of Tibet, he spent time in a financially desolate refugee camp in India before emigrating to the United States.

Pre-1959, T.J.-la describes his childhood as "really fun." Education, with an emphasis on writing and spelling in the extremely complicated Tibetan script (more complicated than Arabic!), was paramount in his community, and children would commute long distances to attend school, which lasted the entire day and into the evening. After exams, all the children in the class were made to line up according to their scores. The kid who performed best on the exam would get to go down the line and smack all the lower-scoring children (girls on the hand, boys on the cheek). The child with the next-highest score, who had just been hit by his highest-scoring friend, would go down the line next, hitting all those with lower scores. This process would continue until it was the turn of the lowest-scoring child, who had been slapped by every member of the class. He was made to smack an empty can, and all the other children would laugh.

Buying a horse in those days was a big investment--almost like buying a car. To purchase such a valuable animal, one had to see a horse trader. Horse traders could be identified by the special robes they wore, with extra-long and extra-wide sleeves. Business with horse traders was done entirely under the table--or rather, under the sleeve. You'd slip your hand under a horse trader's sleeve and bargain for a reasonable offer through a series of hand gestures that represented the price you were willing to pay. You paid in secret, so no horse buyer knew the deal his colleagues ended up with, keeping the market ripe for savvy buyers and shrewd sellers.