Notes on a Yak Herder in Brooklyn

Robert Hirschfield talks to a yak herder in Brooklyn, finding once again how New York is a city where worlds fall in to one another but touching.

Photo: Queennomad

NYIMA DOKDA pours me his butter tea. Too tainted for me. But it has a ambience of mystery. Until now, Id usually tasted butter tea in books about Tibet. Salt as well as breeze upon a tongue.

On a walls hang thangkas, pictures of a Dalai Lama, a 17th Karmapa. we am in Bushwick, upon Gates Avenue. In a travel below this room, transplanted from Lhasa, have been bodegas, stores which wire remittances to villages in Central America. we am in a partial of my city where worlds fall in to one another but touching.

I was told about Nyima by a mutual friend, who similar to him, was tortured in Tibet.

How did an removed yak herder (now a waiter in a Queens hotel) manage to dissapoint a Chinese? we ask him.

Not isolated. Nyima laughs, rubbing off his pitted, leathery face. Part of independence transformation with other yak herder.

I try to suppose Nyima thigh low in a sleet with his yaks, rock climbing a white silence. Could this male in his white we LOVE NY t-shirt essentially be him?

His difference get deformed by a towering M train. Somewhere, someone is cursing someone in Spanish. we try to suppose Nyima thigh low in a sleet with his yaks, rock climbing a white silence. Could this male in his white we LOVE NY t-shirt essentially be him? What, we wonder, have been a contingency of a Tibetan yak herder ending up upon a travel in Brooklyn with a Burger King, where his mother Chodron as well as their six-year-old son Tsewang have been having lunch?

The Chinese put me in prison 3 years. we was woe all a time. Electric shock, cigarette lighter. They want me to pointer paper which say Tibet partial of China. we discuss it them, no, if we want to kill me, kill me.

He takes a darin! g swig o f his tea. Inwardly, he is acrobatics behind in to captivity, his wiry physique changeable from side to side upon a flush cushions, acid for a approach out. we shift with him, acid for a approach in. Is there a approach in? How does a life climb up again from a Ground Zero of torture?

Escaping over a Himalayas to Nepal, he acquired a feign Nepali passport, a genuine Air India craft ticket, as well as wound up without a country in Grand Central Station in Manhattan.

I see other without a country people. we discuss it them we need drink. They point where someone offered juice.

I saw no Tibetans when we used to distribute food to a without a country in a tunnels as well as crannies of Grand Central Station.

Before a days of a globalization of homelessness in NewYork.

I ask him to discuss it me what his days as well as nights were similar to underground. He shakes his head, puts a finger of closure to his lips. Talking about woe is easier.

Do we miss Kham?

we miss Kham. But Bushwick good. No Chinese soldiers.


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