When lost in a crisis self-confidence and identity, Menda Rewa* finds that there is no alternative to sticking to one’s Tibetan root.
In India, she carried seven thick textbooks that were written entirely in Tibetan and a pencil case made of recyclable plastic that was taped together not because she couldn’t afford a proper pencil case but because it was fun to stay after school and talk over snacks while making such things with friends while wasting time she could have used to study. She carried nine notebooks for biology, algebra, social studies, music, computer science, English, Hindi, Chinese, and Tibetan. All the books had the same C-shaped curve because of how she carelessly placed them on the shelves, though the empty Tibetan notebook had a more defined curve because it was thinner; she knew she wouldn’t write much in it anyway. She had a prayer book filled with scriptures she could read, but only slowly, never at the same pace as her classmates. She had old candy wrappers, a few rupees to buy more, and a water bottle with dozens of dents from throwing around her bag. Her wrists carried three beaded bracelets each, made of amber, sandalwood, elephant tusk, jade, coral, and coin. Her ears carried gold earrings with turquoise that dangled halfway to her collarbone; and her knees carried scars from the times she fell while running to nowhere. During lunchtime, she carried the fear that she mispronounced something simple while chatting, a fear of pausing midway through a sentence while trying to find the right words she should know already, a fear that others would notice the stalling and filler-laughter as she desperately tried to string together sentences in her mind that should have been forming naturally.
Four years later, the things she carried were lighter, condensed to fit the fast pace of the First World. She needed to decide what could fit inside her new backpack now that she had a borrowed computer from her American school—her first electronic. She took out the scriptures, the shabby pencil case, the candy wrappers, the rupees, the dented water bottle, and the Tibetan notebook, though it was still empty. She carried her voice, it was quiet; so, she was worried. But there was no need to talk because life was too busy and fast to care about what she could have wanted to say anyway. She carried a new kind of fear. She knew she wasn’t American enough and didn’t necessarily want to be; but she did want to laugh and joke with other Tibetans so badly. She mustered courage and struck up conversations, but things would quickly go downhill. She didn’t carry their inside jokes, their shared memories of birthdays, field trips, or sleepovers, the casual way they draped their arms around each other’s shoulders, the natural sync of voices that had learned to laugh at the same time. She carried the weight of four missing years. She didn’t grow up beside them; so, there was a silence between them that she couldn’t name but always felt, thick like the humidity before rain. No matter how much she smiled or spoke or tried to bridge it, it stayed. She was a foreigner in India and was now a foreigner in America.
She carried her identity as a Tibetan, Indian, American, foreigner, woman, child, immigrant, refugee, daughter, sister, teacher, and student. It was a heavy thing to carry, whether measured using the imperial system or metric system. It didn’t fit inside the backpack she carried to school, couldn’t be packed neatly beside her notebooks or zipped away when it got too loud. It couldn’t be scanned, formatted, or uploaded into a PDF for her borrowed computer. So, it spilled out—through her accent, through the silence between words, through the way she paused when someone asked where she was from and she didn’t know where to start or end. She was open and bare for anyone to read. But now at least, she carried pride, knowing readers could see that she had finally opened up her Tibetan notebook and started writing.
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* Menda Rewa is a senior in High School. Born in the US and having lived in Dharamshala for four years, her writing focuses on exile, identity, cultural preservation, and intergenerational memory by drawing from personal and family history.