children with the need that immigrant women have for reliable employment. The emotional labor that constitutes such work, and the negotiated intimacies that can ensue in these arrangements, can be at once rewarding and challenging.
This conversation with Dolma and Nyima attunes me to the shapeshifting nature of parenting and young childhood in response to the khora of migration. I think about the circumstances under which people are relying upon networks of extended kin to raise families between Nepal and New York. Grandparents as well as other elder and younger female relatives have certainly shared childcare responsibilities in the past. However, caring for other people’s children as an economic strategy in New York shifts the balance of care between New York and Nepal. This is not a situation unique to Mustang, of course, but it is changing how the work of parenting gets parsed between the youngest and the oldest in Mustang society.
Dolma and Nyima are fortunate that they live in the same city. For many young couples from Mustang, having the support of elder relatives to care for their children means sending kids back to Nepal, once they are weaned, often until they are school-aged. But this added work of childcare is coupled with other forms of strain on the elderly who remain in Nepal, particularly in Mustang. There, the work—of planting and weeding and harvest, of milking and making cheese, of repairing roofs and attending to ritual practice—continues, unabated. Money might be sent back to help hire laborers for some of these tasks, but the labor of raising children is not outsourced.
“The little one will stay with her grandmother,” says Dolma. “She will learn from the bigger kids. She will be so good. And when she goes to school, maybe her grandmother will also learn more than ABC123,” she laughs. This is a different sort of grandmother hypothesis.
As I think about Dolma saying her ABCs, I consider language. This strategy of sending young children on a global khora during childhood is also shaping the acquisition of word and gesture. Young Mustang-Americans may begin with Logé and some Nepali. They may learn to love their mother tongue as they learn to love the elder generation. They may even acquire the rudiments of written Tibetan or Devanagari in a Mustang daycare or an urban Nepali preschool before returning to New York, where they will enter the swiftly moving current of English and ESL. On the one hand, this strategy of sending young children who are born in the U.S. (and therefore have U.S. passports and the possibility to enact this khora with relative ease) builds a certain firmament of belonging. On the other hand, the transitions can be jarring for everyone. As illustration of these dynamics, two moments come to mind.
The first involves a grandmother I met in 2012, on a trail outside the village of Ghami. Her slight frame, already bent by age, was weighed down by a squirming toddler strapped to her back. She walked slowly, herding her two cows toward home. The woman fingered the front flap of her chuba, pulling a package of biscuits from the folds of fabric covering her sagging breasts—breasts that had undoubtedly nursed many children. She reached around and gave one to the child. Her expression was dull, exhausted.
The second example involves a friend from Lo who lives in Elmhurst, Queens. He is about my age. He has lived in the U.S. for eighteen years, during which time he has not been back to Nepal. His son spent four years of early childhood between Mustang and Kathmandu. When he arrived back in the U.S., he spoke no English. Three years later, he refuses to speak anything but English. “Don’t be hitting. Do now your school working,” my friend coddles his child in precise and imperfect English. He tries to ply his rambunctious boy off the iPad. He promises candy. He pleads. The child ignores him. This father works long hours, as does his wife. While there is no shortage of love in the household, there is little energy left to build boundaries of discipline and inter-generational respect, to cultivate family connection.
Dolma has made dal bhaat. She serves lunch on the heavy copper plates like the ones I once ate from in Monthang. We eat quietly, as an Indian version of American Idol suffuses the room with Bollywood ballads. Mouths pucker with the acidic delight of pickled radish, but Nyima avoids this relish for the sake of her child. “If I eat it, the baby spits up half the milk I feed her.”
Dolma and I nod, knowingly. “Yes,” we drawl in tandem. It has been a decade since the birth of my own daughter and almost two decades since Dolma’s youngest was born, but bodily memories remain.
“How was your labor?” I ask Nyima, who has finished eating and now picks up the child to nurse.
“There was no problem,” she answers. “The pains started in the afternoon, and I gave birth about twelve hours later. At first, I thought that I would want to have medicine for pain, but then I thought maybe it was not good for the baby,” her voice trails off.
Dolma cuts in. “There was no medicine for the pain in Monthang. Just some village friends giving massage and smooth words to keep going.”
“When the baby was close to coming out, I wanted the medicine, but the doctors said it was too late,” adds Nyima. Dolma had been in the room with her daughter, along with hospital nurses and the obstetrician on call. The nurse had cut the cord, swaddled the baby.
“What happened to the placenta?” I ask.
Nyima looks at me, befuddled. “I don’t know.”
Dolma understands my question. “It was not like at home. No earth burial. No river. They probably just threw it away.”
“Why is the placenta important?” Nyima asks.
“In the village, we say it needs to be taken care of well, so that the baby will not get sick or be attacked by nöpa,” Dolma explains.
“Really, people believe that?” Nyima responds.
“Yes,” Dolma answers. “Does it help? I am not sure. But if we don’t do this and then there is a problem.… I have seen that happen.”
Nyima says nothing, her eyes wide.
“Was the hospital nice?” I ask.
“It was neat and clean,” Dolma uses one of her English phrases. “But home is more comfortable.”
“I would be scared to give birth at home,” admits Nyima.
“How has it been with nursing?” I ask. I have just seen Nyima feed her child, but I also notice formula under the coffee table.
“She nursed for the first month,” Dolma answers for her daughter.
“But the doctors said I did not have enough milk coming,” continues Nyima. “So I started feeding her lactose too.”
“What would you have done back in Mustang if this had happened?” I ask Dolma.
“We would feed tsampa mixed with butter early, like this,” she mimes the motion of putting a little bit of dough in her mouth and then feeding it to a baby. “We do this not only if there is not enough milk but to make babies strong. It is food from our place. But here, the doctors told us not to feed anything but breast milk or this powder for six months,” says Dolma. “We are in a new place now. The wind and water are different here. The customs are different. So, we have to change what we do.”
As we talk, I learn that the family performed a simple purification ritual in their apartment after the birth but that more elaborate rituals for the baby girl took place back in Nepal. She was given her name by a lama in Kathmandu. The khora of migration is also the circling of ceremony across place, through social networks, at a distance.
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