culture.” I am embarrassed and nervous, but I take the microphone. I speak, mostly in Logé, telling them how happy I am to be here, how hard they all work, how difficult it is to be a mother. I say that it makes me feel old but also glad to see people whom I knew when we were younger, back in Mustang, and that I am encouraged to know they are doing well here.
Everything I say feels inadequate. When they ask me to sing, I freeze up. All I can muster is “Happy Mother’s Day to You …” repeated to the tune of “Happy Birthday.”
Later that evening, I recall a poem I once wrote to my mother, on the same annual occasion, when I was about seven. At that time, our small household was fracturing. Divorce was imminent. I was at once too young to understand motherhood and old enough to intuit something of what it means to be a mother. The poem went like this:
Moms. The people who hold the world together.
They take care of their joy through all sorts of weather.
They take care of the house, every last toy.
I’ll learn from her as she learned from her mother.
And someday, I’ll pick up a toy, and I’ll know
I’m a mother that holds the world together.
PART II
PARENTS AND CHILDREN
Education is a social process; education is growth; education is not preparation for life but is life itself.
—JOHN DEWEY, EXPERIENCE AND EDUCATION
Education-driven out-migration from Nepal’s high mountains to boarding schools and monastic institutions in urban Nepal or India is not unique to Mustang. It is a cycling out the mountains but not necessarily a cycling back. These patterns are bound up in money, obligation, and love—with parents and sponsors, both foreign and domestic. Likewise, the khora of migration exists through seasonal movement between summer schools in Mustang and winter schools in Pokhara or Kathmandu and through the slower turning of the wheel of time as children are sent away, only to return once a year, or less, to their village roots.
The relationship between parents and children is a form of khora: a circling of support and obligation, expectation, surprise, and care. But education portends broader social change. It demands answers to new questions: What does one need to know? What does one want to know? What counts as knowledge? Is education necessarily a pathway to socioeconomic advancement?
Education opens up new possibilities even as it changes the world, by changing ways of knowing the world. Sometimes children born in New York spend their early childhood with grandparents in Nepal, returning to New York when they are school-aged. Meanwhile, their mothers may be caring for American children as an economic strategy. Here, the ends of kinship include the fraying of connections between parents and children, people and place. But these ends can also be refashioned: through school “families” as well as within extended families across time and space, through the dance of language.
In the short story, “Letters for Mother,” Wangmo is born into a position of low social status in Monthang. Her life is changed when a Swiss man decides to support her education in Kathmandu. What does this opportunity come to mean? How does it shape her sense of self and her place within the wider Mustang community? Where does it lead? How different is Wangmo’s experience from that of her daughter who is growing up in Queens?
The ethnographic chapter, “Going for Education,” begins by describing the ways in which outsiders—individuals and institutions—are implicated in education-driven out-migration. It explores the logics by which parents have made decisions about their children’s futures. This includes considerations about the shortcomings of the Nepali national education system and the role of private as well as faith-based institutions in educating Mustang youth. Mustang’s cultural connection to Tibet shapes educational futures as well as senses of identity. Even so, American educational ideals become assimilated into Mustang-based institutions, and efforts to retain linguistic and cultural knowledge from Nepal are being carried out in New York. Still, education, even in its most advanced forms, does and does not transform social values: the ways we see ourselves and the ways we treat one another.
LETTERS FOR MOTHER
Wangmo sinks into the cushions of her sleeper sofa and contemplates the birthday card. To be more precise, she stares at the letters. They begin, as usual, to float and wobble. Wangmo squints and sucks in her breath. It makes the words sit still. This act is more instinct than thought—an old habit that she used to get through school.
Wangmo holds the note with both hands. Alone in her apartment, she reads the words aloud.
I love you mom wangmo because you are my mom wangmo. my MOM. happy birthday.
She exhales. Wangmo not only feels proud because her child at age seven can form these letters, clear and beautiful, but also because she knows that, if her daughter were unable to do so, some well-mannered teacher’s aide would pull the girl aside. The school would offer tests. Her child would get help. The problem would be named and hopefully managed, if not cured, rather than handled with an inevitable rap across her knuckles.
The birthday note is written on lined paper. Printed blue, pink, and purple hearts run across the top of the page. Her daughter has copied these hearts, making a neat row along the bottom of her message, in lieu of a signature.
Wangmo is not convinced that today, March 30, is her actual birthday, but it became the date inscribed on her nagarikta identity card and, now, her green card. It would do. Her mother said she had been born in spring.
Wangmo holds this endearment from her small child. The note dissolves the residue of an argument they’d had earlier this morning about which leggings her daughter would wear to school. But the note also does something else. It brings back memories of her own boarding school days in Kathmandu. Decades compress into these minutes of quiet. Before her journey on the 7 train, before the start of a twelve-hour workday at Nu 4 U Nails, Wangmo finds herself inside a twenty-year-old memory.
In the days before monsoon brought thunderstorms to settle dust and cool temperaments across the Kathmandu valley, everything felt hot, edgy. Wangmo was not alone in her discomfort as she sat in her classroom. Still, she felt the flush of embarrassment as her English teacher, a feather-thin Nepali man who rarely smiled, announced an assignment: “Write an essay about your parents and why you are grateful for them.”
This assignment posed two problems for Wangmo. First, she did not really know her parents. She was not allowed to know her father, and although she had lived with her mother until age seven, several years had passed since they’d seen each other—a veritable lifetime for a child. The truth was, she felt more pity than love for her mother. Wangmo worried for her mother’s welfare, but she did not miss her.
Second, Wangmo struggled to write in any language but especially in English. The neat line that ran atop Devanagari script seemed to keep the letters in check, tethered them to one another like a rope. They only had Tibetan class twice a week, and much of this time was spent reciting the alphabet, memorizing prayers, and singing songs. She could find reliable shapes in the graceful lines of this, her natal-yet-not-natal language, and could reproduce, fairly faithfully, these shapes when asked. But English was unhinged. Shapes turned backward and forward. She couldn’t wrangle the words.
As
