Notes on a Yak Herder in Brooklyn

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

“How did an isolated yak herder (now a waiter in a Queens hotel) manage to upset the Chinese?” I ask him.

“Not isolated.” Nyima laughs, rubbing his pitted, leathery face. “Part of independence movement with other yak herder.”

His words get mangled by the elevated M train. Somewhere, someone is cursing someone in Spanish. I try to imagine Nyima thigh deep in the snow with his yaks, climbing the white silence. Could this man in his white I LOVE NY t-shirt actually be him? What, I wonder, are the odds of a Tibetan yak herder ending up on a street in Brooklyn with a Burger King, where his wife Chodron and their six-year-old son Tsewang are having lunch?

“The Chinese put me in jail three years. I was torture all the time. Electric shock, cigarette lighter. They want me to sign paper that say Tibet part of China. I tell them, ‘no, if you want to kill me, kill me.’”

He takes a defiant swig of his tea. Inwardly, he is tumbling back into captivity, his wiry body shifting from side to side on the crimson cushions, searching for a way out. I shift with him, searching for a way in. Is there a way in? How does a life rise up again from the Ground Zero of torture?

Escaping over the Himalayas to Nepal, he acquired a fake Nepali passport, a genuine Air India plane ticket, and wound up homeless in Grand Central Station in Manhattan.

“I see other homeless people. I tell them I need drink. They point where someone selling juice.”

I saw no Tibetans when I used to distribute food to the homeless in the tunnels and crannies of Grand Central Station.

Before the days of the globalization of homelessness in NewYork.

I ask him to tell me what his days and nights were like underground. He shakes his head, puts a finger of closure to his lips. Talking about torture is easier.

“Do you miss Kham?”

“I miss Kham. But Bushwick good. No Chinese soldiers.”