Min tibetanska barndom i Zorgay - Life and Culture on the Tibetan ...

11
STUDY
T
he summer holiday seemed to pass as quickly as a week
in school <strong>and</strong> it was suddenly time for me to start grade
one, which I had been yearning for. Our new classroom
was well organized, with enough desks <strong>and</strong> chairs for all the
students. Posters of Western <strong>and</strong> Chinese scientists <strong>and</strong> thinkers,
such as Newton, Einstein, <strong>and</strong> Lu Xun were pasted on the walls.
A red <strong>and</strong> white banner above the blackboard carried Chairman
Mao's exhortation: Study hard <strong>and</strong> make progress everyday.
Posters of famous Tibetans <strong>and</strong> Tibetan proverbs on education
were conspicuously absent.
We had new books <strong>and</strong> new teachers. Everything was
new except ourselves. We should have had an unprecedented
experience in this grade with serious teaching but it was not to
be. I liked the classroom <strong>and</strong> our schoolbags were heavy with
books that had unfamiliar Chinese characters <strong>and</strong> colorful
illustrations. These intrigued us <strong>and</strong> we wanted to learn as
quickly as possible.
Brother was too shy to teach me anything from my new
books, so I asked Father to teach me, but he did not know
Chinese. However, Father wrote my name in Tibetan in each
book so I was less likely to lose them. My name written in
Tibetan looked like the legs of an ant <strong>and</strong> gave me a strange
feeling. We only started learning Tibetan in the fourth grade.
I learned as much as the other students did. Our teachers
were responsible <strong>and</strong> cared about us, except for our arithmetic
teacher. They generally taught well <strong>and</strong> were not like the
teachers in the xueqianban who often beat us with a bamboo
stick. The Chinese teachers were better than our Tibetan
teachers. They were responsible <strong>and</strong> taught us until we
understood what they were trying to teach. Their purpose in
teaching was not to go through the books as quickly as possible,
but to teach us as much as we could learn, even if we could not
finish the textbook. However, when they were tired, they
▪46▪