“Our parents were gone by then and my brother had disappeared with some old unregistered Bonpo monk, so I assumed the worst. I became an engineer then later a professor. They would call me into government service for especially challenging projects. The last one was a dam designed to flood a valley up in Heilongjiang Province by the Russian border. I went out with a survey team and discovered a village of the Oroqen people there, an ancient tribe of which there were only a few thousand left. I went back and told the truth, that there were better dam sites in the region and this one would destroy a village of indigenous people who had lived there for centuries. I was told no, this will be the valley because those people needed to enter the twenty-first century. They were using the dam as cover for their political goals, as a way to justify the destruction of those people. I left the next day. Left the project, left the university, and without a word to anyone, I went to Larung Gar, the school colony, because I had heard people could start over there, could learn to live the life of a monk or nun no matter how old they were, or what their prior life had been.”

“You honored your Tibetan roots,” Shan said.

“My soul had become a dried, shriveled thing. I honored it for the first time in my life. I had never forgotten a passage an old lama showed me when I was young, written by another lama centuries ago. The man wrote that he was leaving to be a snow monk, that he was going to go up and sit with the mountain for a few years, until only the mountain remained. For a while it seemed there was nothing better in all the world for me to do.”

“But you couldn’t entirely leave that old life behind,” Shan suggested.