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Some of the students in the Kham dialect class were oddly evasive. One lady in her 50’s was particularly unfriendly everytime I passed her in the halls. I began to wonder,” What gives? Why is this lady giving me a funny vibe?” This led me to naively wonder why people other than me would be taking the class. They weren’t grad students doing research. It’s not going to help if you go to Lhasa and the TAR. Kham dialect is only useful if you’re going to spend time in Kham, the part of Tibet now fully absorbed into Sichuan. What could possibly interest them in a Tibetan dialect that was, to be honest, obscure and extremely regionally specific?

I found an answer in the class textbook. It was written in the 1930’s by an American missionary and several scholars from Sichuan. I now realize some of the students taking the Kham Dialect and Modern Chinese classes either had direct or indirect interest in missionary work, work that could potentially land them in a Chinese jail. Anna’s pop-up cafés in SWUN and Lhasa were entrées into discussing the gospel. Another avenue for missionizing was teaching English. Prior to arriving in China, I read an article in The Toronto Globe and Mail written by a former missionary. She taught english in mainland China all the while attempting to broach the subject of Jesus Christ. This is not surprising as the desire to learn english in Tibet and the Chinese mainland is intense and lucrative. A missionary would draw a lot of interest if they were offering the chance to practice english. I could have made quite a bit of money teaching english but I judged it too risky.