Room at the Top
on October 21, 1999
The last time I was in the Himalayas, I met a young, highly Westernized Tibetan who, misled perhaps by my Indian features (born in England, I’ve never lived in the subcontinent), started talking to me about the strange ways of the exotic foreigners he saw all around him. “These Westerners,” he confided, in a tone of half-admiring bewilderment, “they call us Tibetans refugees. But to us they are the refugees: cultural refugees, always looking for somewhere to belong to. We can’t understand them.