To be frank, the Tashi Dawa reading confused me more than enlightened my concept of the Tibetan with all the

strange goings on in the village of Gokam. However, Tashi Dawa provides oblique historical references near the ends of each chronological section, which are interesting. From this, we can take it to mean that the important foreign involvement in Tibet, during the period of 1929-1950 for example, consisted of Englishmen exploring the areas around India and encountering the native population of Tibet, and that the Peoples Liberation Army was met, at least initially, with considerable hospitality by the poor farming communities in the Himalayan mountains. That said, Tashi Dawa does not sound like any of the Tibetan names in his text (it sounds more Japanese than anything), and the entirety of that issue may not have been addressed. I do believe that to farmers who lived solitary lives, the influx of the Chinese army would have provided excitement beyond compare and an opportunity to leave their isolated, lonely communities for the grander world outside. Culturally, it appears that the majority of Tibetans practice variations of Buddhism, and that the greatest respect is afforded to monks and nuns, as evidenced by the fact that Cering Gyamo stayed alone in Gokam, feeding the lama that was meditating in her cave, though she had never even seen the man, and by the fact that Dalang would not touch her after learning that she had become a nun despite his brazenness prior to that fact. As to Liu Hengs Dogshit Food, the most important piece I can draw from it has to do with, of course, Cao Apricots (Goiters) attitudes towards food. On the one hand, she struggles with all her power to provide food for her family and herself, and on the other, she does not work in the fields at all, preferring not to waste any energy in that way since it will not directly benefit her. In the fields, When it was time to work, her muscles and energy began to sag, turning her into a pile of lazy flesh (CAMCL 371). This can be read as a criticism of the communal farms produced in the Land Reform period from 1950 to 1953, highlighting their ineffective levels of production; in order to survive, people needed to conserve their energy for finding food for their own households as opposed to serving the community. Or, more likely, since Liu Heng was raised during the Cultural Revolution, and taught the principles associated with Maos Revolution, Dogshit Food is a criticism of Goiters self-serving methods.