On our drive back, the previously heavy atmosphere lifted. Everyone had finished the hike and the Chinese engineer was no longer bothered by calls from his company. We got to know our guide better throughout the three hours in Abujicuo, he was firm but warm hearted and we felt as if we could ask him anything.

“Do you have children, sir?” I asked. I have always been rather cautious of asking such a question as it could be rather sensitive. Yet somehow that day, I felt compelled to ask that question.

“Yes, I do.” he replied.

 “How many children do you have sir?”

“I have two daughters. Guess how old my eldest daughter is,” he said.

“Ten?” the Vietnamese lady suggested.

“Five..?” I said.

“She’s fifteen.” he replied. With one hand on the steering wheel, he retrieved his phone from his pockets and looked through it.

“Here’s my younger daughter.” He passes me his phone. It was a photo of a pretty fair-skinned girl in Tibetan traditional costume.

“She has your nose,” I pointed out the obvious. “And she’s so fair-skinned!” I exclaimed.

“Tibetans are not born dark-skinned, you know?” he laughed.

As his phone made its round amongst the rest of us, he told us about how their children need not work as hard as their parents and hence had fairer skin.

“Can your daughters speak Chinese as well as you do?”

“They can speak Chinese. But we Tibetans speak Tibetan amongst ourselves of course. If you are Tibetan and you choose not to speak Tibetan to your own people, we would think it’s ill-mannered of you.”

He then showed us a picture of his elder daughter. She was in high school, where they had a good mix of Tibetan and Chinese students. We asked about his preference of the race of his future son-in law. “I won’t restrict them but I would prefer for them to marry a Tibetan.” he replied. “Tibetans have a strong moral compass within them.”

Our guide himself had an arranged marriage in his early twenties. He wouldn’t wish it on his daughters although he was happily married. “Tibetans make an honest living.” he stressed. “We wouldn’t do anything that would rack our conscience. You’ll probably never hear of Tibetans smuggling drugs.”

We were passing by a Tibetan village when he tapped on his side window. “The first building you see is my house.” he said. He shared about what seemed like a high level of camaraderie amongst their village people. Everyone in the village lent a helping hand to build each family a house. All the village children who attended boarding school and came home weekly were ferried by any adult who had free spaces in their vehicle.

“I heard you don’t kill the female cows,” I said, recalling what the teenage girl told me in Litang.

“No, we kill all.”

“But the female cows give birth, don’t they?”

“We will still kill them, who told you we didn’t kill the females?”

“A Tibetan girl in Litang.”

“Well, we will kill all.”

We asked if he had ever thought of moving to the capital, Kunming. He didn’t see any reason to move there. He could speak Chinese and Tibetan but wasn’t literate. It would be difficult to make a living.

“If there’s one thing Tibetans aren’t good at, its studying.” he chuckled. “Other than that, we can do anything under the sun.”

“Do you get the 1000 we paid, in full?” I asked, citing the five of us who had paid 200 yuan each on this trip. There was still the middleman who contacted them to guide us as well as the hostels who recruited us to be paid, he said. He would probably get about 600 yuan out of the 1000 yuan we five paid that day.