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As long as I am alive, I am fully committed to amity between Tibetans and Chinese. Otherwise there's no use.

The Chinese are brought up to believe that you should be silent in class. The teacher speaks, and you just listen and absorb what they say.

I'm not Chinese. I thrive in interesting times.

My major in college was Chinese Studies. It was very intentional.

When I was living in China, I learned to make things hyper-explicit because often they were being read by people whose command of English kept them from picking up what I thought were obvious signals.

I wanted to do something far from my intellectual and physical home, so I went to live in Beijing for eight months and took Mandarin Chinese.

You don't know what the Chinese expect in the way of beauty. The presentation is just a farce. You come into a room filled with 50 people and they don't talk to you. There's very little interaction.

I am very practical.

Once I became interested in China, I flew to Beijing in 1996 to spend half a year studying Mandarin. The city stunned me.

I just started taking Mandarin classes. I love the idea of globalization: of being able to work in different countries.