Soon enough, I faced more culture shock. The local accent, diet and dress were all different. I stole my first bites of stewed eel, frog meat — and those spicy rabbit heads. I knew full well that I would be cursed by my folks for violating the cultural and religious taboos that I had been brought up with. But then if I didn’t go ahead and try the local food, I would be teased by the Chinese students. To them, if I was too scared to eat a rabbit’s head, I certainly must be one of those ethnic “barbarians.”

Chengdu is located in a river basin; it’s hot and damp. My fellow Tibetans and I were surprised to find that the humidity caused our hair to curl. To the straight-haired Han Chinese, natural curls are the telltale trait of minorities. So every morning we tamed our long hair by brushing hard and brushing harder. In the end, we had to clip our locks to ear length. We looked like middle-aged women sporting perms.

The school was segregated; we minorities were isolated in a different part of the campus and we rarely saw any of our Han Chinese peers. Our teachers, all Han Chinese, had no experience teaching minorities. Most of my classmates were Tibetans; the rest were Yi people, a minority in the Chengdu region. We all came to the school speaking many different dialects and languages; some stuck to their mother tongues, others spoke Chinese dialects. But soon enough, every one of us mastered the local Chengdu dialect.

Only when we were older did we realize that in the process of assimilating we had left behind a piece of ourselves. I, for one, lost my grip on some traditional Tibetan sounds. My relatives in Lhasa would later say my tongue must have been operated on by the Chinese. Tibetan — my mother tongue — became so mangled that even my pronunciation of “Lhasa” didn’t sound right.

I continued on to college in Chengdu. The Southwest University for Nationalities boasted students hailing from more than a dozen ethnic groups, with Han Chinese in the majority. Here I was schooled in how the first emperor of China built the Great Wall, but was never taught how the Potala Palace, the historical seat of Tibet’s government, came to be. I learned to recite Tang- and Song-dynasty poems, but was never taught the work by the Sixth Dalai Lama and renowned 17th century poet, Tsangyang Gyatso. I could rattle off the names of the martyrs who died for the People’s Republic, but knew nothing about the Tibetans who perished in the 1959 uprising, when China took over Tibet.