My Amazing Experience while being at SASANE
Resistance through Community
Reflecting on the beginning of my internship in Nepal, I was depressed. I was scared to walk around Kathmandu because of fear of getting harassed for my gender and race. People assumed that I was a Chinese woman, and I fit perfectly into their stereotype of the weak, submissive Asian woman. Dearly missing my friends and my home country, I stayed in my room, and some days I couldn’t get out of bed. When I had the energy to leave my room, however, I made friends with locals. Gradually, I was always walking around with friends and no longer being harassed. I realized that I was surrounded completely by other Asian people for the first time in my life, and this shared identity made me feel safe. I also met many people who accepted my sexuality and gender. In this blog post, I share stories from my friends that I haven’t shared on this blog yet and explain their significance through resistance in our gender, sexuality, and race.
First, I want to begin with my dear friends whom I had met at Kathmandu’s only queer bar. I first inhabited this place out of a desire to connect with other queer people as a queer person myself. This was during the part of my internship when I didn’t want to leave the hotel, but my friends from home had convinced me to go out and make new friends. I sat alone eating my popcorn when I was approached by my new friend, who complimented me and invited me to sit with him and his friends. We gossiped about men and his various boyfriends, and I was even introduced to some of them. I had just met this man, but I felt that I could tell him anything since he was so vulnerable with his personal life. He introduced me to his best friend from college, whom I also found easy to talk to. I felt at ease with this group of men, which was new for me because I never had a group of men that I could hang out with in my time at college without feeling uncomfortable. I always hung out with women or one man at a time. Especially because I faced so much harassment by men in this country, and even at this
After this night, they asked me where I wanted to go in Nepal and explained that they wanted to be my tour guides. We met up again to go to Patan Durbar Square, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In order to ensure that we weren’t charged the tourist price to enter the site, they told me not to speak English because they believed that I could pass as Nepali. This was one of the biggest observations I gleaned from my friends, that I was in some part related to them due to my Asian appearance. In America, I am not surrounded by a majority of Asian people, and I have experienced racial harm from many people in my life. When I am surrounded by Asian Americans in my college’s cultural clubs, I experience gendered and sexuality-based harm. However, when I am with my two friends, I feel safe in all my identities.
They persuaded me to take a motorcycle to meet them at their local mall, where we took the long bus ride to Patan. I was scared, but they pushed me outside of my comfort zone, and I experienced less familiar modes of transit. When weird men approached me, they told them to go away and protected me. On the bumpy bus ride, I asked them about their dreams, and they told me that they wanted to move to Dubai or the United Kingdom. They study hotel management, although they don’t know what they want to do with this degree yet. What they do know is that they want to go to Thailand on a fun trip, and they already have invited me.
At Patan Durbar Square, we evaded the guards who believed I was a foreigner. It didn’t help that my friends really wanted to talk to me during our visit, so they also spoke English. We couldn’t stick around for long, so we got traditional Nepali food that I hadn’t tried yet in a nearby restaurant. In there we created TikToks with audio that I had never heard, but I learned quickly. In return for the new experiences, I asked them if I could take them to a Korean restaurant one day to share parts of my culture. Before I went home for the day, they wanted to buy me a souvenir. We stopped by a new makeup and accessory shop, and they tried to buy me something cute but I refused. I don’t feel good when people buy me things, especially when I know that they don’t have a stable income. They insisted because it is rude for me to refuse a gift offer. Knowing this, I chose a gift that we could all enjoy, an embellished fan and a cute lip gloss container. We would be using those each Friday night in the future when we went out.
We always spent Friday night at the queer bar, where we all met the first time. We talked about our boyfriends, ate as much popcorn as possible, took pictures, and danced. My one friend applied his lip gloss and makeup throughout the night using the back of his reflective phone case. They had so many boyfriends with whom they talked throughout the night. They barely had boyfriend troubles, rather they seemed so uplifted by their relationships. Everyone at this bar talked to each other. I am not used to so many friendly queer people in America. People only talk to you at bars if they are interested romantically, but here everyone wanted to be your friend. I had so much fun here, and I was completely sober. There were so many familiar characters each night. I never thought I could feel so comfortable hanging out with so many men in Nepal, but honestly I felt more comfortable than hanging out with all women. It further reinforced my gender identity. I feel more open with men because in certain ways I feel like a feminine yet underlying masculine person. At the bar, I know I was not perceived this way, but all that mattered is how I felt when surrounded by my friends and their boyfriends.
I was really excited to introduce them to Korean food. It was their first time trying budae jjigae, gimbap, and various banchan. One really liked eating the kimchi with the rice. The other was really bad at the chopsticks and completely submerged the roll in the soy sauce. They ate all of their food, and I was really happy that they we able to try new food. Heading out of the restaurant, they fixed their shirt and makeup, then on the way back we linked arms and skipped and danced happily through the streets without giving people a thought. We didn’t even notice people laughing at us and throwing us homophobic slurs. That is what I really liked about being with them is that I didn’t care about how others viewed us. I am anxious when walking down the streets in the US because of the violence that I have endured from people with power. But when I was with them I did things that I wouldn’t have done if I was alone. They healed me. Now that I am gone, they tell me that Thamel isn’t fun anymore. I feel the same in the queer spaces in my home country. We still keep in touch about their boyfriends. One wants to visit in the US, one will travel back to his village soon, and we all hope we can see each other in Thailand one day. I am so grateful to have met queer men in my life that have treated me with kindness and respect. When I was with my queer friends, I felt comfortable walking, running, skipping, and jumping down the streets and didn’t care about what anybody thought about me. We loved creating TikToks in random places. My friends were so comfortable expressing themselves openly in public.
It is difficult for me to become friends with other women because of my gender, but it was really easy for me to become friends with these 2. I see in them me in the past before I went to college and lost innocence in dating and experiencing life as a woman. Even though I am no longer a woman, I can identify and empathize with their experiences as a feminine person growing up. It’s amazing that we only hung out twice, yet I felt so comfortable around them. They also want to go on a Thailand trip one day. I will be able to hang out with the one at her university when I come back to the US. We keep in touch about similar things today.
Image description: My 2 friends and I at a hotpot restaurant. This was their first time eating hotpot.
My final friend is one who works at the hotel selling art. It was naturally easier for me to meet this friend because I went downstairs and saw him. He works day and night shift, so he was always at the hotel. We started becoming friends over sound meditation. In this art, you hold a bowl with your hands and make sounds using instruments. The bowl is put on one of the 7 chakras of your body to balance it. I loved going downstairs and practicing this with him before I went to bed or started my day. He said that whenever he felt stressed, sound meditation was what helped him feel better. I loved sound healing as a way of grounding myself and resetting during the stressful parts of my internship. My friend and the security guard demonstrated how sound healing works in the human body by filling the bowl with water, mimicking the effect on the human body.
Another thing that we bonded over was music. One day he brought a guitar to the lobby, and I learned how to play a My Chemical Romance song on it, one of his favorite American bands. I used to play guitar in the past, and I felt like I had regained that spark after my friend encouraged me to play. After that week I learned the song, he always told me that the guitar was available in the lobby for me to play. He, the security guard, the receptionist, and I often hung out in the lobby late at night during their shifts to listen to American rock and metal and Nepali music while they played video games on their phones and I worked on my South Korea prep and internship things. I now know so many Nepali songs because of him, and he already knows so many American songs. While we listened to music in the lobby, we cuddled with the hotel cat, who tried to claw and bite us. Before I went to bed, I did our signature handshake: the dap and snap. We taught this to all of our friends and the hotel staff.
Sometimes, I took him shopping with me throughout the streets of Thamel so that he could help me get a better deal. He is a business man afterall. One time, he haggled a shop owner to sell me a rug for only 300 rupees more than he paid for it, which is an extremely good deal. After, I always treat him to food, especially Korean food and hotpot. It is funny, however, because he told me that I am not materialistic as other people are right after we went shopping.
This man also helped me learn a significant portion of my Nepali. He even helped me practice it by asking his friends on the street to practice it with me. It is now really easy for me to ask someone their name, say my own name, and say nice to meet them. My friend and I hang out in the hotel lobby at night. We do this very often, listening to music and hanging out during their night shift.
Image description: My friend haggling to the best of his ability. I was able to meet the shop owner and buy a rug from him for only 300 more rupees than he bought it for, which is a great deal.
My friend is a very spiritual person. He has been selling art for a long time at different Thanka shops around Thamel. Even though he sells art for our hotel, he visits the other shops frequently to see his friends. We visited the one closest to our hotel often, and he explained the various paintings that they sold in the context of Buddhism. Something that he talked about a lot was the concept of impermanence: nothing lasts forever. In the hotel lobby, we listened to mantras while we did our work. The om mani padme hum mantra was something that he said whenever something went wrong in order to ensure a positive result later. He is so passionate about the art and sound healing that he is training to become a sound master. Sound healing helped him a lot during a difficult period of his life, and he wants to be able to heal others with this. I will be studying abroad in South Korea next year, and he will be visiting in order to further his sound training.
I have always thought that it was difficult to be friends with people who were different from me, but my friend gave me hope that people who have different identities can be my friends. I shared my gender and sexuality in the beginning with him, and he was comfortable being friends with me still. Even though the concept of gender was difficult for him, I felt that he clearly respected me in his own way. While English pronouns are difficult for him to understand, when I told him I was non-binary he told me he would call me “bro”, which in Nepal is very gendered to be used toward men. This meant a lot to me.
One day, my friend told me that I should be careful with whom I share my sexuality and gender with because people can use this against me to hurt me. I was really angry at my friend initially because this wasn’t an identity that he ever had to hide. It broke my heart when I was deciding whether to remain silent or educate my friend but I chose the latter and did a bit harshly. He felt bad bringing it up because he felt that it offended me, and he didn’t want to talk about it any longer in order to not ruin our friendship. But I reassured myself that he had no bad intentions and was only trying to protect me and asked to talk about it further. When we had a conversation about it, I learned that he had many friends in the past who had betrayed him. He learned to hide parts of himself from the people he had met. He saw himself in me. He didn’t know that this was such as touchy subject that I had experienced in my life, and I didn’t know his personal motivations behind this topic. I am glad that I had called him in because it had only made our relationship stronger.
Later when we hung out with my other gay friends we had received homophobic slurs when we were having fun skipping down the streets. My friend stood up for us. He told the men to stop because we were just having fun. He expressed that he had never had any gay friends and he didn’t know what to do, but he stood up for us. He integrated so well with them and treated them just like all of the people he meets.
This was the last friend I saw before I left. As we walked the streets of Thamel around 4am, we reflected on our time together. He says that without me at the hotel, things will be boring. Even during trekking season, he doesn’t really click with people like he does with me is what he says. But he believes in impermanence, that nothing lasts forever. Yet, we will meet again in Korea after his sound training, or I will visit him again in Thamel.
Everyone here tells me not to be sad that it is over, but to be happy because it happened. Yet, I find myself longing to be back in Kathmandu. I found myself longing for my friends at home only 3 weeks before the internship ended, but now that I am back home I find that who I am missing the most is my friends from Nepal. I get afraid again to be surrounded by so many White, cisgendered people everywhere I go. They are reminders of the racial and transphobic violence that I have endured. But I know I have friends back home too that have supported me in similar ways. Friends who have helped me when I was homeless because of my gender and sexuality. Friends who I have supported through similar trauma. Friends who have been there just to have fun and remind me of how life should be. I now look forward to Korea. I have found the importance of finding a community who supports me wherever I go. I know I will face discrimination everywhere I go but it doesn’t have to be the situation where I cower in fear and feel so unsafe. There are other people out there who feel the same and that is why we connect. For safety, for protection, for belonging, for fun, for necessity, for resistance.
