It is opening night.  The cinder block gallery is across a jade green river at the foot of a mountain in a Tibetan neighborhood where kids are riding bikes and people are dong laundry. 
                We have worked hard to make sure the government knows nothing.  The consequences for our soft-spoken Tibetan gallery director who walks with a limp are significant.  They risk everything in their contact with us.  They are serious about art: making naked red babies trapped in nets and Tibetan beauties painted on the US dollar bill. 
                The digital black and white print I buy of a surreal midnight garden with a red chair breaking up the idyllic scene is one of these pieces. Fecundity and death. Just like one of my endangered species portraits.   “Maybe this is the last garden left,” the photographer says of this print made during the riots.  I tentatively ask if the turmoil was near our hotel at the city center.  He kindly explains that it happened all over Lhasa.
            The Tibetans are here and so is the beer.  My buddhas and collages of Chinese train workers and temple sweepers are pinned on the wall.  “This work is for you, the Tibetan people.”  I tell them how I am profoundly moved by a culture broken apart and put back together again
            They inspect my work.  I am suddenly self-conscious of my lecturing to a people I barely know about a subject they comprehend better than me.  “Maybe the culture has reformed to make something new,” one of them ponders.