An actual resthome tidbit:

The other week at the resthome, my one (Tibetan) coworker with an inappropriate sense of humor was like, "Here, eat some dry cheese, it's from our country," and she pointed to a small half-size Ziploc bag sitting out on the table in our office, where there was a bunch of little white rubbery-looking cheese cubes all strung together on this off-white piece of string.

"But they're on a string," I was like.

"Pull off one, eat it, it's good, it's from our country," she was like, and so I did.

And, the cheese was surprisingly dry and not even that rubbery, and it had no real taste apart from maybe some vague sour milk taste and a strong lemony bite, maybe from something that they use to preserve the cheese to keep it from spoiling when they probably string it up on strings to dry out in the open air.

And, as I ate it, I thought about how my coworker always says "our country," although she was born in India to her refugee parents and has never actually been to Tibet.

I think she shares food because she's nice like that - Tibetans are very a nice and well-socialized people, like Mormons - but also because it's a way that she stakes out being a Tibetan, since other more obvious ways are closed off to her.

I wonder how much of the Tibetan diaspora is like that.