A Ngawa Tibetan Nomad Childhood

"I was born in a pastoral family in the autumn of 1986, in Rongrima Village, Hongyuan County, Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, PR China. When I was a child, my family lived in a 'four-column' wood house made using four poles placed in a rectangular configuration in the center of the home. Four shorter poles were behind the central columns. Four-pillar wood houses had flat roofs with several compartments, and had a skylight in the center that allowed light into the home and allowed smoke from the hearth to escape. We lived in our wood house from November to April. As flowers began to bud and calves were born, we took out our black yak-hair tent and pitched it, which announced that we would soon start moving to our camp on the open grassland where we would stay through spring, summer, and autumn."