The Sweetest Words

Tsering Yangzom Lama

What are the sweetest words in your tongue? In ours, they are ko, lo, and apu. It’s possible that these are not even words. Just sounds tacked on at the end of a sentence so that our mouths are pursed, open, beseeching.

Eat your dinner, ko. Listen to your mother, lo. How cute you are, apu. 

Tsering Yangzom Lama’s debut novel, We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies, won the GLCA New Writers Award as well as the Banff Mountain Book Award for Fiction & Poetry. Tsering holds an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and a BA in Creative Writing and International Relations from the University of British Columbia. She was selected as a 2018 Tin House Novel Scholar. Tsering’s writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Malahat Review, Grain, Kenyon Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Vela, LaLit, and Himal SouthAsian, as well as the anthologies Old Demons New Deities: 21 Short Stories from Tibet; House of Snow: An Anthology of the Greatest Writing About Nepal; and Brave New Play Rites. She is also a co-founder of LhakarDiaries, a leading English-language blog among Tibetan youth in exile.