Within seconds, my body landed fifty feet below in a dusty street. My heels shattered on impact. I crumbled on the ground. Peasants and pedestrians in gray-and-blue Mao jackets and caps likely gathered around me, wondering who I was, a white-skinned foreigner, my face unshaven, my hiking boots caked in red mud, my wire-rimmed glasses unbroken but askew. Thick-tired bicycles, their wire baskets heavy with fruits and vegetables, veered wobbly around me. Vendors in the street's open-air stalls abandoned their row of shiny apples and plums and rushed over. A handful of Tibetan monks in maroon robes, dotting the nearby green hillside like fallen rose petals, glanced up, their meditation broken. They wouldn't have known how alike we were, that their robes and prayers were mine as a child…