I wanted to discuss modern Tibet with Tashi Tsering, but as we drank beer on his balcony in an old part of Lhasa one evening, the 70-year-old former political prisoner insisted on quizzing me on the origin and decline of the Irish language.
Mr Tsering, author of the only Tibetan-English-Chinese dictionary, is a passionate advocate of Tibetan, which is now having to come to terms with the prevalence of Chinese, just as the Irish once tried, and failed, to cope with English as the language of advancement.
"The Tibetan language defines the nation and I am very much concerned about its future," he said in near-perfect English as he swatted a fly on the balcony which serves as a bar where his wife Sangyela sells barley-based local beer known as chang. Among Tibetans themselves, he believes, there is a decline in the quality of the language, which has 34 consonants and four vowels and is based on Sanskrit. "Young intellectuals are very good at Chinese and English, but they are not very good at Tibetan any more."
The problem is that in the upper levels of college it had become important to learn subjects like physics, geography and mathematics to compete in higher education, he explained, adjusting his large gold-rimmed glasses, but this today can only be done through Chinese.
There is now a "psychological imbalance" in Tibet. Chinese officials don't speak Tibetan, and "if there are five Tibetans and five Chinese in a room the language is Chinese".
"I don't blame the Chinese totally," he added. He faults the Tibetans themselves for not insisting on their linguistic rights.
"We Tibetans are so weak," he exclaimed, as he refilled our glasses. "We can't demand our own rights!"
Mr Tsering is by no means a dissident. To many he is an enigma, a Tibetan nationalist who threw in his lot with the Chinese.
He left Tibet after Chinese troops "liberated" the mountain nation in 1950, but he returned to work with the Chinese for a better Tibet. He is not a "splittist" as Beijing terms supporters of the Dalai Lama, though he met the exiled Buddhist leader in the United States last year and respects his desire to do a deal with the Chinese one day. Several pictures of the Dalai Lama adorn his living room.
And while he is pro-Beijing, Tashi Tsering suffered terribly at the hands of the Chinese for his faith in them. Born in a Tibetan village in 1929, Mr Tsering had good reason to nourish thoughts of revolution.
As a starry-eyed village boy he came to Lhasa as a 13-year-old member of the Dalai Lama's personal song and dance troupe. But he was treated cruelly by teachers and by the noble family with which he was billeted. He advanced himself by becoming a drombo, a passive sex partner to a prominent monk, and eventually secured a job in the Potala Treasury.
Disillusioned by corruption and stagnation, he became attracted to socialism. When the Chinese arrived, he was mixing with young Tibetan radicals who were excited at the prospect of social change, which before had been blocked by conservative monks. He was impressed by the way the People's Liberation Army set up a hospital and a school and began to grow their own vegetables. "The most startling thing I saw was that they picked up human excrement from the street with long ladles and put it on their vegetable gardens," he said, recalling his first sight of PLA soldiers. "I had never seen such a thing!"
He left for India in 1957 "to learn more about the world", and was drawn into the orbit of expatriate Tibetan activists. He ended up in the United States but never shook off his conviction that, as he put it, "the Chinese invasion of Tibet provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Tibetans who did not know how to conduct a revolution by themselves". After "reading Marxism and all the other `isms'," he said, "I was ready to accept the Chinese presence."
Tashi Tsering returned in 1964 and even joined the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, but was soon afterwards denounced as an American agent. He was publicly humiliated, tortured and imprisoned. "They fried me, boiled me and cooked me," he said, laughing. He spent six years in prison or doing forced labour, and was only released and exonerated in 1978. He then became a professor of English at Lhasa University and in 1985 founded a night school to teach English.
With the profits he built the first-ever primary school in his native village. Since then Tashi Tsering has set up 36 rural schools with over 4,000 pupils and ten more will open in September. He provides half the cash - about $7,000 - the government provides the rest, and the villagers give their labour free. He raises the money today by selling Tibetan carpets and yak-wool sweaters from his home to visitors from overseas, and gets donations from a Colorado-based project.
His autobiography, called The Struggle for Modern Tibet, has just been published in New York by ME Sharpe. Looking back, he does not express regrets about what happened in Tibet, but he adds: "I do not think that the price of change and modernity should be the loss of one's language and culture." He gave a self-deprecating smile. If it had not been for "my naivete and foolish optimism", he reflected, sipping his beer, "I would never have survived and accomplished what I have."