About Kay Larson

Kay Larson travels to McLeod Ganj in northern India, home to the Tibetan government in exile and to thousands of Tibetan refugees, for a firsthand look at the challenges facing this exile community. The Dalai Lama has said that in the short term he has no hope at all, and in the long term everything changes. The dharma messages embedded in that pithy observation roll around in my head during an extended sojourn in Dharamsala, northern India, seat of the Tibetan government in exile, where out of necessity the Tibetans have been practicing the social engineering of wisdom and compassion for some five decades. I’ve come at the urging of the Dalai Lama’s youngest brother, Tenzhin Choegyal, and Tenzhin’s wife, Rinchen Khando Choegyal. I met them at a dressy art-world event in Los Angeles, the opening of an exhibition of contemporary art focused on the Dalai Lama. Witty and serious, comfortable as international travelers, evidently at home on the road, they seemed emblematic of educated Tibetan citizens of the world. They were adamant: Come see what it’s like. My reporter’s nose itched—a condition I’ve never yet cured. I gathered my husband, Andrew Pekarik, and after the usual melodramatic traverse of India’s anarchic roads we found ourselves drinking tea on the balcony of a hotel overlooking the Dalai Lama’s Namgyal Monastery and temple. This sprawling complex of white buildings wraps itself around a knoll at the lower end of McLeod Ganj, the old British Hill town perched some thousand feet above Dharamsala. You reach the ridge by twisting up a single-lane road that mysteriously serves as two lanes for cars, buses, bikes, lorries, and scores of people walking. The settlement lies in an earthquake zone and was leveled by quakes sometime before the Tibetans arrived. When the Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959, Nehru gave him the ridge, which sits in front of one of those Himalayan mountain ramparts that drop from the sky like shower curtains. The land is leased to the Tibetans for 99 years, and the time is half up. Tibetans are still pouring daily into India. They escape the Chinese occupation of their homeland by hiking across trackless snow passes (often in Chinese-made tennis shoes), evading soldiers and extortionist border guards, and negotiating the tricky Nepali and Indian travel-permit system. They are issued papers in Nepal, assuming they make it that far, and are sent to Delhi, which directs them to one of the Tibetan communities in India. For those who arrive in McLeod Ganj’s narrow streets, their next-to-last stop is the Tibetan Reception Center, a modest pile of concrete with no sign, across from the post office. Andy and I climb a set of blackish concrete steps to the office of the director, who says his name is Dorjee. He gives us numbers: most Tibetans coming over the passes are teenagers or young men, but a few are ten years old or younger, and some are sixty or seventy. Women find the trek hard. Babies often make it over in the arms of someone other than their parents, who stay behind so their families won’t be harassed or tortured. Dorje leads us up more dark stairs to the roof, where a Tibetan refugee and a Western volunteer have been teaching an art class for children. He points to a bulletin board tacked with drawings. One poster-sized sheet resembles an old map of the known world, with white snow mountains ringed by sawtooth blue borders. A line of black figures crawls toward a pass. Green figures fire rows of dots and a black figure falls. Around a red stupa are tents and a cluster of red figures, one holding a red blob that Dorjee says is a video camera. Before we left home, the news of a Chinese army assault on Tibetan refugees at Nagpa Pass made the New York Times and the international news agencies. According to the Chinese government, the Tibetans attacked the soldiers, but that version was challenged by the Romanian climbing team who captured the event on video. The Romanians wore Western expedition clothes in bright colors like red and orange; the Chinese were in green uniforms. Dorjee says that two Tibetans, a nun and a twenty-three-year-old, were shot. Thirty-three Tibetans were arrested and forty-two escaped. He points to a black square that he says is a cook tent. Curled up inside is a small black figure: a boy who survived the massacre and who made this drawing in the reception center art class. Dorjee, whose face is set in a seemingly immovable sadness, reminds us that the only open border out of China is the one in Nepal. Tiny Sikkim has already been gobbled up by the Indians, who keep a strict border. Fragile Bhutan, justifiably terrified of the Chinese, will not accept Tibetans (although earlier waves of Tibetan monks and lamas have filled Bhutanese monasteries for years now). The Chinese lately have been pressuring Nepal to close the Tibet office and reception center in Kathmandu, says Dorjee. I recall the long, ruinous Maoist insurgency in Nepal, its recent “accommodation” with the government, and I suddenly see the possibility of a closed Nepalese border and Tibetans with nowhere to run. Being here makes the dharma lessons seem even more urgent. The Tibetans carry with them a thousand years of intensive Buddhist practice. Now it’s being applied to a distressingly difficult set of choices. I ask myself, what if my enemies were implacable and their weapons beyond my resources? If I were tricked, betrayed, surprised, and hurt, forced into a permanent alarm and alert? Enticed by rage and grief? Demoralized and exhausted? How would I fight back? Would I fight back? What does “fight” mean? Is this only a Tibetan problem? Or could Americans, obsessed with the harm brought on us by 9/11, have something to learn here too? The Tibetans have straggled in, sick and traumatized, in small groups, over the last half century. When they arrived, they had two choices: either fall apart altogether or devise an organized social welfare system intent on ensuring their continued existence as a culture and a people. In 1960, still recovering from his dangerous escape, the Dalai Lama asked his sister Jetsun Pema to begin a school for traumatized refugee children. The boy who survived the assault at Nagpa Pass, for instance, might be sent from the Refugee Center to one of the schools of the Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV). At the upper school, where orphaned grade schoolers are educated, giggling youngsters throw themselves into our arms and scream with delight as we twirl them. A chorus of warbling song emerges from a concrete-block meeting hall. We ask a young woman in attendance what she is doing there, and she tells us that she is a TCV graduate who got an education degree so she could come back here and help. Most of the children, she says, are sponsored by Western donors. At the lower school, a boarding school for Tibetan children whose parents can afford the modest tuition, we are shown classrooms where students lean over old wooden desks, like those in American schools a century ago, and copy equations and geometry lessons from blackboards. I am startled to hear a burst of perfect British English from a tall Tibetan teacher. I’m told that he actually speaks no Tibetan. Born in Britain, he came to TCV as a volunteer to teach students English drama. He and several students are busy rehearsing a production of Romeo and Juliet. In the library, which doubles as a computer center, Dhargyal La, the librarian, shows us racks of Penguin Readers, English texts so heavily used they are flaking apart like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Overwhelmed, we offer to find replacements. The impulse to help is powerful. In the adult school, the director has such a stalwart military bearing that we ask his history. He explains that he was one of the CIA-trained operatives dropped into Tibet after the Chinese invasion. He looks as though he would have no trouble handling the demands of teenage and adult refugees, for many of whom school is a strange new universe. Somewhere along the line, TCV makes assessments of the refugees and their capabilities. Unschooled teenagers or young adults coming directly from Tibet may do best in vocational training. Others will get a basic education and choose to go back over the mountains to live in Tibet near their families. Those who are sufficiently motivated receive assistance to go on to higher education. Tibetans are hoping to found their own university in southern India (and are looking for donors), but for now they send talented Tibetan children to Indian colleges, often with the help of yet more sponsors. Refugees who are too old or too inflexible for academic challenges are given a tiny plot of land or cash to start a small business. I look anew at the stalls that line Temple Road, run (usually) by older Tibetan women selling handmade jewelry and shawls made in a local cooperative. I can only begin to imagine how these not-so-nimble elders got here. It occurs to me that the suffering of the Tibetans is both a challenge and a teaching, which holds up a question about compassionate action. I remember the posters I saw, tacked to walls and trees in the courtyard of one of the TCV schools, quoting the Dalai Lama: “Never give up, no matter what,” said one. Although the Dalai Lama is both guide and inspiration, the Tibetans have been obliged to govern themselves within the immense complexity of the Indian bureaucracy. The government in exile has made a decision not to ask for Indian citizenship, which would allow Tibetans to drive cars and participate in other ways in Indian social systems. Indian citizenship might suggest to Tibetans still at home that Tibetans in India have given up hope of returning. Instead, Tibetans—wherever they live around the world—pay taxes to the Tibetan Secretariat and participate in elections for the government in exile. In the meantime, the schools, the monasteries and nunneries, the study centers (which give Geshe degrees, the Tibetan monastic equivalent...

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