taigu "Henry H. Tan-Tenn"

taigu "Henry H. Tan-Tenn" 


Tibetans Struggle to Preserve Culture, at Home and Abroad

By SUSAN SACHS

Class begins with a Buddhist prayer for the world and ends with a
song for Tibet. In between, Pema Dorjee, a diminutive monk in a
sleeveless orange robe, darts among his students as they struggle
with the characters of the Tibetan alphabet.

None of the 15 or so Tibetan children who come to his Sunday
language course in Manhattan have ever seen Tibet, the isolated
mountain nation that China invaded in 1950 and forcibly absorbed.
Nor have many of their parents, exiles who were born and raised in
refugee settlements in India or Nepal.

But Tibet is what ?at least so far ?holds them together as a
group.

"The children are our hope to preserve our culture," said Mr.
Dorjee, a store clerk on weekdays. "They can keep Tibet alive."

It is an uphill struggle.

As for other immigrants at other
times, young Tibetans face multiple distractions and temptations in
their new American lives. Maintaining the culture of home ?and in
the case of these Tibetan-Americans, a home twice removed ?
competes with the natural inclination to concentrate on managing a
new culture.

But for Tibetans, the traditional tug of war is complicated by a
real ambivalence on the part of their leadership toward their
growing presence in the United States. In their political lobbying
and fund-raising in the West, Tibetan exiles have argued for
decades that Tibetan culture will die if Tibetans scatter across
the globe.

"We have mixed feelings within ourselves," said Rinchen Dharlo,
president of the Tibet Fund, an organization in New York that
sponsors the language classes and raises money for the Indian and
Nepalese resettlement camps.

"I don't really worry here in the States, at least for this
generation," he said. "It will all depend on whether our community
stays together, as it does today, in clusters. If so, we will be
able to keep our culture."

In just a decade, the number of Tibetan exiles in this country has
increased more than tenfold. It is still a tiny group ?barely
9,000 people in all, scattered over 30 cities ?with the largest
concentration of about 2,000 people in New York City. Another 2,000
Tibetan exiles are believed to live in Canada, Mr. Dharlo said.

Nearly invisible in the city's expanding and ever more diverse
immigrant population, many of the Tibetans who are now living here
came on visitors' visas and stayed. And like the city's other
illegal immigrants, they have had to find jobs on the bottom tiers
of the economy. Many Tibetan women work as nannies. Many men find
jobs as store clerks or on construction sites.

Until the early 1990's, however, Tibetan exiles numbered in the
few hundreds in North America, where they actively promoted their
cause of freeing Tibet from Chinese rule. Then Congress presented
the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetans, with the
opportunity to legally resettle 1,000 people in the United States.

The offer caused consternation.

"Many of our American friends
said, `It's not good to bring too many Tibetans to the States,
because this country is a melting pot,' " Mr. Dharlo said.

But the Tibetan leadership eventually decided that the mythical
melting pot was not what it might seem and that many immigrants, if
they stay close together, succeed in preserving their language and,
to some degree, their culture.

In any case, they concluded, the political advantages outweighed
the risks of assimilation.

"We thought that if we bring 1,000 Tibetans, they will be
ambassadors in this country to make additional friends for Tibet,"
Mr. Dharlo said. "And if we are able to save the culture of six
million Tibetans in Tibet, strengthen the Tibetan struggle and
bring it closer to fruition, then it doesn't matter if these 1,000
Tibetans lose their identity in this country."

To some degree, young Tibetans are playing that ambassadorial
role.

"Nobody really knew anything about Tibet in my school, but I try
to tell them," said Tashi Dorje, who is 15 and learning Tibetan
dance at the Sunday school. "They ask me why Tibetans got kicked
out of our own country. I tell them we are peaceful and we don't
fight."

Still, in their own homes, many Tibetan parents are wrestling with
those very dilemmas that had worried their leaders. They see their
Buddhist faith and their Tibetan language buffeted daily by the
simple fact of living among non-Tibetans.

"Selfishness is very strong in this country," said Chunta Lama,
who came to New York with her husband and young son from India
three years ago. "And it's very materialistic. The moment you see
all these material things, you may lose respect for your own
culture."

Some children, as they become more like their American friends
each day, even question elements of their religion, deeply shocking
parents who could not have imagined debating such things with their
elders.

"They think this is blind faith," said Mrs. Lama, who brings her
son to Sunday school every week and makes sure he practices writing
Tibetan along with his regular homework. "They want to know why, in
this age of computers and science, we believe what we believe."

But learning about Tibetan culture is not only a struggle for the
young.

Tenzin Wangyhl, one of the first refugees to come as part of the
Congressional allotment, teaches traditional dances and songs on
Sundays at the Tibet Fund's headquarters. What he knows, he learned
from listening to old tapes after he arrived in New York in 1993
and from recent visits to Tibetan refugee camps in India.

"Recently, we've had some kids who have just arrived from India,"
Mr. Wangyhl said one recent Sunday, as he watched three teenage
boys practice the Tibetan drum dance outside in the bitter cold.
"They've kept up with it better than I was able to at that age."

As often happens with pioneering immigrants, those first refugees
like Mr. Wangyhl sent for their families, as they were allowed to
do under the law. But their presence inspired friends, distant
relatives and others to come and join them.

Many of those who arrived in the last few years came without valid
documents, believing that the United States would grant them
political asylum. That assumption, for most, has proved to be
wrong.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service considers Tibetans
stateless, but it has opposed most asylum requests from those who
lived for most of their lives in Nepal or India. The agency's
position, supported by immigration judges, is that an applicant
must prove that he or she suffered or fears persecution in the
country of last residence.

Judges generally decide that India and Nepal treat Tibetan exiles
well, lawyers who represent Tibetans say, even if those countries
restrict or refuse to give citizenship to the refugees. Few asylum
applications have been granted.

Canada, on the other hand, grants most asylum requests from
Tibetans. And over the last three years, according to refugee
agencies and Canadian lawyers, nearly 1,000 exiles who had been
living in the New York area crossed the border and claimed asylum
in Canada.

Judges there generally rely on a different test for deciding
whether a Tibetan exile faces persecution in the country of
resettlement. They have repeatedly ruled that a Tibetan who does
not have citizenship in India or Nepal runs the risk of one day
being deported to China, which now controls Tibet.

"If you have no status in a country, you don't have a right to
remain," said Constance Nakatsu, a Toronto lawyer who has
represented many Tibetans seeking asylum in Canada. "And the
Tibetans really don't have a home."











[http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/06/nyregion/06TIBE.html?ex=984881628&ei=1&en=](<http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/06/nyregion/06TIBE.html?ex=984881628&ei=1&en=>)
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