Wayne W. Huang

A young Tibetan student prays before the beginning of each class.

Downtown Los Angeles, March 10^th, 2009: “What do we want?” asks a rally leader on a megaphone, “Justice!” responds the marchers.

“When do we want it?”

“Now!”

These are the voices of Southern California’s Tibetans in exile.

Their chants are still loud and in uniform, their vibrant Tibetan flags still wave with vigor after the two-hour march from City Hall to the Consulate General of China.

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the 1959 uprising in Tibet against their Chinese occupiers. Tibetans worldwide rally each year to commemorate this day and remember the 89,000 Tibetans who died fighting for their country.

But they also rally to remind the world what’s going in Tibet today.

This year is especially significant to them because a year ago on the same day, a demonstration in Tibet was brutally put down by Chinese authorities resulting in 218 Tibetan deaths and the disappearance or imprisonment of hundreds.

It was the most violent confrontation between Tibetans and Chinese authorities in recent history. In the aftermath, China imposed a military lockdown anywhere there are Tibetans and all foreign journalists were expulsed.

Tibetan monks in front of the General Consulate of China in Los Angeles

According to a Human Rights Watch report on media access in Tibet, foreign journalists, even after the Olympics took place, are still facing difficulty accessing “forbidden zones”—geographical areas and topics which the Chinese government considers “sensitive.”

Ground reports and images of the violent crackdown on demonstrators have had particular resonance with young Tibetans in exile.

“Many of the demonstrators were not much older than me” says a young Tibetan marcher born in Dharamsala, who took the day off work to attend the rally.

He and a small group of other young Tibetan men and women carry banners and posters and wear their national flag with pride. “We are here to show solidarity and support for [Tibetans in Tibet] during this difficult time,” he says.

He has a younger sister who is in high school and could not come to the rally. He says she was born in the United States shortly after his parents gained asylum status and were able to stay permanently in the country.

“My sister cares about what’s going on, but she is graduating this year and is so preoccupied with what college she will go to,” he adds.

His sister represents another challenge Tibetans in exile are facing today—that is, ensuring the first generation outside of Dharamsala have a sense of Tibetan culture and ethnic identity in an environment where the youth are so easily absorbed by mainstream American culture.

Knowing your mother tongue is a vital part of this identity, according to Dr. Nawang Phuntsog, assistant professor of bilingual education at California State University, Fullerton.

“Language and culture are so closely intertwined, one would not exist without the other,” says Phuntsog, who was just a toddler when his parents—barley and wheat farmers in the village of Kangmar— were forced to flee Tibet to India.

He returned to Tibet in his adult life to find the state of his native language critically endangered.

“When I spoke with young Tibetans in Tibet, they could hardly count in Tibetan. They had to first recite the numbers in Chinese,” says Phuntsog.

In Tibet, all students are required to pass a Chinese language proficiency exam and admission to higher education is heavily based on a student’s performance on the exam. Tibetan language plays no part in the education system in Tibet.

“As a result,” says Phuntsog, “they’re forgetting their own language, which will lead to the degeneration of the culture as well.”

At 2 P.M. every Sunday, Tibetan mothers and their children congregate in a multipurpose room at the Culver City Veterans Memorial Hall. On the door is a sheet of paper taped to a small window that says: TIBETAN LANGUAGE CLASS 2-4 PM.

The children, some as young as 5, trot into the room toting backpacks, while others carry notebooks and folders. Most of these children were born in the United States and at least three out of the thirteen are mixed-race—half Tibetan, half Caucasian.

Yeshi Farber, math instructor, teaches counting in the Tibetan language

When they are seated and settled, Lobsang Dolma, 42, leads a Buddhist mantra that goes: Om ah prajna dhrika ha hum. With palms together, heads bowed, and eyes closed, the children listen and repeat after Dolma in a collective monotonic chant.

Soft-spoken and with a motherly demeanor, Dolma instructs the children in Buddhist chanting and prayer at the beginning of each class with the goal of instilling a sense of Buddhist spirituality—a central aspect of Tibetan culture and identity.

If it wasn’t for the chupa (CHOO-pah), a traditional Tibetan dress Dolma wears and a woven hanging of the Buddha she puts up every Sunday, there would be little evidence on the surface that this is a gathering of Tibetans. The children and the other teachers are all dressed in Western clothing.

“I wear the dress because I want the children to know who we are,” says Dolma.

In her previous life, she was a teacher at the Tibetan Children’s Village in Northern India for 15 years where she not only taught Tibetan, but also math and science.

These days, her focus is squarely on teaching Tibetan language. She is one of the few, if not, the only qualified Tibetan language teacher among the estimated 300 Tibetans living in Southern California.

What is different in the classroom now, besides the setting, is the reliance of the children on English to help them understand what she teaches. “Sometimes they don’t understand something, but it’s hard for me to explain because my English is not so good,” says Dolma.

Teaching Tibetan culture, history, and geography is left to Dorje Lhamo. Lhamo, 34 and married to a Caucasian-American, exerts a youthfulness that the children respond well to. She wears fashionable sunglasses on her head to keep her hair back and is adorned with traditional Tibetan jewelry.

During the last half hour of class, she gathers the children, including her own mixed-race son, around a table for a verbal discussion of the three provinces—U-Tsang, Kham and Amdo—that make up historic Tibet and the distinct cultures of each.

“Amdowa are known for their horse riding skills,” says Lhamo of the native inhabitants of Amdo.

She begins to sing a verse from a traditional Tibetan folk song and the children repeat: Chamdo ma cha Amdo cha, Chamdo Chuni parla Chayu. Amdo ma cha Amdo cha, Amdo tsetan deilang Chayu.

“If you know this song, then you’ll know Tibetan geography,” says Lhamo, referring to a Tibet before the Chinese invasion.

For a moment, she touches on politics. “You know Amdo is in the Northeast of Tibet. Right now it’s mostly under China and we are asking for autonomy,” she tells the children.

One student asks what autonomy means and she tries to explain in Tibetan the best she can, this complex issue. She mentions the Dalai Lama several times and in English, “self-governing.”

Throughout the afternoon, Yeshi Farber, the math teacher, passes out kasai, fried twisted dough sticks, and cups of yak butter tea to the children to, as she says, “cheer them up.”

The Tibetan Association of Southern California (TASC), which founded the school in 2004 and helps to organize community events throughout the year, do what they can to try to engage and educate young Tibetans, but their influence is limited.

“The older kids, they don’t like to come. They feel uncomfortable being in a room with younger kids especially if their Tibetan is at the same level as them,” says Farber. Instead, at the nearby Veterans Park, older Tibetan youths play basketball, while others relax in the shade.

Often times Sunday classes are canceled or attendance is low. Yangchen Dolkar, a volunteer teacher who keeps track of attendance, says it is because many Tibetan families live too far away or the parents have to work on the weekend. “Some live more than an hour away,” says Dolkar.

Because the classes are only once a week, the teachers rely heavily on the parents to do their part by helping their children with their homework and speaking to them in Tibetan, but they admit there’s only so much they can do.

A children's workbook on basic Tibetan

“Tibetan parents try their best to speak Tibetan at home, but [the children] are so much more comfortable speaking English. It’s a battle,” says Pema Choden, current president of the Tibetan Association of Southern California.

Choden points out that large ethnic enclaves, such as the Chinese and Armenian communities in California have been able to establish full-time schools within the state education system. “They’re able to practice their language at home and at school,” notes Choden.

She says the Tibetan community in Southern California is not big enough and not well-established enough within the education system to achieve full-time schools.

The community is disadvantaged in that respect, but as a whole, Tibetans in exile are not unlike any other immigrant groups who have acculturated or are in the process of acculturating to the American way of life, while simultaneously trying to maintain their cultural and ethnic identity.

But there is a sense of urgency in that maintenance when it comes to passing it onto the next generation. It is a consequence of the dire situation in Tibet. According to Buddhist scholar and Tibet activist, Robert Thurman, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Tibet is an endangered culture.

Despite the scattering and small number of Tibetans throughout Southern California, the TASC has made progress in strides, as they always have since its’ establishment in 1993.

According to the Government of Tibet in Exile statistics, there are an estimated 7000 Tibetan exiles in the United States and Canada. Organizations that represent them, like TASC, are a tight-knit network.

Last April, the Office of Tibet in New York organized a 2-day conference in Minnesota where teachers representing Tibetan organizations nationwide convened to discuss the establishment of a primary education system and a standardized curriculum. A second meeting is expected soon.

Dolkar and Dolma both attended and sees this as a first step in addressing the differing fluency levels of the students. Secondly, it would also ensure that if a student were to move somewhere else, they would be able to enroll in their local Tibetan school and continue on with their education using the same material.

“This is one of the things His Holiness wishes for Tibetans,” says Choden, “setting high goals and making sure all our children get the best education possible.”