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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
An American photographer who brought three children out of Tibet talks about how the country's legendary spiritual tradition is vanishing.
Feb 4, 2002 | By now, the oppression of the Tibetan people, their culture and their religion by the Chinese government is a proven and accepted fact. Since 1950, when the Chinese invaded sovereign Tibet, the circumstances of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people have been chronicled in print and film many times over, as have the destruction of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, priceless art and the livelihoods of many more thousands who have had to flee that country.
One aspect of the situation that has been less chronicled is the migration of thousands of Tibetan children every year, very often without their parents, over the Himalayan Mountains to Nepal and India. Usually they go in groups, led by mercenary Tibetan guides who are paid for their efforts by the families of these children, who wish better lives for them than can be found in Tibet. Many thousands of children have reached the Dalai Lama's Tibetan capital-in-exile in Dharamsala, India. Some have not. The routes are dangerous and on occasion deadly, simply by virtue of the weather and terrain. The children can attempt escape by less arduous routes as well, although these routes are frequented by Chinese police and army, Nepalese bandits and other brigands who may attack, imprison or rob the children.
New York photographer Nancy Jo Johnson helped three young Tibetans leave the country in 1996. Her harrowing effort was chronicled the following year in a LIFE magazine article, accompanied by her photographs. She first encountered Tibetan refugees in the early 1980s while living in Katmandu, Nepal, and has been involved in the Tibetan issue ever since. She is a member of the board of directors of the United States Tibet Committee.
Johnson has been working to raise awareness about Tibetans through her photography for over 15 years. A recent exhibit of her work, "Tibet: Survival of the Spirit," held at the Canon Rotunda of the U.S. House of Representatives, was sponsored by Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., and former Rep. John Edward Porter, R-Ill., co-chairman and honorary co-chairman, respectively, of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. It commemorated the 40th anniversary of the Dalai Lama's March 1959 flight to exile in India. In a recent conversation, Johnson talked with Salon about Tibet past and present.
The story of the children that you brought out of Tibet is a kind of mini-novel in the Graham Greene mold, of a Westerner risking her life for three Tibetan children who, until shortly before the story begins, she had not even known. This was an extraordinarily dangerous thing to do. Where are the children now?
There are three of them: Tsering Norden, a boy, who is 9; Lhakpa Dolma, a girl who is 13; and Tsering Dorje, another boy who's now 17. They're living in northern India at one of the Dalai Lama's compounds that is called a Tibetan Children's Village. There are many of these villages, and they'll contain schools, medical facilities and so on. So the children are getting an education in Tibetan, English and Hindi. The purpose of these villages is to ensure that the children maintain their Tibetan identity. The environment is entirely Tibetan, or as much so as possible without actually being in Tibet itself.
I plan to sponsor the higher-education studies of the children I brought out here in the U.S.
Does the Tibet -- or more specifically, the capital city Lhasa -- that existed in 1950, or even as recently as 10 years ago, still exist?
The fact is that the cultural and religious landscape of Tibet has lost its traditional basis, by now almost entirely. But there are many people who continue to believe that their children will be able to better maintain themselves as Tibetans elsewhere -- in India or elsewhere. They worry that, if their children stay in Tibet, they will not have even the opportunity to know their Tibetan identity.
But this wish for escape is not universal among Tibetans?
No, not any longer.
What's happened to change that?
It's important to know that, from the 1950 Chinese invasion up to about 1989, 90 percent of the Chinese presence in Tibet was military personnel. Before 1989, the uprooting of the Tibetan culture had not really happened in the way that it has happened since 1989. So when I went there the first time in 1987 and observed the military occupation, the place still felt like Tibet in every way that we think about it: historically, culturally ... in the way that we've read about it. Even though most of the monasteries were destroyed in the occupation and during the Cultural Revolution, those few that did remain cultivated a religious activity that was more pure in the traditional sense than what is taking place there today.
