By Topden Tsering
In the shadow of a former office building on Huntington Avenue in Richmond, CA, a group of teenage Tibetan girls belt out a song seemingly incongruous with their Hip Hop appearances. It is the same song that once their grandparents might have sung in some small village in Tibet before Chinese troops occupied the country in 1959. Wearing loose shirts, black leggings and bright sneakers, a few of them sporting sunglasses and caps, they stand in a semi-circle around their music teacher and try to get their vocal modulations right. Reading off from the lyrics typed up in English, they concentrate on their Tibetan diction.
Farther away, several boys, aged between six and eleven years old, practice an ancient and complicated dance performance called “Tashi Sholpa”. The routine, full of energetic foot stomping and acrobatic moves, is usually staged ahead of a performance line-up and is meant to invoke Buddhist deities for blessings upon the stage. The costumes comprise of white-bearded masks, embroidered shoulder capes and colorful cloth-wrapped wands.
These young Tibetans are preparing to welcome their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, who is scheduled to give a public talk, “How to Achieve Happiness,” in Berkeley on February 23. Their performances will take place after the teaching.
The three-story building is the Tibetan community center. It is here the local Tibetans return, during routine events and on special occasions, to reconnect with their roots. Among the many programs the center provides are Tibetan language classes for the children, instructions in traditional music and dance, teachings on Tibetan Buddhism, and seminars on healthcare and immigration issues. For both the older Tibetans, originating from India and Nepal where they lived as refugees, and for the younger lot, many of them born here, this center is their home away from home – their own little Tibet.
“When I first came to the U.S. in 1970s, there were fewer than 15 Tibetans in the whole of Bay Area. We were spread out and were able to meet only during the occasional protests for a Free Tibet,” says Jigme Raptentsetsang, a senior committee member for the community center. “As the number grew over time, we felt it was imperative that we had a community center of our own.”
The Bay Area community now stands at over 2,000-strong.
Tibetan Association of Northern California (TANC), a non-profit organization, purchased the building in 2011. For more than 20 years since the founding of TANC in 1990, the group had been trying to buy a property to turn into a community center. It was only during the recent housing market recession that the purchase finally became possible.
When the Richmond Annex property was acquired, the local Tibetans took it upon themselves to raise fund for the down payment and initial mortgages. They held fundraiser dinners, made momo (Tibetan meat and vegetable dumplings) for sale during festivals like the Himalayan Fair in Berkeley, and organized numerous entertainment events. They generously contributed from their own incomes and reached out for donations from individual supporters and organizations. While they jubilated over a meeting place of their own, they knew much work lay ahead.
Today the center is a site for a major renovation work, a part of a multiple construction-phased architectural master plan. Architect Barbara Brown is providing pro bono services for the TANC and is leading a team of design professionals including architects, engineers and contractors. The current project marks the third and most critical phase. Besides turning the main level into an enlarged assembly hall, it will satisfy requirements for numerous Building Code upgrades. These include energy-efficient lighting and heating systems, four new handicap restrooms, a new commercial elevator and fire sprinklers throughout the building. Various exterior and interior components will feature traditional motifs and the courtyard will be turned into a landscaped garden in an effort to create a Peace Plaza. A Buddhist stupa will be erected in the middle.
“For now the focus is to complete the assembly hall and some basic job on the exterior to make it ready for consecration by His Holiness the Dalai Lama,” says Kunjo Tashi, President of TANC. “As you can see, it is bit of a race against time.”
A conundrum of demolition noise pervades the inside of the building’s first storey. Six or seven Tibetan volunteers, many of them construction workers by profession, are tearing down the partition walls to increase occupancy for the assembly hall. Another group is taking off the wiring system. Yet another is pulling off the old linoleum tiles to make way for hardwood flooring. A boom box in a corner blares a modern Tibetan pop song, its sound competing with the banging of the tools.
Outside, 35-year-old Tsemgon and his apprentice churn out square-shaped wooden blocks to adorn a door they just finished installing on a side structure. The oversize metal shutters for the former storage space had been mangled at many places and had caused occasions for trespassing by the homeless. For the last several days, the Tibetan general contractor and his assistant have been working on erecting walls on the two sides before putting in the door. The blocks mimic design popular on Tibetan monasteries.
Tsemgon left Tibet when he was a teenager to join his father who had emigrated to the U.S. in the early 1990s. Most of the older generation Tibetans fled their country to escape persecution after China’s occupation of Tibet forced their leader, the Dalai Lama, into exile. Many others were born in refugee communities in India and Nepal, not having seen their country.
Carrying a look of close scrutiny on his face and watching the carpentry goings-on is Ngodup, famously known for his association with Yak Band in Dharamsala, India. A general contractor and painter by profession, Ngodup has suspended his livelihood since four months ago to devote fulltime as a supervisor for the renovation project. While volunteers drop by every weekend or whenever they are free to help with whatever tasks are in progress, there are at least four or five other Tibetans like him who work around the clock on the site.
Arrayed in a row, taking cue from drumbeats, the boy dancers stomp their feet, shake their heads, and with their hands draw elaborate shapes. A more difficult act involves full-bodied horizontal twirling in the air. One of them warms up for the jump, then lunges into a twirl, repeated over four or five times, before coming to a jerky stop. The instructor approves but reminds him to keep his hands fully extended. The second boy, Menlha,12, takes off and executes the rounds, his movements more assertive, and, as he comes to a halt, he almost falls face down.
“I will do it better on the stage. I have to practice more at home,” Tashi says. “The ground here is not even and has cracks all over.”
Nearby, the girls embark on another round of practice. Broken up into smaller groups, three of them share between them the lyrics page on which the Tibetan folk song is phonetically rendered in English. Their voices come off lilting, the words authentic and exact, sounding less practiced and more a staple for their everyday conversation.
“In school everybody speaks in English. So at home I get in trouble from my parents for not speaking in Tibetan,” says 12-year-old Tenzin Choenyi. “I really like coming here because I can learn to speak in Tibetan better and hopefully one day read and write in the language as well as I do in English.”
“Our dream is to see this community center become a thriving hub for Tibetan culture and tradition. We want this place to be not just structurally sound and functionally efficient but also aesthetically appealing. Ours is an inspiring culture and it’ll be wonderful for the center to be inspiring as well,” says Kunjo Tashi.
Topden Tsering is a writer based in Richmond in California. A marketing manager for an architecture firm by profession, he devotes his spare time to filmmaking and writing. His short documentary, “Home for Hope,” will be screened prior to the Dalai Lama’s public talk in Berkeley.
