By ANGIE CHUANG
Tsering Lhamo, half of the husband-wife team that runs Tibet Kitchen in Northwest Portland, practices traditional Tibetan healing. She says the food you eat every day is the most important medicine.
Her husband, Jigme Topgyal, hopes the steaming plates of noodles and dumplings will serve as ambassadors for his beleaguered homeland. A prominent activist in Portland’s tiny Tibetan community, Topgyal co-founded the Northwest Tibetan Cultural Association and was instrumental in bringing the Dalai Lama to Portland in 2001. But he’s new to the restaurant business.
“To be honest, I opened the restaurant for my own survival,” said Topgyal, 55, who worked in the timber industry after arriving in the United States in 1969. His most recent job, in Washington state, was eliminated last year.
“But the restaurant does serve the purpose of allowing people to experience the culture. People ask a lot of questions. I talk a lot.”
Topgyal says he’s careful not to insert overt politics into his restaurant, at Northwest 21st Avenue and Couch Street, but the unusual food, the photos of Tibet hanging on the walls and the traditional music playing on the sound system often prompt customers to strike up conversations.
Another Tibetan restaurant, Lungta, at Northeast Sandy Boulevard and 46th Avenue, opened last year as well.
There are about 300 Tibetans in Oregon and Southwest Washington, Topgyal said, dispersed through Portland, Vancouver, Beaverton and even Astoria. Most, like him, left Tibet to escape imprisonment, execution and discrimination imposed by Chinese occupation, he said.
Sent to India at age 12 by the Tibetan monastery where he was educated, Topgyal fled without his family. His mother was imprisoned by Chinese authorities in a labor camp for 17 years for opposing the occupation, he said. While living in a refugee camp in India, he got a visa to work in Maine’s logging industry — the first of a series of timber jobs that eventually brought him to the Portland area.
He’s quick to point out his story is not unique. Most Tibetans in the United States have family who were imprisoned or executed. That’s why the community is eager to educate others about the human cost of the Chinese occupation.
Earlier this month, Topgyal helped organize a midday protest marking the 45th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising, which started March 10, 1959. A few dozen community members waved signs and distributed information in Pioneer Courthouse Square, but Topgyal missed his own protest because he was tending to the lunch crowd at his restaurant.
Chances are, he was probably telling a curious customer that the original boundaries of Tibet encompassed an area twice the size of Alaska, and that the country sits 12,000 miles above sea level. He may have talked about his first trip back since boyhood, in 1982, when he was saddened to see thousands of monasteries destroyed and the scarred face of his mother, who had been beaten in the labor camp.
“I couldn’t express how it felt to be home again,” he said.
Topgyal said he’s found a welcoming second home in Portland, and hopes his venture into the restaurant industry proves successful. He invested much of his retirement savings into the business.
“It’s a huge risk,” he said. “I wanted to bring a unique culture to Portlanders.”
Angie Chuang: 503-221-8219; angiechuang@news.oregonian.com.
