By GILLIAN WEE
Tenying Yangsel was born in Tibet, but her country is little more than a state of mind.
Her mother fled to India with 1-month-old Tenying and her brothers, then 2 and 4. Five years ago, she left her children with her sister in Nepal to come to New York City to work as a nanny.
Tenying, now 16, and one of her brothers were reunited with their mother in her one-room apartment in Sunnyside in January 2003, joining a wave of young Tibetans in exile in America from a country they have never known except in videotapes and stories told by relatives.
Still, Tenying and many other Tibetan youths have become involved in the movement to return Tibet to independence after decades under Chinese rule.
Tenying gets high grades at the Newcomers School in Long Island City and is the top student at the Tibetan Sunday school in Manhattan, which has become something of an anchor for many of the 3,000 Tibetans living in the area, most of them in Queens.
But what really makes her happy, she said, is her involvement as a volunteer for Students for a Free Tibet – an activity she said she could never have imagined had she stayed in India.
“I have to study hard so I can help my country,” said Tenying. “I want to make my country a nicer and more comfortable place. People living in Tibet are hoping we can do something. We can make a difference.”
In 1950, China quickly conquered the isolated mountain nation of 6 million. Human rights groups have estimated that the Chinese killed 1.2 million Tibetans.
The U.S. is home to 10,000 expatriate Tibetans, the most anywhere outside of India, where 100,000 Tibetans live in exile. There are thriving communities of Tibetans in Boston and Washington, but the New York metropolitan area has the most, said Karma Khedup, president of the Tibetan Community of New York and New Jersey.
Just 15 years ago, there were only 150 Tibetans in and around the city, Khedup said, but numbers grew rapidly after 1990, when Congress approved a resettlement plan that brought 1,000 Tibetans from India and Nepal.
As in the Yangsel family’s case, parents often come first, to earn enough money to bring their families over. Most women work as baby-sitters and housekeepers, while the men – often hampered by a lack of education or English fluency – take low-paying jobs in warehouses, construction and restaurants.
When she’s not studying, Tenying practices with her high school dance club and attends meetings for student government. She works at a sushi restaurant twice a week, using her earnings to help her mother pay the bills.
But her favorite day is Sunday, when she meets her Tibetan friends at the Battery Park office of the New York Association for New Americans. There they study the Tibetan language and learn about their culture through traditional Tibetan dance.
On a recent Sunday, Tenying and her friends led a prayer and sang the Tibetan national anthem. They gathered in the foyer over a quick lunch of potatoes and curry before rehearsing a dance, stamping their feet and waving their arms to traditional Tibetan music.
Even though the teens wore low-rider jeans, sneakers and puffy jackets, they said these cultural classes help them preserve their identity – one of the biggest challenges facing the displaced Tibetan community, according to the community’s elders.
“Our biggest challenge is the children,” said Pema Dorjee, a monk who started the school with seven children in 1996. “They are turning into Westerners. Western ideas are not bad, but they are losing real culture and heritage.”
But many Tibetan-American children say that despite their clothes or wearing blue contact lenses and bleaching their hair, they are passionate about preserving their roots as much as they can.
“Everybody else has seen their country,” Tenying said. “I am from Tibet, and I haven’t been there. I have to be there, I want to be called a citizen and to be known to my country, and not to be a refugee.”
