Utahn’s trip to Tibet is first since she was a baby
By Elaine Jarvik
She has championed Tibet, cried about Tibet, marched for Tibet, longed for Tibet. And now, finally, she has been to Tibet.
Pema Chagzoetsang, known in Utah as an ardent advocate for her native land and for the scores of Tibetans who have resettled here, for 45 years has had to rely on other people’s recollections about the country she left behind. She left Tibet as a baby, wrapped in her father’s robes, when her family escaped into India in 1959 to flee Chinese rule. But last month she was finally able to go back.
When the airplane landed in Lhasa, she cried. In fact, she cries just thinking about it and has to get up and get a tissue. “The preciousness of it,” she explains. The sign on the airport in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, now says “Lhasa Airport China.”
“Realizing what a precious, sacred land we have, and we can’t call it ‘Tibet’ ” made her cry, she says. “Realizing what we have and don’t have.”
She thought she might step onto Tibetan soil and do prostrations in its honor. But when she actually got there she thought that might look a little too dramatic. “So you hold your emotions. In your heart you do your prayers.”
“Be grateful,” she told herself. “At least you’re allowed to be on your own land.”
For years, Tibetans who fled Tibet were not allowed back in, and to this day His Holiness the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of Tibet and leader of his country’s government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India, is not allowed to return. Chagzoetsang prayed for the Dalai Lama when she was there, although she kept the prayers to herself. She tried, in fact, to look like a typical American tourist.
In the four decades since the Dalai Lama’s escape, there have been reports of the forced sterilization of Tibetan women, the imprisonment of Tibetan Buddhist nuns, the destruction of thousands of monasteries, and the attempted eradication of the Tibetan culture and language. Today, Chagzoetsang says, China is allowing some of those monasteries to be rebuilt and is trying to preserve some classic Tibetan architecture as tourist sites.
She visited the monastery her father once headed and spoke with an old lama who had known her family before they fled. “It was the second month, the 15th day, of the lunar calendar,” he told her. “You were very little.”
In the photo album of Chagzoetsang’s trip there is a picture of the old lama holding a photo of Chagzoetsang’s young nephew, believed to be the 23rd reincarnation of her father, Gomo Rinpoche. In the photo the old lama is crying.
She was moved, she says, by the poverty of Tibetans, who now are outnumbered by Chinese in the major cities. “If you don’t have Chinese language skills, employment is difficult,” she says. But the Tibetans she met were happy, she says. “We believe in fate. Whatever happens to us is our karma, so we make the best of our circumstances.” Because Tibetan Buddhists have inner peace, she said, “we believe that to live our life is joyful.”
She returned with a bag full of cloth remnants from the robe of Jor-Rinpoche, “the most precious Buddha.” In Tibetan tradition, travelers ask that the robe be removed from the statue of the Buddha and cut into small pieces, which are then believed to offer protection in times of sickness and trouble. Chagzoetsang brought back about 30 yellow brocade remnants, which she plans to distribute to Tibetan families living in Salt Lake City.
She hopes eventually to help street children and the elderly in Tibet. And she plans to return to her new-found country as often as she can. She has always been proud to be a Tibetan, she says. “And now even more so.”
E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com
