Tibetan Refugees Discover the Spirit of Thanksgiving

It is a tale to tell the children sitting around the table after a festive dinner: How the pilgrims suffered political and religious persecution and decided to flee their homeland.

How their journey proved long and perilous. How they arrived both fearful and hopeful in a new country and had to rely on the natives for their survival.

And finally, how they came to celebrate their newfound home with a feast of thanksgiving. It is an old story given new life in people like Wangchuk, 40, and Lhandop, 29, Tibetan refugees who are observing this Thanksgiving as modern-day pilgrims, grateful to have arrived in the safe harbor of America and eager to mark this holiday in ways traditional to their new and old homelands.

The men represent two waves of the Tibetan diaspora. There are people like Wangchuk and his family, who fled with the Dalai Lama in 1959 in the wake of the Chinese invasion 10 years earlier, and recent refugees like Lhandop, who are still putting their lives at risk in their flight from the Communist regime.

Although Wangchuk immigrated to the United States in 1993, his wife and four children were not able to join him until last year, arriving, coincidentally, just three days before Thanksgiving. The family was too harried to celebrate then, so today is a special occasion.

“I am most thankful I will be able to reunion with my family and we’ll be able to celebrate surrounded by friends,” said Wangchuk, who like many Tibetans uses only one name.

They are planning a traditional American feast. Wangchuk once worked as a housekeeper and learned to make all of the staples--turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, pumpkin pie, coleslaw--and will add the Tibetan dish momos--a dumpling made of meat or vegetables.

Lhandop already had a turkey dinner at an employee party this week. At his home he will prepare a more traditional Tibetan menu that will feature lamb dishes. The day will be no less special for him, though. He arrived in the United States three years ago. It will be the first Thanksgiving he will celebrate with his friend, Leeja, who arrived just six months ago seeking political asylum.

The two had fled Tibet together, escaping on foot over the Himalayas during the treacherous winter season.

Lhandop’s accommodation to American tastes will be beer “and lots of singing and dancing. Most of my friends are single,” he said with a grin.

Wangchuk and Lhandop met at the Lantana/Hines Center, a Santa Monica film production facility where they work as gardeners. The two sat down Wednesday and compared notes on their shared and differing experiences and their mutual appreciation for their adopted country.

There are about 90 Tibetan families scattered throughout Southern California, about 200 people altogether, said Martin Wassell, a film producer and board member of Los Angeles Friends of Tibet. The community, however, is very close knit, bonded by a love of their geographically spectacular homeland and a reverence for their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

Wangchuk fled Tibet with his family as a 2-year-old in 1962, settling in a sprawling Indian refugee camp at Bylakuppe. The family and the other refugees were literally set down in a jungle, serenaded at night by the trumpeting of elephants and stalked by tigers on the perimeters of the fences they quickly erected.

He worked as a dairy farmer for many years until he entered a 1993 lottery designed by the U.S government to allow entry to a limited number of refugees. One price of his freedom was being separated from his wife and family for several years.

Together again, his two sons and two daughters are in school and quickly adapting to American ways. His wife, Tenzin Wangmo, a teacher while in India, is studying to obtain a teaching credential here.

On Tibetan holidays, families dress up in their finest for a group portrait, and Wangchuk said his family will continue that tradition today.

“We will be able to send the picture back to our relatives in India and they can see that we are observing the old and the new,” he said.

Lhandop’s memories of his flight to freedom are still vivid. He had enjoyed a fairly normal life in Tibet until his studies of Tibetan history and the fate of the Dalai Lama prompted him to seek a democratic home.

He and Leeja set out in November 1993. It was winter, but they were less likely to run into Chinese and Nepalese security patrols.

They had not counted on the hardships they would endure. They ran out of money after 10 days and began selling their clothes for food and water.

They slept on any bare rock they could find and endured aching and swollen limbs and frostbite. Their eyes became so swollen from snow they were almost blind.

When he started working at Lantana, he knew nothing of Thanksgiving until his friend Maggi Kelley explained about the newly arrived Europeans and their friendship with the Native Americans.

Lhandop says that he now feels a special responsibility to explain the holiday to Leeja.

“For me I feel like the Europeans. The Americans have been good to me,” he said.