By Ellen O'Brien, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

Review: Television

The Philadelphia Inquirer, Tuesday, March 4, 1997

Ngawang Choephel, a 30-year-old Fulbright scholar who fled Tibet as a child, returned in 1995 to record the music of his country before the centuries-old legacy is destroyed by the Communist Chinese.

His plan was to tape all the music he found, all the religious and folk dances, all the songs, from traditional Tibetan life, and then, later, to record anthropological commentaries on them.

Now he's in prison, sentenced to 18 years for spying.

Missing in Tibet, a half-hour documentary about Choephel's tragic quest, will be broadcast on WYBE (Channel 35) at 9:30 p.m. tomorrow. It is compelling television, both for its story and for the beauty and sadness of its images.

The Chinese Communists invaded Tibet in 1949. Since then, they've waged a steady campaign of oppression, driving out Tibet's spiritual ruler, the Dalai Lama; terrorizing Buddhist monks and nuns; and suppressing the culture, language and music of the country. Choephel, not 3 years old when his family fled across the Himalayas to safety, was raised in a refugee camp in India, but grew up on stories of Tibet.

He was 10 before he went to school, but Choephel was immensely talented; by his early 20s he was studying music and dance at a Tibetan institute in India.

Then he won a Fulbright. In 1994 he came to Middlebury College in Vermont, where he spent a year studying, as he said, the ``electronics'' of music. Then he left for Tibet.

The documentary footage includes scenes and music Choephel recorded and sent out of the country before he was picked up by police. Visually, the film calls on glories like those of a National Geographic special: exquisite Tibetan dancing and singing, exotic streets and hauntingly majestic mountains.

But even its loveliest shots are amateurish enough to keep the man who recorded them in the viewer's mind. The purpose of the documentary, after all, is to publicize Choephel's ordeal. Friends and former teachers argue that his intentions were never political although surely he must have weighed the price of preserving what the Chinese are determined to obliterate.

On Dec. 26, after being imprisoned for more than a year, Choephel was convicted of ``espionage'' activities funded by ``a certain foreign country,'' meaning the United States.

Now that Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping is dead, there may be changes. But it's hard to imagine the Chinese ever giving up their hold on Tibet, or ever conceding that one man's crusade to save its music is less than an attempt at sabotage.

At the end of the documentary, there's a shot of Choephel looking over his shoulder. The expression on his face lingers after the film ends. It is an expression of fear.