Published by: World Tibet Network News Thursday - September 11, 1997
LHASA, (Sep. 10) IPS - Meet 22-year-old Sonam Dhargyal, a Tibetan tour guide on one of the several overland weekly tours going from Kathmandu to Lhasa. The son of a policeman, this is his second summer working as a tour guide.
In perfect English, with only a slight trace of an Indian accent, he says that he was educated in India and returned only last year to be with his family in Lhasa.
Since 1959, following what the Chinese call "the peaceful liberation of Tibet," Tibetan refugees have been streaming across the Himalayas, following their exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama to India, Nepal -- and sometime onwards to Switzerland and the United States.
Many older Tibetans who were unable or unwilling to leave their homeland sent their children to India for schooling in India, particularly in Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile. Like Sonam, most of these students attending the Tibetan Children's Village schools (known as TCV) had anonymous sponsors overseas.
Since one generation of these students has now grown up and graduated from TCV, some of them have chosen to return to their families in Tibet. Incomplete government statistics show that in the past few years some 30,000 Tibetans living abroad have come back on visits, and some 2,000 have returned to resettle.
Like Sonam, many of the young tour guides in their early twenties who speak excellent English were educated at TCV and the Chinese government has tried to lure them back with promises of employment as tour guides as the tourism sector takes off.
In Tibet, where Tibetan is losing ground to Chinese, there are few opportunities to learn English and few Tibetans speak English well, so the Indian-educated Tibetans are in a privileged position. That is, unless they get involved in anti-government demonstrations and are deported.
Aside from tour guides, there are other returned Tibetan expats in the travel industry; some own travel agencies, and one successful hotel, the 21-room Kyichu is a run by a Nepalese-Tibetan, Lhundup Phintso.
Modeled after one of the popular Kathmandu hotels, the Kyichu was completely booked in September and October, the last two months of the high season.
Although Phintso does not speak much English, his 18-year-old son and 17-year-old daughter, who were also educated in India, help run the family business. The son, Tenzing, finding his knowledge of Hindi less useful in Lhasa, is going off to study Chinese in Beijing for two years.
Perhaps the most successful of all the expatriate-run Tibetan enterprises in Lhasa is the 11-year-old Khwachen Carpet factory run by brother-sister team Tashi and Dolma who speak English with a New York rather than Indian accent.
In the large courtyard of the Khwachen Carpet factory, about three kilometers outside of Lhasa, 45-year-old Dolma Chuden, the designer and production manager is sweating in the hot summer sun, perhaps less from the heat than from the interrogation of government officials who inspect the carpets looking for niggling points like loose threads in order to have a reason to harass him.
Unlike the "Tibetan" carpet industry in neighboring Nepal which was started by Tibetan refugees and taken over by Nepalese, there is no child labor here. Child labor in the carpet industry has been a sore point with European and American public and legislators whose restrictions have hurt the Nepalese carpet industry.
"The youngest is 17," explains Dolma unapologetically. "They come to us as trainees. Apprentices make 200 to 300 yuan ($25 to $37) a month, and master weavers can earn $800, which is a lot more than they pay in Nepal."
"Our factory is set up according to the principles of the Tibetan dzong or fort and as 80 percent of our workers also live here, we have a community spirit," she says, pointing to the open light-filled compound.
The community spirit is obvious. The workers actually look happy as they work. "Carpet weaving is team-work" explains Dolma. "Unless everyone works together, the result will not be successful." Rooms are well-lit compared to the dingy sweatshops in Nepal and India. Many of the weavers sing as they work.
Aside from carpet weaving, which like other aspects of traditional Tibetan culture virtually died out in Tibet during the horrific years of the Cultural Revolution during the 1970s and was revived by refugees in Nepal, there had been little industry in Tibet, and traditional Tibetan carpets were being displaced by cheap mass-produced Chinese products.
After living in Kathmandu and New York (where she studied art and was naturalized as a U.S citizen), recalls Dolma, she quickly became disillusioned with American materialism. "I wanted to return to my country and support the traditional arts of Tibet which were dying out," she says.
So in 1986, she came back and began researching designs and traditional weaving methods, eventually opening this factory -- a word she obviously dislikes. Pointing to a carpet being woven on the loom by a team of weavers, she says, "This carpet is 100 percent Tibetan -- from the highland sheep wool fibers to the natural vegetable dyes."
However, she does admit to using chemical dyes imported from Switzerland on other, or rather most, carpets. Although there is a retail showroom on the premises, most of the carpets are exported to North America, Europe, and Japan.
What was her biggest difficulty in returning to Tibet and setting up a business? Without losing her twinkle, Dolma explains, "Having lived in democratic societies with free enterprises, our biggest difficulty has been adjusting to the Communist Chinese system and their way of doing business."
However with Tibet catching up and the rest of China turning to free enterprise and a market system, it seems that the Khwachen carpet industry has paved the way for other expat-Tibetans to follow in her footsteps. As Dolma's grandmother says, "Birds miss their nests when getting old."
