NO PLACE CALLED HOME

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BELONG TO A NATION IN EXILE? A COLLECTION OF TIBETAN ESSAYS EDITED BY TENZIN DICKIE TRIES TO ADDRESS THE QUESTION

- Srinath Perur

THE PENGUIN BOOK OF MODERN TIBETAN ESSAYS

Edited by Tenzin Dickie

VINTAGE/PENGUIN

In one of the essays in this book, the activist and writer Tenzin Tsundue recounts watching the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics in 2000, his face wet with tears. He finds it hard to explain this to his Indian hostel-mates, who take for granted their presence on the map, the right of their compatriots to wear their national dress and compete under their flag. While the show talks about the spirit of the Olympics and borderlessness, Tsundue writes: "What can I, a refugee, talk about except the wish to go back home?"

That longing for home is understandably a frequent presence in many of the 28 first-person accounts that make up The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays. The editor, Tenzin Dickie, writes in her introduction that the first modern personal essays by a Tibetan may well have been written in response to its occupation by China-in English, by a western-trained doctor named Tsewang Pemba in his autobiography, Young Days in Tibet (1957).

Dickie, a writer and translator, is also the editor of Old Demons, New Deities: 21 Short Stories From Tibet (2017), a collection of contemporary Tibetan fiction. This time, she says, she wanted to work with a different form. "I have always been on the lookout for essays grappling with the condition of being a Tibetan in the modern world. I wanted to put together the sort of book that I needed growing up." In her own essay, 'The Lottery', Dickie writes about how suddenly the course of lives in exile can change: her parents win a kind of visa lottery that allows them to move to the United States, but this also means that an eight-year-old Dickie has to join a Tibetan boarding school in India.