My childhood social landscape was filled with black and white children, with a handful of Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese students. As a Tibetan, I couldn’t figure out where I belonged. But for Joy, Erin, and Tatiana, it was easy. I belonged with them. And through their nurturing friendships a multi-racial Cambridge steeped in black history and culture became home.
During exile’s initial construction, orphaned and semi-orphaned Tibetan refugees from the 1960s promoted and practiced terms of relatedness at refugee schools that were fairly open. However, the desire to construct biological family outside refugee schools to safeguard vulnerable conditions of exile caused the terms of relatedness to narrow by the time semi-orphan children from Tibet arrived in the 1990s. What caused such a shift? What happens when a group desires forms of relatedness not contingent on the construction of a traditional and biological family?
The following post is a section in Ch. 2 “There Is a Tension in Our Hearts” from the book Echoes from Dharamsala by Keila Diehl (2002, p57-62).
