From Tibetan Refugee to Hoosier

Pema Wangchen is far from the typical Hoosier.

He wears a small diamond stud earring in his left ear, a metal om symbol around his neck hanging on a colorful string, a black bracelet on his right wrist that says Paris and a rainbow-colored one on his other that says “H.H. Dalai Lama.” He sports a mini-goatee under his chin with a smaller patch of hair under his lip to match. It’s hard to believe he’s in his late 30s, with his black hair slightly long and spikey on top and his childish grin. But there’s a few grays here and there showing that this Tibetan refugee—once a Buddhist monk and now a chef and owner of the restaurant Anyetsang’s in Bloomington—has lived.

“I lived in Tibet 12 and a half years,” he said, recounting the remarkable journey that brought him here. “The Chinese took over Tibet in 1959 … poor, no school, no anything, so my parents work hard and they save some money. They sent me to India.”

When he was young enough to still count his age by half-years, Pema’s parents stitched a few hundred dollars into his clothes and sent him on a three-day bus ride from his hometown of Shingtsang Noe to Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, so he could find a better life. He would stay with one of his father’s relatives for a few days before he paid $75 to take a long, packed truck ride into the darkness, along with 50 other Tibetans, to the northern edge of Nepal. And then, their long journey officially began.

“Then we walk … walk … walk … we climbed the mountain.” He raised his right hand at a 45 degree angle to show how steep the mountain was, then sipped on his chai.

“We climbed mountains that were like sand. You walk, fall down. Walk, fall down. Seven or eight hours we hiked and so heavy my food. I just threw it away … I said ‘I can’t make it, it’s so heavy.’”

It was at this point Pema found himself at the bottom of a mountain people train for years to summit—Mt. Everest. They hiked at its foothills in the night.

After abandoning his food, he ate mostly tsampa, which is a Tibetan staple comprised of barley flour and used to make bread. Light-heartedly he tried to explain what it was to my friend Kim and me. He then got up and walked to his restaurant’s kitchen. Anyetsang’s is in an old house hidden by low trees on Indiana University’s campus in Bloomington along a street of other Asian food spots. He came back with a bag of what looked like dark-colored flour for us to inspect.

“It’s yummy,” he said, grinning and sitting back down to twist the Dalai Lama’s name around on his wrist for a minute. Then he continued his story.

“Mountain, ice, rocks … so dangerous.” Pema let out a sigh and squinted his already narrow eyes a bit as if he was back in that moment long ago.

And finally, they reached the Himalayas, a place Pema says is sacred and there was often prayer in this area under the hanging flags above them. He was too young to understand the significance then, but understands it now. There, he ran out of food altogether and had to dig into the stash sewn into his clothes to buy goods, like potatoes, from the Nepalese locals.

They walked more. It was cold and snowy. An old woman died along the way; a few people were sent back because it was simply too treacherous for them. And 33 days later, they arrived just outside Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital. There they boarded a bus. But before that bus could take Pema any closer to India, he and many others were arrested.

Tibetan sympathizers soon came and helped Pema and others get released—finally Pema would go to India. There, Pema’s older brother was a monk at the Sera Jey monastery in southern India, one of the largest monasteries in the world. According to Pema, the city surrounding this famous monastery holds about 10,000–15,000 Tibetan refugees. At Sera Jey, Pema lived alongside his brother as a monk—amongst a sea of at least 5,000 monks—studying Buddhist philosophy for 11 years. He said he preferred work over going to class, praying and keeping a schedule, and claimed he was a terrible student who often failed coursework. He had his eyes on something else.

“Monk life is the best life … happy … but I wanted to come to America,” Pema said. “I told my brother I wanted to go to America in 1999 and he was so mad.”

The main reason Pema wanted to come to America was so he could make money to send back to his family in Tibet to fulfill their dream, to meet the Dalai Lama. And on August 11, 2003, after four years of convincing his brother he should leave and trying his best to get a passport, which cost his brother $10,000, Pema found himself in New York City. He landed a job at a Chinese restaurant. He started as a dishwasher and quickly moved his way up to cook—a skill he had learned with the monks back at the monastery—a position he held there for two years.

“I just know only ‘thank you’ when I moved to New York City,” he said, laughing at himself and shaking his head, it seemed so ridiculous.

He didn’t have to pay rent and saved every penny he could during those two years to pay back his brother and send money to his parents to travel to India to meet the Dalai Lama, which they did (and he did as well earlier this year when the Dalai Lama was in Indianapolis).