>> Today we are pleased to introduce Madeline Uraneck as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's History Sandwiched In lecture.
The opinions expressed today are those of the presenter and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the museum's employees.
Author Madeline Uraneck is an educator and writer who has visited 64 countries through her role as International Education Consultant for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, several Peace Corps assignments, and her passion for world travel.
Her writing has appeared in K-12 curriculum materials, educational handbooks on culture and policy, and publications including Worldview Magazine, Hotline, Global Education, Worldwide Schools, and the Isthmus for which she received a Milwaukee Press Club Award.
Please join me now in welcoming Madeline Uraneck.
[applause]
>> Thank all of you for coming on this gorgeous day.
I'm delighted to see every one of you here, and I think we're going to have a wonderful presentation.
So, I wrote a book, “How to Make a Life,” and it has a long subtitle, “A Tibetan Refugee Family and the Midwestern Woman They Adopted.”
Spoiler alert: I'm the Midwestern woman.
[laughter]
So, first, [speaking Tibetan] you say [speaking Tibetan] to indicate respect.
We want to teach you how to say hello in Tibetan.
Would you like to try it?
Tashi delek.
>> Tashi delek.
>> One more time because I'll ask at the end.
Tashi delek.
>> Tashi delek.
>> Okay.
So, how did I get involved with this Tibetan family that moved to Madison?
And I think it starts at Folklore Village in Dodgeville.
Have some of you been to Folklore Village in Dodgeville?
And this is a place that really celebrates culture, folk dance, folk traditions, foods from all around the world.
And I worked there in the 1970s and 1980s.
And because I worked there, I received a fellowship to study in Sweden for a full year, and I studied [speaking foreign language] folk culture.
And this was more culture and more folk.
And because I did that, I applied to teach Japanese in Japan for three years, and then I was a part of those cultures because you're a part of work culture.
And that was a great experience.
And because I did that, I got a wonderful job for the state as International Education Consultant and was able to help study cultures of many teachers who came and put culture and world languages in the classrooms.
And leaving there late in life, I became a Peace Corps volunteer, and I was assigned to a country I'd never even heard of in Southern Africa.
A little country called Lesotho, the mountain kingdom of Africa, and was there for three years.
And because I did that, I worked for Peace Corps and they sent me to Central Asia to countries I'd never heard of before in the stans, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan.
And then I was back, and this is a very American question that people ask you in America.
[laughter]
Of all the 64 countries you've been, what's your favorite?
And I found myself saying Tibet, which is a ridiculous thing for me to say because I've never been to Tibet.
[laughter]
I didn't even know anyone at that time who'd been born in Tibet.
And maybe, like you, driving around Madison you can see some prayer flags here and there and you can see the sign says, you know, “Save Tibet” or “Freedom for Tibet.”
But the reason that I, after all this travel, would answer Tibet was because of one woman, and that woman is named Tenzin Kalsang.
And today, just a few blocks from where this presentation is, she is working.
And that's a lot of the story is she is working because she is a refugee, asylee, immigrant, whatever.
People come, when you come to a culture that's modern and expensive, like the one in Madison, Wisconsin, you really have to hustle to make ends meet.
So I hope that you get to meet her one of these days because she does when she's able to come and present.
And I just saw her.
She was working at DPI late one night, Department of Public Instruction, and she was dusting my cubicle.
And she had this beautiful, long braid.
And so I said, “Where are you from?”
And she said, “Tibet.”
And so that became this book.
[laughter]
So it would go kind of like this.
I'll read just a ready.
“Madeline, you busy?
I have a question.”
Tenzin occasionally stopped by my cubicle at the end of my work day to ask an array of questions.
She often asked about money market CDs, investments, and mortgages.
Even though she'd never gone beyond seventh grade in India, she had an acute knack for financial management.
After Tenzin lived in the USA for three years, she became eligible to apply for a family reunification visa, and she asked me where she could rent an apartment for her family and if I would help her fill out the forms to bring them from India.
I was a lifelong renter, and I chose my apartments for their lopsided charm.
I had no children, no CDs in the bank, and I was as frustrated by the tiny font on these forms as she was.
But, fortunately, Tenzin asked questions of other Tibetans who'd been here a short time and a long time and other people and she accumulated some good advice.
Working for $7 an hour, Tenzin soon had more money in her savings account than I had.
[laughter]
“I sent $300 to my mom today, she's sick,” she would say.
Or, “I sent my sister $400.
she's going to give it to my niece for her tuition.”
Or, “I sent $500 to Free Tibet.”
I looked at the carpet cleaners and the trash bin collectors in my building with new respect.
So, not in the beginning, but as it came over the years, I myself read and learned more about Tibet.
And you can see this white area is huge.
Even kids here have no idea of kids of Tibetan ethnicity.
They think Tibet was something small.
A huge part of China, which, of course, was one reason why China was interested in it.
A long history of the border, like all countries have with their border countries.
But in 1950 and then all through the '50s and leading up into 1959, the Chinese Liberation Army increasingly came into the section of Tibet, into what was Tibet at that time, and it's a really horrendous history to read about.
The murder of monks and the burning of monasteries and all of these monasteries had these amazing libraries just hundreds of years old with Sanskrit and handwritten translations.
And when they began killing people, first the higher up Tibetans and then more and more people, people fled into the countries of, you can see Nepal nearby and especially into India in massive, massive numbers.
This is a photo, a recent photo.
We don't have very many photos of that time in 1959 as people were escaping for their lives, dragging their family, rich and poor together, burying some of these treasures from the library that are still turning up occasionally.
But they came down into Tibet and Nepal, and you can see all these little black dots.
These were what became refugee settlements.
And the government of India cooperated with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and they had a vision that they wanted to make these separate entities, not integrate but separate entities where Tibetans would be able to keep their religion and culture and holidays.
And they did indeed became remarkably successful refugee settlements, over 47 today, where people work in cooperative relations in the fields and own things cooperatively.
Just fascinating.
Some people have called them historically probably the most successful refugee settlements in the world.
And I think we have a lot to learn given today.
Well, Tenzin was married at this refugee settlement, which chapter something, to a man named Migmar Dorjee.
And I didn't know Migmar.
At first I got to know Tenzin.
So this story, and I'll read you just a little tiny bit of it, is something that I learned, I learned later.
And this is a story that elopes on Tenzin, his parents.
Many people that you can meet in Wisconsin can tell you this story firsthand.
It's an amazing story of what transpired in the late 1950s.
And the story is just as fascinating leading right up to today.
But Migmar would tell me this story surrounded by his children who would all simultaneously translate.
And someday maybe you'll hear his version of it, but here's what I could get out of Migmar's story.
So, at 2:00 AM on an overcast night in December 1959, the three families, his parents and his two older brothers who were married then, crept out their back door as the village slept.
They led their burdened yaks as quietly as they could through two feet of snow, heading toward the foothills, gorges, and ridges that rode quickly into the Himalayas beyond.
The falling snow soon whipped into a fierce blizzard, blinding them so they could not look back on the village that they would never see again but obscuring their tracks from any Chinese soldiers who might discover their absence, and they headed in the direction of Bhutan.
In the hour before their Tenpa's wife gave Migmar a handful of moistened barley.
“Put this in your coat pocket,” she told him.
And hours later, when Migmar complained he was hungry, she reminded him, “Eat your tsampa.”
He put his hand in his pocket, but it was empty.
As he had stumbled and fallen in the snow in the early morning darkness, the small ball of grain must have dropped out.
Despite the blizzard, they kept looking backwards.
Migmar's sister Migkyi, her husband, and her husband's older parents should have caught up with them at the edge of the village.
And Migmar's family assumed that it was the elders that were slowing the group down.
As they reached the summit, the blizzard became life-threatening with screaming winds that hurled blinding chunks of ice and snow.
Landmarks disappeared.
The group decided to turn back to Sammar, a village through which they had just passed, praying the storm might slow down in soldiers in pursuit
In the confusion of turning around, seven of their yaks not only turned but kept on descending back toward their home in the valley.
The gray and black beasts disappeared into the whiteness, carrying not just food and blankets but all of the family's wealth, silver and copper coins and heirloom jewelry of silver, amber, and turquoise.
In Sammar, the men yanked out and tied up the single tent that remained, its hand-sewn edges flapping furiously in the wind.
Exhausted, Migmar fell asleep inside the tent, his head on his mother's lap.
We can illustrate this better.
While the men slept outside sitting up in relentless blowing snow.
In the morning, they still saw no sign of Migkyi and her group.
Heartbroken, the family faced the probability that Migkyi had been captured by the PLA.
It would be five decades before Migmar would learn what happened to her.
Migmar's legs were so frozen from the brutal night in the cramped position that he could not walk.
Namdol lifted him atop a yak.
An older brother.
High above the blinding snow, the 13-year-old rode over the crest of the Himalayas and into the kingdom of Bhutan toward an uncertain future.
So, Tenzin thinks that her story is not remarkable.
She thinks it's ordinary because everybody that she knows has the same story here in Madison.
So she told me her story in kind of bits and pieces, and I love her story because, while it doesn't have the drama of Migmar's, it has so many delightful aspects of it.
So Tenzin's story.
So now they're living in the south of India on one of those little dots, Bylakuppe refugee settlement.
And in 1989, Tenzin and Migmar began hearing rumors that a thousand Tibetan refugees from the settlements in Nepal and India would be able to enter their names in a special US immigration lottery.
Tenzin, the young woman born and raised in the dusty, if successful, settlement, looked at her four small children and said to her husband, “Let's try.”
By that time, more than 110,000 refugees lived in 47 settlements sprawling across India and Nepal.
One or two thousand more fled across China's borders each year, although the Indian government no longer made land allotments for these newcomers.
Each Tibetan refugee family was allowed to submit only one name to the resettlement lottery.
And families debated who could be spared and who might have the best chance.
Among the 15,000 people who finally applied, the Central Tibetan Administration in Dharamsala carefully tried to choose a balance between new, often landless refugees who'd come most recently from Tibet and those who had been in India and Nepal the longest; between people who are largely illiterate and those with education and special skills; between family heads and single persons.
And they looked for strong men and women, ages 18 to 45, and miraculously to Tenzin, her name, not her husband's, was drawn.
And so she wrestled with the choice of whether to go or stay.
And she looked to Migmar who said calmly, “Let's stay.
We don't have a lot of money, but we have enough food.”
Her parents and older sisters were concerned that she'd not only be leaving them but the four young children, and they agreed with Migmar.
How could they manage without her?
And, yet, other friends and neighbors crowded around her and envied her chance to be one of the lucky thousands.
And she was bewildered by the urgency and enormity of the decision, and as she delayed, the first groups began departing Bylakuppe, America-bound.
Batch one, batch two, it was time to make a choice.
And you might guess what she chose.
So five years later, it took five years, the children arrived.
So my relationship with Tenzin during those five years had been, you know, we weren't like best friends or anything.
But once the kids arrived, I felt very important because I was an educator and I would be able to help them enroll in school and tutor English and other subjects.
Well, you can kind of see from the picture here, maybe my busybody, bossy, older sister personality wasn't always appreciated.
[laughter]
In fact, in this picture, Lhadon, the girl in the family, refused, she was an adolescent after all, to be in the picture.
So they came.
And so how did I get involved with the children?
Because if you are a refugee, asylee, immigrant and you come to a new country with a new language, you work so hard.
And Tenzin then worked three jobs.
She worked a day job, she worked a part-time evening job, and she worked a weekend job.
And I had no idea that these jobs were often dangerous, in contact with a lot of chemicals, and also, the night jobs especially, so lonely, where your four- or eight-hour or six-hour shift in a building and you're the only one on the floor and the people on other floors may not even speak your language.
Meanwhile, I had these great kids.
Respectful, fun, polite, and we did lots of things.
The book tells about some of the anecdotes and many funny things, traveling with the kids.
And I was mostly interested in two things about them.
I had two questions.
One, how on Earth were they going to learn English and catch up with these, they arrived as middle school students, so how are they going to catch up with the middle school and high school students?
And then, if they did, how would they retain any of their Tibetan or Tibetan culture?
So that was my interest in culture, and that's what I explore a lot in the book as they all, one by one, first Tenzin, become citizens.
And I, who are known by my friends to be frequently very critical of US foreign policy, cried-- 
[laughter]
At every one of these citizenship ceremonies.
It was so touching to see people from all over the world take the oath and become part of our great country.
One of the first real gifts that the family gave me is I realized my own grandparents had done this.
They had come in 1920 from the border of Poland and Czechoslovakia
And though I hadn't known it, I hadn't know them that well and then by the time I'm ready to ask, they're gone.
And how hard they had to work, how they had to learn a completely knew language, which my grandmother never really did.
How the parents, how the children were bilingual and ashamed of their parents.
And, you know, this is one of our strongest, oldest stories and a story I think very relevant to think about in these days.
Now, when you're a new, when there's enough of you, and there came to be first 400 and then 500 and now 600, you can decide which of your customs you should keep, which ones that's it's going to be hopeless to hang on to, and then there's a lot of them that just disappear without your even realizing it.
And this is what happens so fast, and I just happen to be in the position to see this swirling around, that how long do you think it took the kids to lose their Tibetan?
What would you guess?
>> [inaudible]
>> One year?
Language.
Really, one decade.
So the kids of the kids that came, you know, were fluent, completely fluent in English and learning Tibetan as a foreign language, which they can do in Tibetan Saturday schools.
We also have Chinese Saturday schools and Korean Saturday schools and all over Madison there's a lot of Saturday schools or Sunday schools depending on the nationality.
As we've had, the Historical Society knows, for hundreds of years immigrants have been doing this, keeping certain customs and then other customs disappear.
Certainly for Tibetans, Tibetan Buddhism is central to their culture.
And I'm not a Buddhist but I was fascinated with this, which centers in Madison out of Deer Park, a Buddhist center and monastery.
How many of you have had the privilege of going to Deer Park?
This is an amazing thing and you should try to get there.
Just look at the beauty of this place with architects and stone masons and carvers brought from the Tibetan communities in several countries.
So that's kind of the story how you can, in any city, talk to somebody from another culture, and you say, “Hello,” and a door opens and then, depending on the questions that you ask, you might find yourself on a journey, a journey in my case that went to three different countries.
And I thought I was going to be the guide of the children, but, in no time at all, the children were my guide.
And my sister Susan and I were able to go with the three boys, and they guided us in their Hindi and languages to Bylakuppe, where they had been raised as kids.
And this is the house that they had been raised in.
And we went to three communities, Tibetan communities in India.
And I think we're probably two of the only people who have ever been to India without meeting Indians.
[laughter]
Like if you went to America and you only, you know, met Navajo people or maybe, I don't know, some communities where you're speaking Spanish.
But, you know, just the depth, the layers and layers of culture there were to explore were fantastic.
And the arts.
The youngest son, Thardoe, spent an entire year learning Thangka painting.
And, of course, the path got closer and closer to the Dalai Lama, but you'll have to read the book.
And one thing that's very fascinating to me, I'm not quite sure why, as a divorcee, but is the marriage customs and this blend of love marriage or arranged marriage or kind of an Asian, Pan-Asian blend of the two, which more than just Tibetans do, in the United States is fascinating.
And this I explore in the book.
And this is a wedding not in a far away country but right here in Madison.
Many times I would just pinch myself and say, “Am I in Madison, Wisconsin?”
Just this whole other world.
Even one wedding that went all the way to Nepal to try to maybe prevent.
[laughter]
Is another story.
I didn't always agree with all of the customs, but you'll have to read about that.
As you might see from the picture, maybe I didn't succeed.
[laughter]
And the story kind of comes in this cultural exploration, ends with the birth of the youngest, the first grandchild, who was Tenzin Choesang and who I am honored to know.
There have since been more grandchildren, but I think it would be just wonderful to be able to appreciate all of the many gifts that the family gave me, certainly the lessons of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, but also to see so many people who work toward a vision in a very daily way.
I finally understood more deeply how you do peace.
You do it daily in very conscious ways.
So I'd like to thank you.
[applause]