- Today we are pleased to introduce Madeline Uraneck
as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's
History Sandwiched In lecture series.
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.
(crowd applauds)
- 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.
(crowd laughing)
So, first, (speaks in foreign language)
you say (speaks in foreign language) to indicate respect.
We want to teach you how to say hello in Tibetan.
Would you like to try it? (speaks in foreign language)
(crowd speaks in foreign language)
One more time because I'll ask at the end.
(speaks in foreign language)
(crowd speaks in foreign language)
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 (speaks in 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. (crowd laughing)
"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.
(crowd laughing)
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 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.
(crowd laughing)
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.
Well, 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. (crowd laughing)
"I sent $300 to my mom today,
"she's sick," she would say.
Or, "I sent my sister $400.
"she's gonna 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 become 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 a.m. 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 departure
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 any 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.
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, 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.
(crowd laughing) 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 gonna 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 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 known 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 new language,
which my grandmother never really did.
How the parents, how the children were bilingual
and ashamed of their parents.
And 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 just gonna 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?
(crowd murmurs)
One year, language?
Really, one decade.
So the kids of the kids that came 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 any Indians.
(crowd laughing)
Like if you went to America and you only,
you know, met Navajo people or I don't know,
maybe some communities where you're speaking Spanish.
But 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 faraway 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...
(crowd laughing)
...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.
(crowd laughing)
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.
(crowd applauds)