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A Tibetan Monk Escapes . . . to Brooklyn

by Robert Hirschfield

The nurse on the TB unit at Bellevue Hospital had news for Amchok Thubten. There was another Tibetan on the ward. Amchok, destitute monk, black-market passport-holder, speaker of only Tibetan in the city of New York, perked up.

With his surgical mask in place, Amchok paid Nyma a visit. The man was from Kham. Amchok is from Amdo. Amchok couldn't understand him.

"Next morning," says Amchok, "I went back to his room, and I begin to learn the Kham dialect."

Their three-month banishment was especially hard for Nyma, former nomad and yak-herder. Amchok insisted one day that they escape just long enough to enjoy a few clandestine lung-fulls of fresh air.

"All we had on were little gowns with nothing underneath." He laughs. "We were wearing our masks and rubber shoes. We took the elevator down to lobby. A guard saw us. He was very angry. He made us go back to our floor." The year was 1996.

I ring Amchok's buzzer. He lives on a bland street in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. I try to imagine him specking across the whiteness of the Himalaya, to Nepal, which he will not reach (not until the next time). Chinese soldiers will reach him first. They will shoot him, beat him, throw him in jail.

Amchok, in a gray VERMONT t-shirt and bare feet, greets me at his door on the top floor of a two-story house. We sit in his small living room, where his Tibetan wife, Kalsang, brings us tall glasses of tea. In another room, Jaza, his 9-month-old daughter, is getting up from her nap.

In his mouth, a generous display of huddles silver. In his approach, a naked directness, an unsmiling friendliness. He is 36.

When he was 20, and a monk at the Achok Tsany Ling Monastery in Amdo, Amchok was caught by the Chinese passing out the Dalai Lama's picture and the Tibetan flag. He had been part of a group of dissident monks. "I was taken to a police station in Hong Yen County (in Amdo) and severely tortured for two weeks. They used cattle prods, sleep deprivation, food deprivation. They make me stand long periods of time on my feet. They make the temperature in my cell very high. They had some kind of metal in my cell that they heated up. So it was intensely hot. They wanted to know who my friends were, where I got the material I was distributing."

He was jailed for three years and four months. When he got out, his ration card was revoked. He was prohibited from returning to his monastery, from going to school, from attending public gatherings.

Amchok sought political asylum as a torture victim. In the law offices of Hunton and Williams, he ran up against a new form of torture: language deprivation. "A Tibetan helped me in the beginning. It was hard. I have to review my entire life in the asylum application. It's not finished in an hour."

Arriving in New York in late 1995, Amchok sought political asylum as a torture victim. In the law offices of Hunton and Williams, he ran up against a new form of torture: language deprivation. "A Tibetan helped me in the beginning. It was hard. I have to review my entire life in the asylum application. It's not finished in an hour. It's not finished in a few weeks. It takes months and months.

"Two Tibetans came several times to translate, then stopped coming. We had to wait months for another translator. Finally, I tried to speak to my lawyer myself, but it doesn't work. Some issues, there is no way I can explain, and there is no way he can understand."

Amchok's application for political asylum was begun in February of 1996. It was not completed until March of 1997. It took another six months for his application to be approved.

He screws up his face trying to remember the name of the language school in Queens where he studied English for three months after that ordeal. The course enabled him, with his brave, wildly blowing English, to help as a translator at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, which specializes in sorting out political asylum cases.

The first person Amchok translated for, Lodoe Jinpa, was like himself, a pro-independence monk and torture victim. "It was very hard," Amchok recalls. "Very interesting. But too technical. My English I don't think is good enough. But when we finish, his lawyer (Jinpa, like Amchok, like virtually all asylum-seeking Tibetans, had a pro-bono lawyer) says to me, 'I think you are okay.'"

Just like that, the yoke of language shape-shifted into the clay of vocation. The Lawyers Committee had him inform Tibetans of the new immigration law that had taken effect on April 1, 1996. Refugees arriving after that date had a year in which to file for political asylum. (Previously, there was no deadline for filing.) His outreach brought to the Committee a dozen asylum seekers.

He went on ABC-TV to be interviewed about torture in Tibet. That put him in contact with still more torture victims. He estimates he's worked with at least 40 over the past six years.

In the Spring of 2000, Amchok founded Song Tsen. (Son Tsen was a conciliatory seventh-century Tibetan king.) He wants his organization to do more than just focus on asylum. "It takes 10 years," he says, "for a refugee who has been tortured to stabilize. He has psychological problems, physical problems, economic problems. After you get asylum, you still need help with English, job skills. You still need to adjust to the American culture."

Until he met Amchok, Nyma Dokda had no idea he was even eligible for political asylum. (Amchok tells of meeting Tibetans who believe their mere physical presence in America grants them a kind of mystical protection from harm. America as the super-charged amulet among nations.)

I ask Nyma how an isolated yak-herder managed to upset the Chinese. It seems he was part of a pro-independence group whose members included other isolated yak-herders. "The Chinese put me in jail. I was tortured all the time with electric prods, cigarette lighters."

Nyma, like Amchok, lives his new life in Brooklyn: Bushwick, to be precise. His apartment is a space transplanted from Tibet. Hanging from the walls are tankas, pictures of the 17th Karmapa, of the Dalai Lama. Nyma's wife, Chodon, shows me a photo of the Karmapa and the Dalai Lama together in Dharamsala, and draws it reverentially to the crown of her head just as an "M" train screeches into the elevated Wyckoff Avenue station.

Nyma, now a kitchen worker at the Sheraton Hotel near the JFK Airport, is a slender, quiet man of 32, who is still visited nightly by Kham in his dreams. I ask Nyma how an isolated yak-herder managed to upset the Chinese. It seems he was part of a pro-independence group whose members included other isolated yak-herders. "The Chinese put me in jail. I was tortured all the time with electric prods, cigarette lighters. They want me to sign a document saying Tibet is part of China. I say, 'No. If you want to kill me, kill me.'"

He was in jail for three years. Then he fled to Nepal, went to India, and flew to New York, where he found himself homeless in Grand Central Station. "I see other homeless people. I tell them I need drink (tipping his thumb to his lips, as he spoke no English). They point where I can buy some juice." He lived in subway tunnels until he ran into a Tibetan who let him live with him.

"After living under the sky, how could you live underground?" He shakes his head. Doesn't want to talk about it.

Amchok brought him to the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, which set him up with a pro-bono lawyer at Schulte, Roth and Zabel. Through a translator, Nyma told the INS interviewer about his years of torture.

"Did he ask to see proof? Marks you might have on your body?"

"I have no marks. He believe me. I tell him if I go back to Tibet, I die." Nyma won asylum in 1997. Two years later, his wife and his small son, Tsewang, joined him from Kham. Their second son, Nawang, 15 months old, was born in New York.

Amchok himself, winner of the Lawyers Committee award for human rights in 2001, was homeless, living with friends, having to leave the apartments of friends, even having to sleep once in the street and beg in a subway station. (It was not until 1998 that he moved into his present apartment, and out of homelessness.)

"Next to me (in the station) was a man who play the violin. Every time he try to play, another man, also a beggar, would bend down and take money from his case." Amchok laughs recalling the Chaplinesque spectacle.

"And you?" I ask. "All I have is tin cup."

He rattles the memory of it in his hand. He is almost wistful. Monk's genes, I think. An affinity for begging in his DNA. At Bellevue, where he went every day for his TB medication, he'd be given a sandwich. A kind nurse would stealthily slip him another for later. Some days that was it. He had nothing else to eat.

I admit to being prejudicially surprised by the flowering of Bodhisattva action in law offices. Yet in no small way Song Tsen breathes through the lungs of Latham and Watkins, a mid-Manhattan law firm. The firm has successfully handled 25 of Song Tsen's political asylum cases, costing it hundreds of thousands of dollars in pro-bono fees. It has assigned Finn O'Gorman, a para-legal from Northern Ireland, to coordinate Song Tsen's political asylum cases. Lathan partner Mark Becket, who first met Amchok as a translator, urged him to start an organization aimed at assisting Tibetan refugees.

I talk with Beckett in one of Latham's conference rooms. We sit at an oceanic table where the lawyer, low-keyed, round-faced, on the near shore of middle age, begins by saying, "We are fortunate here in New York that the asylum office is fairly well versed in the background of the Tibetan situation."

Empathy born of research is harnessed by wary scrutiny. It is not uncommon for Tibetans fleeing their homeland to arrive in this country without Chinese ID cards (Amchok's was confiscated by the Chinese after his imprisonment) and with false Indian and Nepalese passports.

The INS, claims Beckett, will usually accept "corroborating evidence" such as family photos, educational documents (the Chinese government in Tibet, I am told by O'Gorman, does not typically issue birth certificates or marriage certificates), or the Green Book, a passbook issued by the Office of Tibet to Tibetan refugees.

Inevitably, there are interviewers who view with skepticism all the sojournings and subterfuges of the Tibetans, and who turn their claims down. Post-deadline filers may likewise find their claims rejected. "There is the thought on their part," Beckett says, "that some of these people are not really Tibetans. Or they are second and third-generation Tibetans born in Nepal or India, which puts them in a different position legally. Sometimes an applicant will arrive with false papers, as a Nepalese citizen, under a false name."

Applicants turned down by the asylum office can have their cases heard by the immigration court. Amchok is in love with the stacked passageways of our legal system.

"How is torture proven?" I ask Beckett.

"Sometimes there are marks. Either the applicant will expose those marks to the interviewer if that's appropriate, or provide photos, or both." Even then, it may not be obvious to the interviewer that the unseemly body marks are necessarily torture marks. A physician and a psychiatrist may have to be called in to examine an applicant and submit affidavits. Where no marks exist, which is often the case, doctors will look for signs of broken bones, for post-traumatic stress disorder signs.

Late one night, in a dream, Amchok saw two Chinese policemen pushing their way past security guards in the Bellevue lobby. Rising from his bed in his sleep, he pushed his bed against the door. The nurse on duty, making rounds, found the door barricaded. She shouted, "Hey, you got a problem?"

"Yes, I got a problem. I got big problem. I want to talk to someone who will understand my problem."

Amchok and I talk about anger. Anchok's anger towards the Chinese. Or how does one carry a burning mountain across a frozen mountain? "In Tibet," I mention, "the political expression of your anger was to hand out pictures of the Dalai Lama, Tibetan flags. You didn't pick up a gun and shoot a soldier."

"No, I couldn't. As a monk, I took the Precepts. That includes not killing."

Amchok ponders this, brooding. "When my father was killed, with the anger I had, I definitely could have killed several Chinese. But I have nothing to gain. If I kill those who kill my father, my country is still under China."

He supports negotiations with China. But a thought troubles him. Tibetans try to negotiate peacefully with the Chinese, but the world pays no attention. Palestinians send suicide bombers against Israel, and the world pays attention. What Amchok pays attention to is karma, his life's balancing rod.

"Karma is a kind of recycling." Meaning that the bad you do, even to land-grabbers and serial torturers, will only boomerang back at you.

"Does nonviolent action help you handle the anger?"

"No."

"What does help?"

"Patience. You have to work at being patient with the anger. It's tough, but on a religious practice level that anger becomes peace if there is patience."

I sometimes think there must be a hidden scriptorium somewhere in the world, where the classical journeys of monks and swamis get penned, then assigned to the proper robed vehicles.

I think of Amchok in the snow, having coaxed his bullet-punctured, fractured leg into a leaping escape from a work detail after being jailed. "We walked all day. [He had escaped with a friend.] That evening, I thought death is coming. I was exhausted. I was frozen. I couldn't walk. My friend said, 'Let's go faster.' I just want to lie down in the snow and die. No fear. This is the death. My friend draw me with his belt from the snow. That moment, we heard a human voice. Immediately, I think, maybe there is hope. Wow! Maybe this is not really the end. It was a nomad. He took us in."

It took Amchok 27 days to reach Nepal, to complete his interrupted journey. He rested a week in Nepal before crossing over into India.

In Dharamsala's black market, he acquired an Indian passport for 20,000 rupees, paid for by a kind-hearted woman from Los Angeles. His first trip to America lasted just nine days. "I speak no English. I have no luggage, no money." (Twenty dollars worth of useless rupees was all he had in his pocket.)

In his monk's robes, on the plane to Seattle, he attracted the attention of a Chinese Buddhist tour guide from Singapore named May. The woman found the Tibetan monk ravishingly interesting. (He found her, being Chinese, an icon of suspicion until finally succumbing to the sincerity of her attention.) Hearing about his 20 rupees, May insisted that he stay with them, eat what they ate, go where they went. That meant checking into a Best Western hotel, eating fried chicken, and sight-seeing in Vancouver.

Back in India, his improvised documentation caught the eye of a Sikh at customs. Thought to be a spy, he was sent to Tikar Prison for three months. Then he was released. He even got his passport back.

In Dharamsala he got lucky. He met Kusang, a man from Amdo. Kusang's son, Tsering, lived in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Tsering agreed to take Amchok in should Amchok decide to come to New York. Amchok decided to come.

The night before he left he had a dream. "It was very clear dream. I saw residential buildings. A church that look to me like a castle. I dreamed the entire neighborhood Tsering lives in. Even his house. A small, cream-color house. So when I get to Tsering's house on Westminster Road, everything is very familiar to me."

All I can think is: A Tibetan who had a vision of Brooklyn!

Robert Hirschfield is a freelance writer living in New York City. He has contributed regularly to The Witness on issues of immigration and human rights.