Melanin Base Camp

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The Heartbreak of Returning to Tibet

Lekey Leidecker

Part I | Before

As a child, whenever I asked my father to draw with me, he always drew the same idyllic scene: mountains, a river, a tent, yaks. After years of repetition by other Tibetans, I finally realized it was not a coincidence. Born in the 70s and 80s and educated in Tibetan schools in India, they had been taught to draw something their teachers and parents were trying to preserve in memory.

It was not until age 30, two generations removed from living in Tibet, that I would fulfill a lifelong dream and see this image for myself. Witnessing it proved that the memory of such a place lives in the bones; that it cannot be forgotten even if you try.

I am the child of a Tibetan refugee from India. I was born and raised on Turtle Island (what is currently the United States). In 2023, I traveled to Chengdu, a Sichuanese city with a sizable Tibetan community. Someone I met there lamented the fact that I would not be traveling farther west into Tibet. What a shame, he repeated. You've come all this way and you can't go home.

For most of my life, Tibet was necessarily an abstraction, a mythical place I yearned for but knew little about. My family's material concerns as refugees, then immigrants, left little time to pass on much cultural knowledge to me. It's a diasporic tale as old as time, but no less painful.

Over the years, I have gone to great lengths to connect with my culture—collecting stories and anecdotes, connecting with others, studying language, and spending hours in obscure corners of the Internet. Yet, nothing had lessened this longing to see Tibet with my own eyes, to see the stars and the flowers.

In summer 2024, I took all my ancestral longings, griefs, and heartbreaks to Tibet for the first time.

Part II | Return

The return to my homeland was, in a way, anticlimactic. I was in a cramped car somewhere in Sichuan, and then, suddenly, I was in Tibet. I clambered out, exhausted and nauseous, and ate a bowl of noodles. But despite an unceremonious reintroduction, it turns out I was right: there is nothing like being on the land.

Arriving on the grassland, I wrote:

I can see the fatigue and stress leaving my travel companion's bodies, evaporating into the expanse of sky. I can imagine few people [this place] does not captivate, does not humble.

My life until now has been about reaching toward some intangible lost thing. This trip showed me, in a way beyond my wildest dreams, that Tibet is a real place to which I have always belonged. There are ways of being Tibetan that are constantly evolving into the future, and they all come from our land. Until now, I have lived my entire life with copies of copies. Now, all at once, I was experiencing the original. It was nearly too much to bear.

Tibetans identify ourselves to one another by our ཕ་ཡུལ་, roughly translated in English as “fatherland.” As I traveled, this idea became less and less theoretical. There are nearly one million square miles of varied and stunning lands that have sustained my people for thousands of years. We say our ཕ་ཡུལ་ because where we are from matters. Tibetanness keeps shifting as our conditions do, but we have always been tied to our land.

The Tibetan plateau rises 14,800 feet above sea level on average, and reaches higher than all the land surrounding. This unlike-anywhere-else environment has fostered internal diversity often ignored by the wider world, whose interest in Tibet has been primarily defined by what it can extract from it: Buddhist teachings, natural resources, movie franchises, outdoor expeditions, careers.

My trip was a means to an end, in contrast to those who arrive with thousands of dollars of gear, minds fixed on a summit. When we travel, we carry medicine and other hard-to-find basics requested by loved ones. And we have always known it is better to circle the mountain and to sing songs to the lake.

Traditionally in Tibet, concepts like "outside" and "nature" would be functionally meaningless. All of our ancestors were at one point drokpas, nomadic herders with deep ecological knowledge who lived off the land. Many people continue to live as drokpas today. My aunt says when my grandfather watched Survivor he always knew what contestants would do, this wisdom and knowledge of place one more thing not passed down after displacement.

In songs, Tibet is often described as heaven. The trip was a lesson in Tibet's vastness, its absolute and glorious majesty. I know now why I am a poet. To live here is poetry. This land and its deities deserve endless praise. The vast blue sky. The grassland, dotted or covered with purple, yellow, and white flowers, stretching into mountains. A view of Tso Ngonpo, stretching so far to the distance she looks like sky.

This is not a story about "the outdoors" because for a vast majority of Tibetans, "outdoors" and home are the same. They are not separate; it is your breath and bones. It is imbued with memory and meaning. Our songs, dances, faith, all come from this land. To be with the land is to eat from, sing, and dance upon it. To do kora around the many, many sacred places.

Although I usually dislike long journeys, on this voyage I found myself grateful for the hours spent in the car watching cities and towns drift farther and farther apart. You are forced to contend with the land. I spent hours fending off car sickness and staring out the window, silently crying, entranced.

Over and over again it hit me: I have never been in a place like this.This is what I have been missing, not only in my life, but for a generation. For the first time, I look onto the grassland, stretching as far as my eye can see. I feel my feet on the ground. I am atop a mountain peak sending prayers that will reach everything the air touches.

There was no blueprint for this experience, no guide to follow for a return that should be, by many accounts,impossible. For this journey, there was a before, and an unbearable after. The fact remained- as soon as I arrived, I drew closer to leaving.

Part III | After

A mountaintop in Eastern Tibet with prayer flags. Photo by : Lekey Leidecker.

To return, to love your land, is to open yourself to heartbreak. 

After I returned from Chengdu in 2023, I wrote in my journal: “Home is a series of irreplaceable things.” I don't want to miss more people or another place. My family line and I have already survived so much loss. 

Mostly, I just missed everything. It felt cruel to go from touching the land and being nourished by it to scrolling through WeChat again (a popular Chinese social media site used by many Tibetans). 

I have been back about two weeks now, and my old life does not fit right. Things feel hollow, empty, devoid of meaning. It is a level of grief I had until now managed to outrun, and my life is being reformed by it.

I once wrote that I miss Tibet through my body. I think I now know more fully what this means. The embodied experiences fade, first to memory, then to a heavy absence. Mere weeks ago I was on the grassland. 

Now, I feel disembodied. I am outside of myself and disconnected from the world around me. I have returned to my "normal" life, but I can't shake the feeling that this life is the strange one, and my normal life is in the other world, carrying on without me.

Going to Tibet forced me to confront how little I am able to know or live of the ways of my people and ancestors. Even the most earnest attempts fall short like a drawing of yaks and a mountain scratched out in pencil. In Tibet, you know the mountain's name, pray to the deities who reside there. The yaks gallop down it, the flowers beam at the sky.

I wrote this on my phone, in a car somewhere on the plateau: I do not know what the future holds, for me, for this place, for our people. I do know that I will be dreaming of this place every day for the rest of my life. I know now that, if never again in this life, I'll return here when I die.

My friend tells me, when you have your land, there is always hope. I do not have my land. But she is there. And now she knows my name. For now, the yearning will have to be enough.

Note:

There are so many other important perspectives on Tibet that I cannot encapsulate in my first-person essay, which is limited by many things including my own experience as a relatively privileged member of the diaspora. I encourage everyone interested in learning more to prioritize Tibetan voices and perspectives.

An incomplete suggested reading list: