Tibetan group's leader staying busy

When Tsering Wangdi talks about Tibet, his gaze drifts into the distance, as if the crystal lakes and craggy peaks of his homeland lie just past the dining-room wall, just beyond the border of Upper Darby.

"It's a very beautiful place," he says.

He's never been there, of course.

Like many Tibetans in the Philadelphia area, Wangdi grew up in India, where his family fled after China invaded the Himalayan nation in the 1950s. Now, as the new president of the Tibetan Association of Philadelphia, Wangdi is determined to make this region a visible, vocal part of a worldwide human-rights protest in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics.

"It's important for us to keep fighting," Wangdi said.

Local Tibetans have turned to him for leadership at a key moment, a time when renewed violence in their homeland has made the Buddhist nation a cause of activists around the globe.

Wangdi, 33, magnetic, patient and strong, admits that before being elected head of the 85-member association in January, he'd never been much of an organizer. But others in the group encouraged him to run, and he thought he could offer direction on political and religious issues - inextricably intertwined for Tibetans.

Now he's working to generate turnout for Saturday's running of the Human Rights Torch, an Olympic protest largely organized by backers of Falun Gong, and also for what will be a bigger event for Tibetans: the arrival of the Tibetan Freedom Torch in Philadelphia on May 21.

That relay begins at noon at City Hall, proceeds to the Art Museum, and ends at Independence Hall. Wangdi has been trying to find a local celebrity or sports figure willing to carry the torch, but so far everyone has turned him down.

"Celebrities, it's hard for them, because they have to live by their name," he said. "Behind the scenes, they're always, 'We support you.' "

On Wangdi's right wrist is a thin band stamped "Free Tibet." On his left, where others might sport a wristwatch, is a silver bracelet.

He was born in a refugee camp in Nepal, came to the United States in 1999, and today shares an Upper Darby apartment with his wife, who is pregnant with their first child. Wangdi works as a medical courier, picking up and dropping off lab samples, driving up to 300 miles a day.

"He's very capable. That's why we chose him to be the leader of our small community," said Losang Samten, a Tibetan-born monk and spiritual director of the Tibetan Buddhist Center of Philadelphia.

The new president, Samten said, possesses the energy, languages and people skills to communicate with Tibetans here and overseas - and to take Tibet's cause to the public.

It's a cause that many presume to be lost. "I think the chances of Tibet becoming an independent country within my lifetime are pretty much nil," said James Carter, an East Asia expert at St. Joseph's University.

The leadership of the Tibetan Association of Philadelphia, known as TAP, is consumed by the fight for a free or at least autonomous Tibet. News arrives in phone calls and e-mails from family members overseas, and via the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. Yet the group's day-to-day work is in some ways more pressing:

Making sure elderly Tibetans see a doctor when they're sick. Helping new arrivals from India or Nepal - or New York - find a place to live. TAP devotes a lot of time to teaching older Tibetans to speak English, so they can navigate a new society, and teaching younger people to speak Tibetan, so they don't lose touch with an old one.

Upper Darby has become an unlikely center for Tibetan life, a place where "Free Tibet" stickers adorn car bumpers and prayer flags stretch between trees.

TAP's growth and vitality, and the support accorded similar groups around the world, have Wangdi expecting the unexpected: that after the Olympics, relations between Tibet and China will shift in some important way.

Talk to Wangdi and other Tibetans, and they'll speak not just of Tibet's beauty, but of its climate and natural resources, its copper, gold and uranium. In casual conversation, it can seem an odd lesson in earth science, but it demonstrates the degree to which Tibetans identify with their homeland.

The Land of Snows exerts a primal psychological pull on the 11,000 Tibetans in the United States, people who often speak limited English and work at low-paying jobs.

"It is not just their physical home - where they are from - but it represents their spiritual home," said Leena Taneja, a specialist in Asian religions at Stetson University in Florida. "It's the epicenter of the faith."

Tibetans say, yes, they are immigrants, but more than that, they are exiles, worried about the erosion of their culture and the lives of friends and loved ones in Tibet.

"It's important to keep the identity alive for those Tibetans who are suffering in Tibet under the Chinese occupation," said TAP member Karma Gelek. "So that Tibetan culture won't be wiped off the face of the earth."

This spring, TAP began holding weekly peace vigils that have at times turned decidedly unpeaceful.

Once, as the organizers set up near Independence Hall, two busloads of Chinese tourists pulled in, signaling their opinion of the Tibetans with raised middle fingers. People getting off the buses shouted, "Liar!" at the group's portrait of the Dalai Lama. Another time, TAP members said, a Chinese woman pulled down a Tibetan flag and tried to carry it off.

There are differences, too, among the Tibetans themselves, the older people generally accepting the Dalai Lama's call for Tibetan autonomy within China, the younger ones, more militant, demanding full independence.

And Wangdi?

"Whichever comes first," he said. "My opinion is for freedom. If China is ready to talk about an autonomous region tomorrow, I'm ready for that. If China is always pushing back and making up stories about the Dalai Lama, then I'm changing my mind. This is our land. I want my country back."