She is seven. The question came in the car, somewhere on the road between Dharamsala and the school, and it came in the flat register children use for questions they think are simple. Which country are we from?
I said Tibet. She said but we live in India. I said yes. She said so which one, and I said both, and she said that's not an answer, and she was right.
I have been thinking about that exchange for two years, which is longer than the exchange deserved and about as long as these things take.
The obvious reply — the one I have heard my whole life and have given at conferences — is that we are from a place that currently exists under an occupation, that identity is not the same as jurisdiction, that a nation persists in its language and its practice and its memory regardless of what appears on a map. All of that is true. I believe every word of it. It is also, delivered to a seven-year-old in a car, completely useless, and I have started to wonder whether its uselessness in that setting tells us something about how much work it is really doing in the other settings.
Here is the claim I have arrived at, and it is not a comfortable one for someone in my position: the exile community has built an identity that is very good at surviving and not very good at being inhabited, and my daughter's generation is going to have to inhabit it.
Consider what she has actually inherited. She has a language she speaks with her grandmother and with nobody her own age. She has a calendar of observances she can perform accurately without their having any particular weight. She has a political cause that is genuine, that I have given a substantial part of my life to, and that she experiences primarily as the reason adults are sad on certain dates. She has photographs of a landscape she has never stood in. What she does not have — what none of them have — is the ordinary background hum of a place: the boredom of it, the local jokes, the specific way people there complain about the weather.
We preserved the important things. We were extraordinarily disciplined about it, and I do not want to be read as ungrateful, because the discipline is why she has a language at all. Monasteries were rebuilt from memory. Texts were carried out in luggage and copied by hand. An entire school system was assembled in a place that had not asked for it. That is not nothing; that is one of the more remarkable acts of cultural preservation of the last century, performed by people with no resources and no time.
But preservation has a shape, and the shape is a museum. Things are kept because they are important. Importance is announced. Nothing in a museum is casual, and a culture that a child can only encounter in its important mode is a culture that child will eventually experience as an obligation.
I watch it happening in small ways. My daughter code-switches into Tibetan the way one puts on a school uniform: correctly, on time, and with a visible sense that the day is now formal. Her Hindi is where the jokes live. Her English is where the internet is. Tibetan is where the grandmother and the ceremonies are, and she is fluent in it, and it is not where she is funny.
The counterargument, which I take seriously, is that this is simply what the second and third generations of any diaspora look like, that Italian-Americans and Punjabi-Canadians went through the same attenuation, and that the culture survives in a thinner but real form. Perhaps. But those communities have a homeland that continues to exist and generate new material — new slang, new music, new arguments. Ours generates nothing new that reaches us. What we have is what we carried out, and every year it is the same corpus, examined more carefully by fewer people.
So when she asked which country she is from, "both" was the wrong answer not because it is untrue but because it described a legal situation when she was asking about belonging. The honest answer is harder: that she is from a community that carried a country out on its back, that the carrying is why she has anything at all, and that at some point the community will have to decide whether the thing it carried is a relic to be guarded or a life to be lived in — because those require different handling, and we have been doing only the first for sixty-five years, very well.
I did not say any of that in the car. I said "both", and she looked out of the window, and we drove.
What I have decided since is smaller and more practical. This year we started watching a Tibetan-language cartoon series, badly dubbed, genuinely stupid, about a yak who solves problems. It is not preservation. Nothing in it is important. She laughs at it in Tibetan, which is the first time I have heard her do that, and I have come to think that one hour of unimportant Tibetan a week may do more for her than any amount of the other kind.
The yak cartoon is exactly right and I would go further. The Saturday class is where the language is important. The corridor outside it is where the language is alive, and we have spent forty years funding the room and not the corridor.