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On New Year's Day 1994, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa's mother was killed in a car accident along a highway in India. A Tibetan forced from her country during the Chinese invasion and a longtime refugee, Dhompa's mother had longed for many years to return to her homeland. "When this is over," she would say, referring to the ongoing political conflict and dangers, "we can go home." Dhompa's mother never got that chance.
To honor her mother's wish to return home, Dhompa, now an acclaimed poet living in San Francisco, embarks on a journey across the globe to her mother's nomadic village in East Tibet, traveling with a handful of her mother's ashes. Arriving there, she realizes that her mother had been preparing her for this homecoming her whole life. Tibet was a place that lived in the heart of her mother, a place of sweetness and legend passed to Dhompa through stories and memories--of the flowers in bloom in the Tibetan summer, of the people living in the "adobe of snow." Through this pilgrimage, Dhompa comes to terms with what it means to love a land so deeply and the heartbreak of living apart from that land in exile.
Coming Home to Tibet is a daughter's tribute and poetic memoir to a mother and a homeland, and a story of love, family, refuge, and dreams.
Coming Home to Tibet: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Belonging, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Shambhala Publications, Paperback, 291 pages, $18.95
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