On a rainy afternoon on Sunday, April 11, Rinzin Lhundup was a quiet presence, listening to his friends intently as they chatted about the day’s proceedings over cups of steaming hot butter tea. The reticent 50-year-old, who works as a housekeeper in Manhattan, had arrived at the Phuntsok Deshe, the Tibetan Community Center in Queens, to cast his ballot for the Tibetan government in exile, then stuck around to help sell fundraising wares for the community.
Lhundup and nearly 5,000 other Tibetans had turned up at the Queens center from around New York and neighboring states to take part in democracy in a country that doesn’t officially exist. Lhundup was forced to leave his home in Lhasa to escape Chinese persecution in 1991. He trekked into Nepal, eventually settling for a time in India before moving to the United States. His father, also an activist, died at the hands of the Chinese and his younger sister Ngawang Sangdrol was the longest-serving Tibetan prisoner in China. She w
Kelsang Dolma | Foreign Policy | January 5 2021 | Read the original news here
Since its occupation of Tibet, the Chinese Communist Party has displaced and murdered tens of thousands of Tibetans with genocidal settler colonial policies. As refugees, Tibetan Americans have worked tirelessly to pres