Paper short abstract:

Prompted by research on Tibetans in New York City, I explore the long-term effects of exile and its permutations on those who were expelled from their home several decades ago, and how that prolonged loss has been passed down to their children and grandchildren abroad.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will use a study of lives approach to understand the experiences of exile described by those Tibetans who came to New York City following the passage of the Immigration Act of 1990, and the stories told by their children who were raised in New York. Not unlike other diasporas in the world today, the transfer of events, stories, and in many cases, the wounds, of exile formatively shape the narrative hereafter of younger generations, though this phenomenon has been given little attention in the social sciences. This work will look to the Tibetan diaspora to understand how the prolonged experiences of exile have determined what stories are inherited from one generation to the next, and how that understanding informs their conceptions of home and return. I explore how that understanding changes across time and impacts possibilities for action, resistance, and forgiveness. I argue that the loss of home suffered by the older generation has left a psychological impress, an experiential remnant that bears greatly on the lives of younger Tibetans, resistant as it can be to language (though sometimes it may, in contrast, become quite rhetoricized). I am interested in the passage of such an impress to the next generation, how it is inherited, how it can provide a narrative lining and give shape to the arc one's life for both the one who was there and the one who was not.