How to Make a Life: A Tibetan Refugee Family and the Midwestern Woman They Adopted
Just in back of Tenzin’s family’s home stood an identical white cement house. Three older men lived there, all brothers. The youngest brother, Migmar Dorjee, was already in his thirties. He was a handsome soldier in the Indo-Tibetan forces and came home on leave now and then. Years later in Wisconsin, in Tenzin’s intermediate English and Migmar’s Tibetan, they would tell me the story of their courtship, interrupted by their grown children’s gleeful translations. Tenzin and Migmar would grin and blush, as if the events had transpired only yesterday.
Pema Choedon spoke with the brothers every day, since their cow sheds were just on the other side of the bamboo fence that divided them, and she came to know Migmar’s family well. When Tenzin was sixteen, Pema Choedon told her daughter, “You should be married.”
“So the next time Migmar came home,” Tenzin told me, “I took a close look. I told my mom, ‘No, he’s too old.’ But she told me I had no choice.”
“If you marry a man your same age,” Pema Choedon told Tenzin, “then he can’t do a good job of taking care of the family. You need someone who can take care of you.
