Tibetan cultural resistance in Queens, with help from TikTok and YouTube

First come the grownups, wheeling crates of Poland Spring. Then the teenagers and little ones, in their fine silk chupas and Nike Air Force 1s. A loudspeaker here, a banner there. A large portrait of the Dalai Lama. And, finally, the music and the dancing, which go on for hours until darkness falls, like so much well-earned sweat.

So it goes every Wednesday at Moore Homestead Playground in Elmhurst, where generations of the city’s Tibetan community converge for a weekly circle dance known as Gorshey. They aren’t alone – the same thing takes place in Paris, Toronto, New Delhi and other centers of the Tibetan diaspora. And while it might look like mere fun to casual observers, community members say what they’re doing is actively engaging in resistance in the face of cultural erasure – part of an ongoing campaign that combines mass gatherings with digital platforms like TikTok and YouTube.

Since the 1950s, when Chinese forces overthrew the Tibetan government, the people of Tibet have fled their homeland for the safety of other nations. Their displacement, along with human rights abuses within Tibet, received significant international attention in the 1980s and ‘90s. This was due in part to the work of new advocacy groups like the International Campaign for Tibet in Washington, D.C., and Students for a Free Tibet in New York, as well as the considerable visibility of the Tibetan spiritual leader, Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama.

In 1987, the Dalai Lama's appearance before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus infuriated the Chinese government, which accused him of wanting to “split the motherland.” Nonetheless, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, and freedom for the Tibetan people became a cause célèbre in the West, taken up by the likes of Richard Gere, Sting and the late Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys. Much of that attention has faded, but in recent decades a parallel movement has grown, one firmly situated within the Tibetan diaspora itself – including in the Elmhurst playground.

On a recent Wednesday, around 80 community members showed up for Gorshey at the Elmhurst playground. The participants were drawn from the estimated 40,000 Tibetans who live in North America.

The five boroughs are home to an estimated 9,000 Tibetans, and many of them live within walking distance of the playground in Elmhurst, as well as in nearby Woodside and Jackson Heights, according to city data. What unites them, according to community members, is loss.

“For me, Gorshey means everything,” said Tsetan Namdol, a student at American University who was born and raised in Queens but whose grandmother lives in a refugee settlement in India. “We don't have a country, so Gorshey really brings us all together.”

Organized efforts to prevent the disappearance of Tibetan culture accelerated in the late 2000s with a movement known as Lhakar, or “White Wednesday” in Tibetan (Wednesdays are considered auspicious for the Dalai Lama, who became Tibet’s head of state in 1950, at the age of 16, and has served as the Tibetan spiritual leader ever since). The campaign, which is influenced by Gandhi's ideals of nonviolent protest, encouraged Tibetans worldwide to patronize businesses in their community, eat Tibetan food and speak the Tibetan language, shorn of Chinese words.

The movement's core is the preservation of Tibetan identity – hence the dancing in Elmhurst. It’s set against the backdrop of an increasingly powerful China, the worldwide specter of Chinese state surveillance, and new tools for protesters to amplify their voices.

Protest by YouTube, TikTok

In his 2013 essay, “Why Lhakar Matters: Elements of Tibetan Freedom,” Tenzin Dorjee, the former director of Students for a Free Tibet and currently a doctoral student at Columbia University, argued that reclaiming food, language and art were politically potent acts because they helped Tibetans “assert an identity that has been suppressed for decades.”

At the same time, he said Lhakar was a “voluntary, flexible and one-size-fits-all kind of movement,” in which someone could spend an hour on Wednesday — or any day for that matter — listening to a Tibetan radio program or wearing traditional clothes, or doing something more overtly political, like calling a Chinese consulate and complaining about their government’s treatment of Tibetans.

“For a generation raised under the myth that we could never match China’s power, nothing is more empowering than realizing that the inexhaustible reservoir of our culture is finally being weaponized into a powerful set of nonviolent tools,” wrote Dorjee. “Lhakar has transformed Tibetan culture from frozen asset into liquid capital, from a holy scepter into a golden spear.”

But music and dance in particular have caught fire over the last few years via platforms like YouTube and TikTok, as Tibetan youth have devoured clips of Gorshey being performed in other strongholds of the diaspora and committed the latest moves to memory.

Chemi Lhamo, who was raised in South India and lived for years in Canada, said Toronto’s Lhakar Gorshey is legendary and involves hundreds of dancers, some of whom sign up for Gorshey “tutoring” every weekend.

“So young kids were taught on Sundays how to dance, and then on Wednesday they would be dancing all the choreographed dances,” said Lhamo, who wore an all-white chupa — a traditional Tibetan dress worn by men and women — to Elmhurst's Gorshey. “It's just a beautiful wave coming together.”

Like that of many others in the community, Lhamo’s life and work revolve around the idea and condition of exile. Lhamo’s never been to Tibet, and has been harassed and even threatened for her activism by pro-Chinese voices while attending university in Toronto. As a result, she said she cut off all communication with family and friends in Tibet so as not to put them at risk.

One of her favorite songs at Gorshey, “Yudrang Tsanga Shik Shik,” prompts dancers to mimic the movements of birds and fishes (scroll to the 2:41 mark in this video to get an idea) – she compared it to the Baby Shark dance that went viral a few years ago. Lhamo said the song is “about the beautiful sentient beings that live in the Tibetan plateau.”

“So many of the songs,” she said, “remind us of our home.”

The price of dissent

For millions of immigrants in the U.S., that sentiment is a familiar one. And for many Lhakar Gorshey participants, the emotional appeal is amplified by the involvement of different generations of the community. Seniors stand shoulder-to-shoulder with teenagers, slow-twirling and stepping left-right-left with the rest of the crowd.

All of them collectively break for butter tea and quietly listen as a community member chants a prayer, followed by the singing of the Tibetan national anthem, a moment of silence for Tibetans who died resisting Chinese rule, and then more dance.

Tenzin Gonpo Gomchoe, a Gorshey organizer, said the event moved to Moore Homestead Playground last year after previously taking place at a playground near the BQE. In addition to mounting an image of the Dalai Lama, attendees “pray for his long life” and closely heed the words of their spiritual leader.

“When he goes around the world, [the Dalai Lama] always says, ‘Please preserve your religion and culture,’” said Gomchoe. His own father was killed by the Chinese government in 1965, after he was caught spying for the Tibetan government, Gomchoe said.

His death followed momentous events in the history of the Tibetan people. These include the annexation of Tibet in 1951 – China officially refers to it as a peaceful liberation – and a subsequent uprising against Chinese rule in 1959 that was brutally put down after an estimated 87,000 Tibetans were killed.

One dancer, Gyaltsen Tsering, 65, said he was just a year old when his family fled Tibet in the wake of the uprising, along with many others. That group included the Dalai Lama, who set up a government in exile in the Himalayan region of northern India.

One of Tsering’s family members, however, didn’t make it out: His aunt, he said, then in her teens, joined the Tibetan uprising and was killed by Chinese military forces.

Tsering and his family settled down in India, where he eventually joined the army and served for 17 years, including a stint in the world’s highest battlefield, the Siachen Glacier, where India and Pakistan have fought intermittently for decades. He was proud of his military service, calling India his “second home,” and wore a crimson military beret to the dance, along with a wonju, or traditional shirt.

But as he reflected upon his life’s path and the loss of his homeland, he grew emotional.

“We need the freedom for our country,” he said, his voice choking.

Today, more than 64 years after the uprising, Tibet is among the world’s most politically repressed places. In 2023, the U.S. organization Freedom House gave Tibet a 1/100 score, placing it at the bottom of its index, along with Syria and South Sudan (by comparison, North Korea received a 3/100 score).

“Chinese authorities severely restrict freedom of assembly,” Freedom House said in its 2023 report. “Even nonviolent protesters are rapidly and often violently dispersed and harshly punished.”

That reality, combined with the widespread dispersal of the Tibetan people to various corners of the world, has created a global diaspora that is highly politicized from an early age.

‘Tibetans are born activists’

One of the earliest photos of Topjor Tsultrim, the communications coordinator at Students for a Free Tibet, depicts him as an infant during the early 2000s, strapped to his mother’s chest as she holds a sign during a protest at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, across from the U.N. headquarters in Midtown.

“The sign read, ‘1.2 million Tibetans dead, how many more?’” Tsultrim said. “You can't talk to Tibetan people for very long without hearing the common adage that all Tibetans are born activists.”

And something as seemingly apolitical as “just dance,” Tsultrim said, is inherently charged with meaning, with the Chinese government steadily “cracking down” on the teaching of the Tibetan language and other native forms of culture.

In 2020, Chinese authorities sentenced singer Lhundrub Drakpa to a six-year prison term for his song “Black Hat,” which criticized Chinese government policies. Last year, Tsewang Norbu, a Tibetan singer who had risen to national prominence in China, died of self-immolation outside of Potala Palace, the Dalai Lama's former home.

Even in Elmhurst, thousands of miles from the homeland, there is no certainty that Tibetans have escaped the eyes of the Chinese state. In 2020, FBI agents arrested an NYPD officer, accusing him of spying on New York City’s Tibetan community for China, but the charges were dropped earlier this year without explanation from the Justice Department.

A Chinese government official called the accusations “pure fabrication” at the time. However, by the estimate of one NGO, Safeguard Defenders, China operates as many as 54 unsanctioned “police stations” around the world, prompting a number of countries to launch investigations.

“Oh for sure, hands down,” Lhamo said. “It's very obvious that there will be Chinese government-funded entities here that are surveilling, constantly watching, hearing, listening and taking pictures of us.”

She said that did not affect the people’s love for the event, because “our community does not run on fear.”

“For us in exile, I think it's our utmost right to be able to practice the freedom that we have and continue fighting for our homeland, so that one day we can all return,” she said.