Harassed, afraid, a North Country immigrant fights back with love
Tenzin Dorjee did everything he was supposed to do and more. He became naturalized as a U.S. citizen six years ago. He co-owns the Himalaya...
Nov 17, 2016 — Tenzin Dorjee did everything he was supposed to do and more. He became naturalized as a U.S. citizen six years ago. He co-owns the Himalaya Restaurant in Plattsburgh, which now has a second location. Each year, he helps organize a festival that brings in musicians and artists from across the country and overseas.
He’s put in hundreds of hours building the city’s cultural diversity. Lately, something else is consuming his energy: fear.
Since Election Day, there has been a wave of hate directed at minority groups across the U.S. Intimidation. Harassment. Swastikas. The Southern Poverty Law Center counted over 400 such incidents in the week after the election.
After being repeatedly harassed himself, Dorjee is struggling to make sense of this moment, and trying to figure out how to fight back.
Update, 12/27/2016: After this story was published there was an outpouring of support for the Dorjee family.
Dorjee grew up in Bhutan. Over the years he’s been singled out a few times in Plattsburgh, but it was just “minor stuff. They trash all my flowerpots and stuff,” he said. “This feels very different.”
It was Wednesday of last week, the day after Donald Trump was elected. Dorjee was walking into Walmart when he ran into two men wearing camouflage jackets. “It was a couple of guys standing next to a couple of trucks. And that’s when they say, ‘Hey chink, get the f— out of my country. Go back to where you came from.’ And I just smiled at them.”
He sighed. “Then it happened again.”
Just a few steps away, two other people used the same racial slur. “I felt very uncomfortable, unsafe,” Dorjee said, and he never made it into Walmart. “I just turned around and went back home.”
Then, a couple of days later, he was out running errands when two older men in a car cut him off on purpose, he said, and flashed him the middle finger. The fact that they were elderly people broke his heart. “That was something that I wasn’t expecting.”
Dorjee is culturally Tibetan, and his family came to the U.S. to escape persecution from the Chinese government. Once, he said, agents of the Chinese government caught up with them in India, and he was beaten so badly it took him three weeks to recover.
He came here to get away from all that. And for the most part, the North Country has embraced the Dorjees. They’re well liked and widely respected for organizing the annual Tibetan arts and culture festival. In 2015, local artists built a permanent mandala tile mural into the side of a building downtown to honor Tibetan traditions. At the unveiling, Dorjee smiled and appeared to be overwhelmed. He told the crowd that Plattsburgh is full of honorary Tibetans.
“I’ve always been asked this question of 'how many Tibetan families are there in Plattsburgh?' And I’ve always said plenty. And this goes to prove that whatever I said about my family in Plattsburgh is correct…The hearts that I have here are Tibetan,” he says in Arts in Exile, a Mountain Lake PBS documentary about the festival.
Now, Dorjee is frightened for his family’s safety. On Facebook he wrote a long, emotional post, which said in part,
“As fear overtakes me for the protection of my family and myself I am now joining the group that believes in right to own firearms."
He continued, "It is a sad decision for me as I believe in compassion but as a family man and human I have faults and it has driven me to the conclusion that a weapon of destruction is my only safeguard against the hate that has been directed against the color of my skin and political beliefs.”
Dorjee is a practicing Buddhist. Being peaceful is a huge part of his religion and identity. But he felt like he didn’t have any other options. He planned to buy a shotgun for the house, and get a license for a concealed carry pistol.
It was a dark, low moment, Dorjee said. Then he heard from friends, and he slept on it.
“I got around to thinking, and then my community members, of course they’ve been very supportive on my Facebook, and then I’ve had community members come up to me and say 'Tenzin, we are behind you all the way.' And when I look at that kind of support, then I do not feel the need to bear any kind of firearms, because that is my firearm.”
Instead of guns, he’s buying a new security camera. He’s also hoping to help organize a forum about racism and xenophobia. Leaders from the city and town said they think that’s a great idea.
In the meantime, people are on edge. Recently, a rumor ran around SUNY Plattsburgh about the KKK. University Police sent an email reassuring students that they’ve looked into it and there is no evidence of KKK activity in the area.
On Monday, Dorjee’s car was vandalized while it was parked outside of his house. He’s not sure if it’s a racial thing, but he thinks so, since it’s never happened before in the nine years he’s lived here.
Dorjee plans to fight back with compassion. In a Facebook post about the car, he wrote, “Bring it on. Your hate is not going to change me into you.”
Correction: The original version of this story said Dorjee was attacked by Chinese government officials. Dorjee said he was attacked by agents working on their behalf.
