Larry Schwartz
When she performs live, Yungchen Lhamo chooses to sing alone, without musical accompaniment. “When I left Tibet, I lost my family and my culture,” she says. “So only one thing isn’t lost: my voice. If you have something special inside you, people can’t steal it from you.”
She speaks quietly, hesitating in her use of a language she has come to learn after fleeing across the Himalayas with a six-year-old son to the residence of the exiled Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, eight years ago.
“It was very, very difficult,” she says. “You had to be prepared to give your life.”
She took little with her besides a small supply of dry noodles and a traditional food made from barley. She and her son journeyed with five others including a Buddhist monk. They ran much of the way, sleeping just two hours or so a night, fearing robbers or
“spies” paid handsome bounties for capturing fugitives. She knew she might be jailed for 18 years if caught.
Yungchen married an Australian she met in Dharamsala and settled in Sydney in 1993. She won an ARIA award for her debut album, Tibetan Prayer, and has never forgotten the advice of her grandmother, who taught her some songs when she was five years old. “She said I should use that
for spiritual practice,” she says. “And I said to her I didn’t understand what she was talking about.”
She would come to regard her singing not just as entertainment but in terms of her commitment to the religious culture that has been undermined in her homeland during four decades under Chinese rule. Her biggest regret is that her grandmother died soon after she left the country, too
soon to hear the music created in exile.
Speaking from New York on the eve of her return to perform in Australia, she talks of song as a spiritual dedication. “When I perform, I always offer the music to Buddha,” she says. And her audience? “I hope they get blessings showered down.”
Yungchen’s extraordinary vocal prowess has won fans around the world. Critics have raved about the “sheer beauty” of her “diamond pure voice” and described her performance as “spellbinding”. She travels from continent to continent with her husband, Sam Doherty, as manager. The
holy men told him this was his duty, she says, and laughs. As a spokesman in song for her troubled people, she acknowledges her reverence of their spiritual leader. “For Tibetan people, he is the living Buddha,” says the singer whose music is banned by Chinese authorities in Tibet. “Not like
a celebrity. He’s very, very special.”
Interest in her music intensified after last year’s release of her second album. “There is a way of thinking, a way of living that has meaning,” she has written in liner notes to a song on the latest album, Coming Home, which was released on Peter Gabriel’s Real World label. “And it is the
happiness found on this path that we really should be searching for.”
At 32, she has found her place alongside the stars of the international music industry. She has played at New York’s Carnegie Hill on a bill with Michael Stipe, Natalie Merchant, Sheryl Crow and Philip Glass; and with Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson at London’s Festival Hall. She was at Lilith
Fair with Emmylou Harris, Jewel, Sarah McLaughlin and has toured Spain, Germany, Australia, Belgium, Switzerland and France.
“Australia is my second homeland,” says Yungchen, whose son, now 14, has returned to Dharamsala to study Tibetan culture. “But from 1995, I’ve travelled.”
Particularly on the latest album, produced in collaboration with the French artist Hector Zazou, she has managed to bridge the gap between traditional and contemporary sounds.
“Tibet is part of the modern world,” she says. “So if you are a creative artist, you have to do new things and then turn back to tradition. You need to keep your culture going.”
Yungchen remembers all too well the hardships of life outside Llaso, the Tibetan capital. She was one of six children; at 12, she was sent to work in a factory. For three years, she was refused permission to see her family. Two of her three brothers died of malnutrition. Her grandfather was
killed by Chinese authorities, her grandmother imprisoned, her father forced to flee and her mother sent to a labor camp.
Yungchen wants to see Tibet again. “I want to go back,” she says. “Because I have success and I have the taste of freedom. I want to show people what my freedom means.”
The Sunday Age, 14th of February 1999
Larry Schwartz Writer 