Voices From the Rooftop of the World

A conversation with Amy Yee, award-winning journalist and author of “Far From the Rooftop of the World: Travels Among Tibetan Refugees on Four Continents.”

Amy Yee in Lalibela, Ethiopia. Photo: Amy Yee

By Michael Judge

I first met Amy Yee in Hong Kong some two decades ago when I published a piece of hers on the Chinese-American poet and fiction writer Ha Jin in The Asian Wall Street Journal, quickly followed by a beautiful piece with a Lhasa dateline on an extraordinary school that strives to “aid the growing numbers of needy and neglected Tibetan children.”

Interestingly, these two stories serve to illustrate much of what we discuss in our conversation below a quarter-century later—cultural identity, life in exile, and the injustices and indignities suffered by the Tibetan people since China’s 1950 invasion of Tibet and the Dalai Lama’s 1959 escape to India and settlement in Dharamsala, home to the Tibetan government in exile.

The Dalai Lama was followed into exile by more than 80,000 Tibetans, most of whom settled in Dharamsala and have never returned to their homeland. These Tibetan refugees—longing for home while working to sustain their…