Voices From the Rooftop of the World, Part 2

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

As I wrote last week, Amy Yee’s just published Far From the Rooftop of the World: Travels Among Tibetan Refugees on Four Continents has a cinematic writing style that transports the reader to scenes as varied as a basketball game in Dharamsala between the Dalai Lama’s bodyguards and a raggedy team of rough-playing refugees, and a young Tibetan nun shot at by Chinese troops just 400 meters from the Nepal border. “This book,” Yee writes, “is not an academic history; neither is it a memoir. It is a close-up look at the lives of ordinary Tibetans in exile who make their way in the world far from their homeland.” It is that and much more. Yee combines her impressive reporting skills and journalistic instincts with the eyes and ears of a poet who sees the extraordinary in the ordinary and shines a warm and much-needed light on our shared humanity. I recently spoke with Yee by telephone from New York where—smack in the middle of a …