Jigme Norbu won’t embrace his uncle, but considers him to be among the wisest and most compassionate men on the planet. Norbu, 29, is the nephew of the 14th Dalai Lama, the self-exiled political and spiritual leader of Tibet who is considered by his followers to be the human embodiment of the region’s indigenous faith, Tibetan Buddhism.
In strict biological terms the Dalai Lama is blood kin to Norbu, but in the eyes of Tibetan culture he is the reincarnation of his predecessors, transcending, but not negating, familial relations.
“It’s hard sometimes,” says Norbu. “I don’t get next to him that often. I can’t just hug him or anything like that. You don’t do things like that. Sure I have an audience with him. Sure I see him. I respect him to the point where if I’m in India I don’t go see him every day. He’s got more important things to do. He’s got 6 million Tibetans to worry about.”
Norbu’s entry into the family business isn’t as unusual as how and where he went about it. And when one of your family elders happens to be the sovereign voice of an ancient and oppressed nation of millions, the prospect of following footsteps takes on a unique quality. Particularly in Indiana.
Norbu is the creator and owner of the Snow Lion, a chain of Tibetan restaurants with two locations in his adopted hometown of Bloomington and one in nearby Columbus. If his family business has been to increase awareness of the plight of the world’s Tibetans, Norbu has chosen to do so in epicurean fashion.
“Every day I serve a meal in my locations I feel good about it, like I’m doing my duty to serve His Holiness (Dalai Lama) and my people,” Norbu says. “My goal is to open a chain of Snow Lions, to get them nationally known and continue with this kind of information outreach.”
The cuisine
The Snow Lion, named for Tibet’s national symbol, serves deliberately inauthentic food. True Tibetan fare consists of dishes laden with liver, mutton, yak butter and fat, warming fuel for Tibetans battling harsh winters but daunting to American palates. It’s for this reason that Tibetan restaurants in America, including the short-lived Momo Cafe in Chicago, have been few and far between. The significance of the Snow Lion’s success is not lost on Norbu, who, in addition to serving native Tibetan dishes tempered with the cuisines of places as disparate as Nepal and Louisiana, makes available a small library of literature detailing the turbulent history of Tibet and making calls for its independence.
Tibet is a region of China surrounded by mountain ranges and situated atop a high plateau in Central Asia, earning it the title of “roof of the world.” Tibet was a land deeply isolated culturally and geographically from the rest of the world until it was invaded and occupied by China in the fall of 1950, shortly after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. A year later the Chinese signed an agreement giving Tibetans nominal autonomy as a people within China but continued to exercise firm control.
Tibetan resentment came to a head in March 1959, culminating in an unsuccessful uprising in the capital city of Lhasa that resulted in the Dalai Lama and thousands of his followers fleeing across the Himalayas to neighborhing India. The Tibetan expatriates were granted political asylum in India, where they created a government in exile in the city of Dharamsala that exists to this day. About 6 million Tibetans remain on their native soil under Chinese control.
Norbu’s father, Thubten Norbu, elder brother of the Dalai Lama, was among the first Tibetans to become a permanent resident of the United States, immigrating from Japan in 1955. After working in academia in Seattle and New York, including a stint as a curator at New York’s Museum of Natural History, Thubten accepted a teaching position in the religious studies department of Indiana University’s main campus in Bloomington in 1965. Thubten, his wife and their three sons were Bloomington’s first resident Tibetan family.
Cultural attraction
Thirty years later, there are but two such families living in Bloomington, but the Midwestern college town of 60,000 has emerged as an unlikely but important American destination for Tibetans the world over. Thubten, now retired, founded the Tibetan Cultural Center in 1980, funded exclusively by private donations.
The center, on 96 acres of donated farmland on the southern outskirts of town, hosts a yearlong program of workshops, seminars, educational programs and meditation sessions for all comers. The centerpiece of the well-manicured property is the Jangchub Chorten, a monument to the million and a half Tibetans who have perished during the Chinese occupation and to “all people who seek world peace and justice.” The Chorten was consecrated by the Dalai Lama during his Bloomington visit in 1987.
Born in New York City, Jigme Norbu was 7 months old when his family arrived in Bloomington. He completed all of his primary education in area schools except for three years in India and Japan. After graduating from Bloomington North High School in 1983, he returned to India to volunteer in a Tibetan children’s village, teaching English, science and math to orphans in Indian settlements.
Norbu made his first visit to Tibet at 15. His family was invited, he says, as guests of the Chinese government to view what was defined as improved living conditions for native Tibetans. But there, he says, he witnessed firsthand the widespread desecration inflicted by the Chinese, scars from the pillaging that occurred after the Tibetans’ 1959 flight to India, and continuing damage from the years since.
“I’d never seen the (destruction), but had heard about it through my parents’ stories, horror stories. It was like a holocaust. . . . Everywhere you go there’s the ruin of a monastery, seeing religious items on the ground, just thrown on the ground, like old religious writings, being in a facility where we weren’t supposed to go where they were using Tibetan prayer books as toilet paper . . . and just seeing in people’s faces how unhappy they were. . . . Everything was destroyed.”
Most unsettling was a visit to a Chinese-sanctioned museum of the communist occupation.
“The (Chinese) say, `Here’s what Tibet was before we communists came and took over,’ ” says Norbu, rocking more agitatedly in his chair. “Here we (Tibetans) are, we’re barbarians, we’re cannibals and here’s how we tortured people and cut off people’s hands and showed how we used skulls as teacups. . . . They projected everything as if we were so primitive before the communists came, and when communists came they rectified and made everything so nice for us. It’s just propaganda for the tourists.”
No vengeance
As appalling as Norbu considers the actions of the Chinese to be, he steadfastly holds to the same principles of tolerance and non-violence that earned the Dalai Lama the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.
“I don’t want to give people the idea that I hate the communist Chinese,” he says. “My wife’s Chinese; she’s from Taiwan. I totally am against their policy, but that’s it. Nothing can be resolved if we start hating everybody. . . . I love China, I’ve been to China, I love the Chinese people. . . . I’m at the Great Wall and there’s young kids, they’re wearing the (uniforms) of the army and have got guns, and here I am 15 or 16 years old and we’re conversing and playing. . . . Why would we hate these people? They don’t know any better either.”
Returning to Bloomington from his volunteer work in India, Norbu spent a year studying East Asian culture at Indiana University and a year studying international law at Asia University in Tokyo. Growing impatient with academic pursuits, he returned to Bloomington in 1987 to launch his career as a restaurateur.
Drawing from a lifetime of experience working what he estimates to have been every restaurant job known, Norbu opened his first Snow Lion in 1987. Popular among the university’s multicultural faculty and students, the restaurant soon expanded from 50 to 180 seats. Another Bloomington unit opened in 1994, followed this year by the Columbus location.
Norbu considers the Snow Lion in Columbus, a smaller industrial town, to be the prototype for his planned expansion throughout the U.S., the dining equivalent of the “but will it play in Peoria?” theater idiom.
When detailing his ambitious plans for the Snow Lion, Norbu’s discussions of his lineage quickly fall by the wayside as he lapses into impassioned business-speak, buzzwords like “volume” and “turnover” linger on his lips.
He discloses that he is eyeing Indianapolis and Chicago for his next two restaurants, and then, fond of the diversity afforded by college towns, he says he would like to open on each campus of the Big Ten Conference, licensing the Snow Lion name and concept to parties in each city for $40,000 plus 5 percent of their gross take.
“I don’t want people to come to the restaurant just because of the Dalai Lama,” Norbu says. “I want them to come because they like the food and they like the service and the quality, and then hopefully are interested in the culture. I’m not trying to convert anybody. . . . I’m trying to do my duty to preserve my culture.”
