Yangzom Lama, Tsering

Tsering Yangzom Lama was born and raised in Nepal to exiled Tibetan parents. She has since lived in Vancouver, Toronto, and New York City. Her writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Malahat Review, Grain, Kenyon Review, Vela, LaLit, and Himal Southasian, as well as several anthologies, including Old Demons New Deities: 21 Short Stories from Tibet and House of Snow: An Anthology of the Greatest Writing About Nepal. She is also a co-founder of Lhakar Diaries, a leading English-language blog among Tibetan youth in exile. In We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies (Bloomsbury Publishing), a novel spanning 50 years and three generations, the plight of two Tibetan sisters unfolds. In the wake of China’s invasion of Tibet, Lhamo and her younger sister, Tenkyi, arrive at a refugee camp in Nepal. They have made it across the Himalayas, but their parents have not. Decades later, Lhamo subsists by selling trinkets to tourists near Kathmandu; Tenkyi, living in Toronto, cleans hotel rooms, and Lhamo’s daughter, Dolma, an aspiring Tibetan scholar studying in Canada, lives with her aunt. This is a novel about their life in exile, stories of survival, and desperate holding on to culture and family.