Songs of Kongpo with Tsering Wangmo
As a young Tibetan refugee in India, Tsering Wangmo Satho learned the traditional music and dances of her family’s homeland by watching and listening to the village elders – Particularly her mother Bhalu Satho, one of the main female folk singers in her community. Bhalu is illiterate and cannot speak English, but to this day, she can still sing over 400 traditional songs straight from memory, retaining an impressive library of music she learned as a child while growing up in the Kongpo region of Tibet.
After moving to America, Tsering began to spearhead the very first effort to formally collect and document these important regional folksongs by creating a book of lyrics and translations with Bhalu’s guidance. Her project has not only become a noble effort to preserve her people’s fading culture, but a deeply personal meditation on the transformative power of embracing one’s roots, as well as a testament to the special bond shared by mothers and daughters.