NEW DELHI—Karma Tenzin knows that he will never be able to visit his mother in Tibet. He only wants to know if she is fine.
When he was 10 years old in 1994, Tenzin’s parents paid a professional smuggler 700 yuan (around $85, and around a year’s rural household income) to take him out of Tibet while the rest of the family stayed behind. He walked for 14 days with a group of 20 refugees in the punishing Himalayan weather, evading the Chinese police and border guards, and crossed over to Nepal, eventually reaching his current home of India.
