World events always have an audience in Toronto. Immigrants congregate here while keeping one eye on the situation back home. This past March, when violence erupted in Lhasa, Tibet, Parkdale was the local hub for worried expats. The neighbourhood, a long-time magnet for the downtrodden, is currently home to more than 2,000 people from the roof of the world. They eat at Tibet Kitchen and 1959 café, and shop at Shangri-La Produce for their groceries and Tibetan Emporium for traditional chupa dance costumes. Local schools now have significant Tibetan populations. At Parkdale Collegiate, nearly 200 of the 600 students have Tibetan parents.

Many Tibetans are schooled in their ancestry from childhood, and can take you back 2,000 years during the course of a cup of sweet, milky tea. Entangled with China, Mongolia, Bhutan and India, Tibet’s history is famously complicated and contentious. Pictures of the Dalai Lama are currently illegal inside the Chinese-controlled region, and teaching of the Tibetan language discouraged. For 49 years, Tibetans have commemorated the unsuccessful uprising that forced the Dalai Lama to escape over the mountains into India, establishing his exile government in the northern city of Dharamsala. His laypeople trickled out steadily after him, and today an estimated 150,000 live in countries outside of Tibet. Most settle for at least a time in India, Nepal or Bhutan, where sympathetic governments have given them land for farms and schools. But those countries do not afford citizenship as a birthright, so the grandchildren of the original exiles are still categorized as refugees.

Canada’s refugee board has been especially welcoming to Tibetans. Cheap rent drew the first arrivals to Parkdale, and they’ve clustered there ever since. Flags adorned with snow lions beneath red and blue rays, banned in Tibet, flutter from the balconies of crumbling ’70s apartments along Jameson and West Lodge.

Despite the constant uprooting that has landed them in Toronto, they smile often—a smile that involves showing a full top row of teeth. Here, they can be citizens if they choose, teach their children their own language, and they can hang pictures of the Dalai Lama in their living rooms. On the journey toward nirvana, this is not such a bad pit stop.