Born at Lenox Hill Hospital in the big bustling city of Manhattan, New York, and weighing in at a hefty eight pounds was Pema Youdon Alatsang, named by her uncle, His Eminence Gyang Khang Khentrul Rinpoche. Pema, a shy Tibetan girl with long, thick, black hair and almost evenly toned brown skin, at the age of two was sent to India where she lived with her uncle until she reached about the age of three and her parents came back into the picture. After taking a year off to get their life together and prepare to take on the full responsibility of parenthood, Pema’s parents moved her across the globe to live with them in Bolinas, California. This quaint little hippie town was where her Mother, Sonam, and her father, Tenzin, were convinced, by Tenzin’s American adoptive mother, to start a new life and escape the …show more content…
The Alatsang family spent about two years in Bolinas when a new member stepped into the picture. Born in Greenbrae, California at Marin General Hospital was a three pounded premature little girl. Now, although Pema had always believed that the first miracle in her life was her own birth, the survival of her sister, Julia Alatsang, was definitely highly ranked to about the second miracle.
Julia, named after Julia Roberts, spent only three days in Marin General Hospital before being transferred to the UCSF Medical Center, which was better equipped to take care of a premature baby. Although Pema didn’t think much about it in the years following, she could still remember visiting her particularly quiet baby sister, Julia, in the hospital for about two months while she was hooked up to machines which assured that she would keep breathing. Pema also remembered seeing this freakishly slender, wrinkled, reddish purple baby, with skin so