Yungchen Lhamo fled Tibet to escape a life of persecution. Now the West can enjoy her remarkable sound, writes Arminta Wallace.

Think Björk singing sean-nós, crossed with Sinéad O'Connor at her most cosmic, and you have some idea of what Yungchen Lhamo's virtuoso vocals sound like. Her tone, of course, is all her own. The voice plunges from the CD player, sometimes childlike and plangent, often impossibly ethereal, occasionally in a howl of despair. So much for the singing voice. When she speaks, Lhamo sounds like nobody else you've ever heard. Even on the phone from her apartment, halfway across the planet in the New York borough of Queens, the Tibetan diva projects a personality so vivid that she appears to be physically present in the room.

Not that she's floating gently somewhere above your head, mind you. It's more like having a conversation with one of those cartoon women who deliver a sucker punch with every sentence: Pow! Biff! Wham! She is, in a word, amazing.

Partly this is to do with the extraordinary story she tells. Mostly it's to do with the way she tells it - though in Tibet, she says, such a story is not extraordinary at all. As related in Lhamo's expressive, rapid-fire English, this is how it begins: "Most people know what happened inside Tibet because of the Chinese. For me, I grew up in a labour camp. My grandfather was killed by the Chinese because he practised Buddhism. And then my grandmother was many, many years in jail, and she also got punishment. At that time Chinese were saying religion is poison. Superstition. So they destroying monasteries, sending monks, nuns to different places. My father is monk, my mother is nun. Six children - three brother and three sister - all born in labour camp. So . . . oh. Difficult to talk about, all this. There's no food, so therefore two of my brothers died of malnutrition. So then I become oldest, and my mother said I must go to find some food. At that time everybody had to work. Go to school in the morning, then everybody had to go in the fields - so there's no much studies. When I was age 13 I had to go to full-time job in a factory very, very far from my parents . . ."

She didn't meet her father until she was eight, she adds; his life was in danger, so he was forced to flee, leaving her mother with six small children. "Many people told her he was dead. These stories sent around because at that time it wasn't like now, when there is so much technology. Then, even if people know the truth, nobody telling you the truth. Everybody living in fear."

Eventually, Lhamo decided to leave Tibet with her five-year-old son. In the West, she observes, the idea of crossing the Himalayas is regarded as glamorous, an expedition. "Actually, this is not like one-week trek, you know? For Tibetans to cross Himalayas means to give up your life. Also, the journey was not easy. Many people died from hunger. The weather was bad; there was no road. I mean, there is border into Nepal, but for this you need documents. So, you know, I'm lucky that we survived."

Lhamo and her son made it to Nepal, and then to India, where she met the man who made all the risks worthwhile: the Dalai Lama. "For Westerners maybe he's a celebrity, but for us Tibetans he is special," she says. "We can't explain it very easily. He is our spiritual leader and political leader. And also, for me, I want to find out why my mother and my grandmother had so much faith in him."

And did she? "When we see him there's so much tears, and so much stories have to be told which is sad and happy and everything's together," is how Lhamo puts it. After a couple of years in India she moved to Sydney, then to New York. And now, having recorded a couple of CDs for Peter Gabriel's Real World record label and attracted praise from music critics, she is something of a celebrity herself.

But for a Tibetan Buddhist, raised on a diet of loving compassion for all creation, Western life has proved something of a puzzle. "When I was on the plane I thought people must be so happy, this is free country, and the people must be very cheerful. But then after I landed I saw that people didn't really smile. That if you say hello they get afraid. Took me three or four years to understand why.

"Why? The first week I thought maybe this person little bit sick - maybe he has pain, you know? For me this was much more difficult than crossing Himalayan mountains. In New York some of the Tibetans would say, 'Oh, Yungchen, please don't say hello to people. Here, people don't like.' I said why, I like these people. Different looking. Different culture. But they say, 'Yungchen, please don't smiling - people think you want something.' I said no, I have something I would like to give them."

The gift, it turns out, is her glorious a-cappella singing - and in this she has refused to compromise. Listen to Lhamo's album Coming Home, produced by Hector Zazou, and you get the snazzy, sophisticated version of her voice, all digital samples and trancelike rhythms.

Go to a live concert, such as her appearance tomorrow at the Sionna festival, in Limerick, or at the O'Reilly Theatre, in Dublin, and you get the real deal. Just the voice. No high-tech tricks.

Lhamo's earliest recordings were made as aids to meditation, and she says she wants to preserve that simplicity, both spiritual and musical, in performance. "When I said I would like to do concert, people said you must have a band. I said no. And then they said you need to have rhythm, otherwise people don't understand you; in the West people cannot concentrate if you're singing, they don't know how. But I said no. Human beings same everywhere. If you have the karma, people come."

Her songs are intended to give spiritual sustenance, but not of the superficial kind. People who come to her concerts, she says, often express a desire to convert to Buddhism. "I don't wish everybody become Buddhist, you know? Buddhism not just go to temple and blah blah and then finish, you know? From morning until go to sleep, it's a practice."

Meanwhile, Lhamo is preparing for her visit to Ireland - and hoping against hope that her mother, who has also left Tibet, will be able to get a visa to come to one of her concerts here. Her father, she says, is still in hiding. It would be better if she didn't mention where her mother is living. Will she herself ever be able to go back to Tibet? "I try to go back to Tibet every day," she says. "On train, on bus, on plane, I always thinking I go to Tibet. And everywhere I go, I make myself like home. If I go to office meeting, wherever I sit I think this is my home. Helps me to . . . not feel lost."

Yungchen Lhamo is at St Mary's Cathedral, Limerick, tomorrow and at the O'Reilly Theatre, Dublin, on Wednesday