China

Is it a nursery rhyme going through my head? Or just a saying? When I was little and we had spent a long evening out and about and were just pulling up to the front of our house, my mom would always say, “home again, home again, jiggity jig.”

That’s where I am now: back at my house in Oakland, California. After pulling a banner full of blue lights out of a silver bag at 11:30pm in front of the Olympic bird’s nest stadium in Beijing, getting arrested, being detained through the night in a smoky room, put on a 12 hour flight to New York city, waiting at the JFK airport for another 4, sitting through a flight to Oakland for 5 hours, waiting at the airport to be picked up, I finally arrived home at about 10:30pm last night. After 50 hours of no beds, no showers, lots of waiting, a bit of fear, excitement, not knowing what was next, boredom and exhiliration: here I am. Not sure what to do with myself. Not sure what to say.

8/19/08 in BeijingShortly before midnight this evening in Beijing, China, at the Olympic Park, five U.S. human rights activists were detained for holding an impromptu and unauthorized gathering in support of Tibet. One of the five individuals was Liza Smith, the national organizer for the Fellowship of Reconciliation's Colombia program.

John Richard Hersey, son of China missionaries, was perhaps able to bring a personal history of growing up in Asia to an unimaginable event in terms and tones that are both haunting and yet accessible. His story carries a quiet, deep respect for the Japanese victims, a humanizing story of their lives that brings them immediately and intimately to life. This is part of the power of his telling, which appeared as an article in The New Yorker in 1946. Doctors, secretaries, seamstress, mothers, priests, soldiers, and urban mix of everyday lives carry this cautionary tale.

The nexus of the coming summer Olympic Games and the weather catastrophes of recent months in China and Burma have opened a new window of curiosity and interest to the issues of Buddhism, Democracy, Globalization, Compassion and Spiritual leadership. Few are bettered positioned to provide insights than Iyer who met the Dalai Lama through visits with his father when a child and whose curiosity about the “East” has sustained him as a writer for decades, include frequent circlings through the presence of the Dalai Lama and Dharmasala.