It’s no accident that I chose that title.  I wanted a phrase that would not rest easily in people’s minds, forcing them to pay attention to it.  But more importantly, I wished to communicate one of the book’s central themes.  As this historical novel is set in Tibet, it felt appropriate that the title reflected its Buddhist roots. 

Buddhists do not neatly separate things into mutually exclusive categories which we can clearly label as “good” or “bad.”  According to Buddhist thought, we are often on the path towards events or things which have both good and bad natures wrapped up within them simultaneously. 

An example that comes directly from FALLING TO HEAVEN would be Gerald’s intense desire to find a guru in Tibet.  He wishes for this, never knowing that it is only by being thrown into a Chinese prison for communist reeducation that he will meet his teacher.  This humble sage appears in the form of Lama Tenzin, whose compassion and profound wisdom keep Gerald alive through years of unspeakable torture.  

Thus, Gerald finds heaven in the hell of a prison cell. 

FALLING TO HEAVEN is also an invitation to examine your own life and look within the sometimes hellish challenges we face for their potential to help us ascend — and ultimately transcend — our comfortable, small-minded ways of doing things.

In 1996, I began working as a psychologist with survivors of torture and communist re-education from various parts of Asia.  These were people who couldn’t sleep more than a few hours a night, or who had panic attacks at the sight of a police officer, because it reminded them of their torturers.  Four years later I sat down and began writing, and what emerged was the story of two American Quakers who trek into Tibet in the 1950s just as the Chinese communists are invading.  I hadn’t planned to write a story about the persecution suffered by Tibetans at the hands of the Chinese, but I let the story lead me, and I poured into it all I knew from sitting in the same room with people who had survived the unthinkable. 

What I began in the year 2000 is now a novel called FALLING TO HEAVEN, and it has been published in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, and soon, in Spanish, worldwide.  

In FALLING TO HEAVEN, those two American trekkers are named Emma and Gerald, and they quickly form warm bonds with Dorje, a Tibetan neighbor. The communists suspect Gerald of teaching Tibetans capitalist ideas, and so the communists abduct both him and a member of Dorje’s family, throwing them into prison for “re-education.”  Dorje and his family, along with Emma, flee Tibet to go into exile. Told in three distinct voices rich in their respective spiritual traditions, FALLING TO HEAVEN is ultimately a novel about faith: losing it, and rediscovering it in places you’d never expect.  

It is my hope that FALLING TO HEAVEN will help readers experience the Tibetan struggle on a personal level.  I will be reading from the book at Summerthymes Café on September 30^th.  As I prepare for my trip to Grass Valley, I feel great excitement because of the enormous enthusiasm of my hosts, Sierra Friends of Tibet.  SFOT is a local group dedicated to raising awareness of issues facing Tibetans.  The group is spearheaded by Joseph Guida, who also hosts two radio programs on the subject: Tibet World Service on KVMR and the Tibetan Radio Hour streaming live on www.openmindradio.com.  Both programs are heard all over the world thanks to the Internet.  According to Joseph Guida, who tracks the origins of the website’s visitors, people from all over the globe tune in to listen to the programs, including listeners in China. 

So here is Grass Valley, California, a relatively small community tucked under the wing of the Sierra Nevadas, having an enormous reach across the planet.  I look forward to being a part of it.

My first radio interview is on KVMR on Labor Day (9/6/2010) at 12:25pm (Pacific Time). You can catch it live streaming on the Internet at http://www.kvmr.org/webcast.html. 

So for the first time in my life, I’m writing talking points.

I have mostly heard that phrase — talking points – from liberals (like myself) criticizing the far right for approaching every interview with a set of talking points provided by the Republican Party. 

Consequently, I have always viewed talking points with deep scorn — as a form of speech used by conservative automatons.  Of course, I never minded when liberal automatons used their own talking points, which they do, because, well, those talking points made sense to me. 

Now I’m training myself to be a talking point automaton too, so that I won’t sound like a blithering numskull or fill the air waves with a spectacular number of “Ummmmms.”   

So tune in.  Afterwards, you can tell me where I fell within the spectrum between Automaton and Blithering Numskull.

At many of the book signing events for FALLING TO HEAVEN, people have asked me about whether I’d like to go back to Tibet.   There is this expectation, I think, that I’ll get misty-eyed and say something like, “Oh yes, I would live there if I could.”

But my answer is, unequivocally, “No.”   During the several years since 2003, when I was in Tibet, I’ve felt rather sheepish, even guilty, about my lack of desire to return.  Didn’t I love it enough to write a book about it, after all?

There are some natural inconveniences built into going to Tibet.  There’s the adjustment to the altitude, which takes a few days in which your heart pounds when you even stand up from your chair and going up a flight of stairs makes you feel like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn.  There’s the poor hygiene, which led me to eat mostly fried rice with egg during most of my time there, and of course, the bathrooms, whose stenchy horrors defy description.

But that doesn’t explain my rejection of a return visit.  I’ve dealt with other unhygienic places in which adjustment to local conditions required some effort.

It wasn’t until I read a recent article in the New York Times that I could put my finger on the exact reason for my discomfort.  The article is entitled, “China’s Money and Migrants Pour into Tibet,” by Edward Wong.  This piece covers a wide range of issues affecting Tibetans today, enumerating the factors that exacerbate the discontent among Tibetans.

The part that struck me involved a description of the Barkhor area.  The Barkhor is a sort of plaza where there are many vendors and a lot of pilgrims.  The Barkhor sprang up around the Jokhang Temple, one of the most famous temples in Tibet.  Standing right outside the temple on any given day, one can see the faithful doing their prostrations.  Many of them wear leather aprons and mitts for this purpose, which can signify that their current prostrations are simply part of a larger pilgrimage — pilgrimages can last for months, in which literally every inch of ground covered was done by means of prostrations in Tibet’s dry rocky soil.  Some people in the Barkhor area are doing a simple set of koras, or circumambulations on a set clockwise path around the temple and plaza.  All of these practices are believed by Tibetan Buddhists to accumulate merit towards a more favorable rebirth in the next lifetime (as a human, for example, instead of as a yak). 

The Barkhor of today is patrolled by paramilitary troops in riot gear.  They march counterclockwise, disrupting the clockwise route of pilgrims. 

Worshippers go into the temple to pay their respects.  Ah, but, actually they can’t quite do that normally either, as pictures of the Dalai Lama are banned everywhere in Tibet, even inside the temple and within private homes. 

Imagine going to your place of worship, ready to connect with your God/gods, and being greeted by police in riot gear.  Wouldn’t that be a bit distracting?  Perhaps even intimidating, or terrifying?  Picture a Christian church without any crosses — or a synagogue without a star of David anywhere in it?

In reality, the comparison I’m making here is a failure.  We westerners live in very secular societies, so it is difficult for us to comprehend the level of intrusion Tibetans experience, as religion is so much more central to their lives than it is to ours.   

The fact is, I have absolutely no desire to visit Tibet again.  And reading about the police in riot gear and the rest helped me to pinpoint why that is.  Even though there were no police in riot gear in 2003, I could not forget that I was visiting an occupied country.  When I paid my Chinese coins to get into the Tibetan monasteries, it was impossible not to think of whose pockets I was lining.  The Chinese have cleared the monasteries of thousands of monks and thus disrupted the transmission of teachings/trainings that are centuries old.  And then they charge admission for you to go in and have the tourist-y Shangri-la experience of walking through those gorgeous but somewhat empty edifices.

There was a pall hanging over the Barkhor that arose from something else as well: desperate beggars.  In all my travels through Mexico, Chile, and even more geographically similarly, Kathmandu, I’ve never seen beggars like I saw in Lhasa, while in the Barkhor area.  There was a desperation that bordered on aggression.  If you gave money to one, you would be immediately surrounded by 15 more.  When I ran out of bills to give them, they fought over the bills I had given.  At one point, a child beggar made such a beeline towards me that he ran into a passing rickshaw and fell down.  (He was okay).

These days, a lot of people are going on trips to see the glaciers in Alaska before they all melt and disappear forever from global warming. 

Perhaps these folks have the same thought I had in Tibet about witnessing what’s before them: Precious, but doomed.

One of the scenes in FALLING TO HEAVEN involves the concept of “eating the air.”  It takes place in a prison cell, and a Tibetan lama tells his fellow prisoner Gerald, an American Quaker, that when there isn’t much food, you must “eat the air.”  In this scene, Lama Tenzin describes this advice as a “lama secret,” but in fact it did not come from a Tibetan source. 

I first heard the phrase “eat the air” from a Vietnamese man who’d spent ten years in a communist reeducation camp in the 1970s.  He’d nearly starved to death during his imprisonment, and he said that another prisoner had advised him to do this.  The wisdom in this advice is deeper than you might immediately perceive, but as I thought over the phrase it became clear to me that in fact, eating the air was likely a very wise thing to do.

Eating the air means simply, to breathe deeply, as if the air had the nourishment value of food.  The wisdom of this advice lies in what happens to the body when we breathe deeply.  If you think of the body as a car, then breathing deeply is like slipping it into park.  And when you shift your car into park, what happens to your fuel consumption?  It goes down.  It’s certainly lower than when you’re in acceleration mode.  So by breathing deeply, you’re slowing the heart rate and easing off the gas on the fight/flight system.  As we know, once the body has used up all the fat stores, it begins attacking muscle and using that as fuel, as during starvation.  So in fact, eating the air would likely help you to survive by conserving the fuel in the body.

That is the most frequently asked question thus far at my book readings. People want to know how I put in the sensory and cultural details that make readers feel like they are in Tibet as they read the book.

Once I realized the enormity of what I was undertaking in writing a book about Quakers and about Tibetans, I got my hands very dirty doing research. I started at the San Diego Library, checking out every book available about Tibet. There was so much to figure out:

What was the societal structure of Tibet at that time?
The governmental structure?
The climate?
The animals with which Tibetans would be familiar?
The daily foods eaten?
Types of jobs that people hold there?
How do people get an education?
Where do they go to the bathroom?
How often do they wash?
How do they wash clothes?
Cook food?
What does the furniture look like?
What are their birth practices?
The death practices?

I could never have done so much research if I hadn’t been utterly fascinated by what I was reading. And these were just the books! Still to come were the movies, the workshops, the attendance at dharma talks at the local Tibetan Buddhist monastery, the interviews, and travel to Tibet as well.

I knew that I needed to be able to write in the sensory details (sights, sounds, smells, tastes, sensations) in every single paragraph, or readers would just say, “Ho hum. Time to go to bed,” and wouldn’t feel they’d traveled anywhere in their reading.

Then there was the Quaker part of the research. But that’s another blog!

I’ve been reading a thought-provoking book entitled: Stones from the River, by Ursula Hegi. Pretty amazing piece of historical fiction about Nazi Germany.

What strikes me is the parallel between the experiences of the Germans (both Jewish and non-Jewish Germans) under the Third Reich and the experiences of the Chinese under their repressive government. Anyone who harbored Jews or tried to defend them during Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship was likely to suffer in some of the same ways the Jews themselves suffered (losing one’s job, losing one’s freedom, or worst of all, being sent to a concentration camp). And this is the same sort of thing the Chinese government is doing by revoking the licenses of lawyers who defend the rights of dissidents, Falun Gong members, and Tibetans.

In both situations, individuals are continually presented with a narrow set of choices: conform/go along with the repression, or resist it. Of course, within those two choices is an enormous latitude. You can take to the streets in protest, or you can quietly give food to those who are suffering, or you can hide Jews, or you can stay in the shadows and do nothing at all to register your opinion on the matter.

It’s easy, from this distance, living under a government that’s not so repressive, to judge. To say that I’d do this or that if I were in that situation. But the fact is, I am in that situation. Darfur — what have I done about that lately? Mmmm…Guantanamo — don’t really remember the last time I expressed an opinion about what my tax dollars are doing there.

Lifting a finger to help. It’s not so difficult to do here — the cost for me is not so great.

And as I understand it, some of the lawyers who were threatened with disbarment had only offered to defend Tibetans. They hadn’t even had a chance to do it yet.

I was just listening to NPR, and apparently some Chinese lawyers who have taken on human rights cases have been disbarred by the Chinese government. Some of these lawyers had defended Falun Gong sect members and Tibetans in cases of human rights abuses by the Chinese government. Wow, if that’s not a strong statement about how completely the Chinese government feels it can ignore human rights, I don’t know what is. No separate judicial system there — it is the executive branch of Chinese government saying, “I’m the decider.”

There was a statement from one of the disbarred lawyers, saying that he felt the government was gathering evidence against him to throw him into prison eventually.

It makes me think about some of the reactions I’ve gotten regarding my book, FALLING TO HEAVEN, which is a novel about the Chinese takeover in Tibet. Someone asked me, “Are you pro-Dalai Lama?” I had to stop and consider the question as a larger one, that is, is my book essentially a political book? An anti-Chinese book?

Well, here’s what I can say. Yes, the book is unabashedly from a Tibetan point of view, which tends to mean that it’s going to be pro-Dalai Lama. But the bigger issue is, no, FALLING TO HEAVEN isn’t an anti-Chinese book. It’s a pro-human rights book. And in the book are all sorts of scenes of Chinese citizens suffering right alongside Tibetans from the repressive Communist Party government. Which brings me back to the story I heard on NPR — imagine, disbarring a lawyer for defending someone’s human rights, like the right to not be tortured or sent to prison for one’s beliefs? Now that’s a pretty open repudiation of the importance of human rights.

Many other regions were targets of communist “evangelical” zeal, including Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Korea and Afghanistan. But the invasion of Tibet was different because it was so isolated from the rest of the world.  This isolation meant that Tibet had no acquaintance with concepts like Marxism, and it also had almost no acquaintance with technology.  In the other target areas, the inhabitants were at least using the telegraph, telephones, cars, trains, airplanes, radios.

To get a sense of this, picture yourself in a place in which everyone’s main aim is to gain merit in order to be reborn more favorably in the next life.  You’ve never even dreamed of a telephone.  A wireless radio is a conundrum, a box with spirits in it.  There are no roads, only footpaths.  The only “vehicles” used are animals.  You value your religion so highly that you use the Himalayas to keep all other influences out.  Religious practices that were passed down for centuries are preserved with reverence and care in Tibet’s monasteries.

A defense budget?  Why have one?  Killing destroys one’s karma, after all.

The Chinese rolled into Tibet in tanks, in trucks and on airplanes, all of which had never been seen before by most Tibetans.  Tibetan society looked like a feudal system to the invaders.          How in the world could these two groups of people understand each other?  And what chance did Tibet, as a pacifist country, have in protecting itself against the Chinese?

History, even up to this past year with the protests during the Olympic torch relay, has given us a very disturbing answer to these questions.

I can only say that FALLING TO HEAVEN first came out of the ether.  By this I mean that the seed for the book came out of my pen one day as I was free-writing.  What first emerged, without my planning it, was a letter from Emma to Genevieve describing the danger Emma found herself in.  I was rather astonished, because I’d had no plans to write any such thing!  As long as I sat down and let the pen do its thing, the story continued to emerge.  That is not to say that I thought it all up the whole way.  Once I realized what seemed to be trying to come forth, I began to research Tibet and Chinese communism assiduously, with books spread all over my kitchen floor to address thousands of questions: What does the food smell like?  What sorts of trees do they have there?  Animals?  Calendar?  Climate?  Exactly how did the Chinese impose their will on Tibetans?  There are many accounts written by both Chinese and Tibetan authors about what it was like to live through those years of political upheaval, and therefore my plot was very much inspired by these accounts.