Dear China, I’ve always loved your food.  As a child, when my mother would announce “Get your shoes—we’re going to The Jade Spoon” I’d swoon to thoughts of Hunan, garlic, black bean—how you marry sweet with sour always seemed, to me, a Taoist practice.  Each dumpling wrapped with such precision.  Today, as a vegetarian, I am humbled by what only you can do with tofu.

Dear China,

I cherish your language.  The lilt and flutter of those tones so like morning larks courting at daybreak.  The precise geometry of your carefully scripted characters—how the meanings of two kanji in concert give birth to a uniquely new, creative entity—like how the character for person plus the number 2, becomes compassion.

Dear China,

I revere your ancestral medicinal practices—God knows when my back is out of whack those pins you strategically place at the base of my spine are the only things saving me from pain.  Ironic, though, because Dear China,

the role you’ve played in the modern age—the aid you gave and trade you engage in with genocide minds, to which you turn a blind eye, and the lines you’ve drawn and redrawn in Tibet—an arid, barren plateau—hoping to blot out the greatest light the world has ever known, for no other reason than to fit your agenda for hegemony and supremacy—leaves me painfully trying to reconcile all the gifts you’ve given the world, with what you’ve been doing to it lately…

October 7, 1950 – On the heels of the creation of the People’s Republic, you first entered eastern Tibet, and with the efficiency of fighter jets, surrounded towns, lectured the surrendered on the tenets of socialism, and offered monetary handouts—a curiously capitalist buy-out with a communist agenda, you claimed it as an act of compassion toward your otherwise backwards neighbors.

Later that year you marched with drums to Lhasa and publicly announced your plans for Tibet’s peaceful liberation from quote—“the oppression of tyrannical Buddhism”.  The phrase alone raised eyebrows.  For over a thousand years this kingdom on high had existed in reclusive harmony.  What were your motives?  Fear of anarchy?  Devoid of natural resources, free of international allegiances, dry as a dry pond, it offered nothing to plunder, it posed no threat.  Sometimes, the scariest crimes are committed not by those with nothing to lose, but those with no hope to gain.

Feigning concern, you coerced the Dalai Lama—then sixteen—into surrendering control of his meager defenses, in the interests of his people.  In eight years time he would see through your screens, and be forced to flee, for his own safety, to never return.

Tibetans separated from their spiritual leader, your legislation in place, The People’s Liberation Army as the new face of Asia, the state as religion, and Mao sitting in God’s chair, the Cultural Revolution started colonizing.  You imposed martial law, prohibited foreign visitors, and banned freedom of expression.  The stranglehold began to squeeze—you seized resources, commandeered stores of food, and outlawed simple livelihoods, like animal husbandry.  In a place where so few crops grow, how else can a people eat?

For decades to come, you locked monks and nuns in their own monasteries, effecting prisons of worship for the devoted, and instituted patriotic reeducation campaigns—“renounce Buddhism and denounce the Dalai Lama” (x3) as a heretic, or face more severe conditioning.  Ironic how your atheist agents echoed Imperialist Catholics with ultimatums for New World natives, but you could never convert the faithful, could you?  You hung them naked by their own skin from ceilings like light bulbs, flogged them with metal rods, shoved cattle prods down their throats, stole their teeth and nails, but they burned on.  Fifty years later, you still can’t break their resolve, so

in the name of the state—and defending it from perceived threats—you have to date, left millions of Tibetans unaccounted for and dead from military aggression, execution, torture, famine, neglect, suicide…

but what strikes me wide open is when a single monk, imprisoned and tortured for half his lifetime, blind in one eye, missing fingers, and disfigured beyond his years, escapes to say, with a quiet smile,

“Being a prisoner was the greatest blessing karma could ever bestow, the noblest lesson I’ll ever know.  I have no hate in my heart for those who tortured me, only sympathy, for they see me as an enemy, and the surface hurt that my scars hide, is nothing next to the suffering they endure inside.”

Admittedly, I understand genocide on the crudest level.  And I’m no boddhisatva, but I etched this tattoo on my arm—this character for person plus the number 2—as a charm—to internalize compassion in your language—to not hate you.  A paradoxical inscription, I thought the irony could permeate me, render me merciful anatomically—make me love you as enemy.  But it hasn’t.  And as you continue to do what you do, this simple glyph reveals a glaring rift in the way you exploit the world with how my heart works.  And you are the largest living organism on the planet, and I am a single entity with relatively little power to affect it.

So as I watch my government pay the world lip service, condemning your actions while it scratches your back, you continue to strangle an already breathless people, deaf to the din of your own paranoid drummer, and all I could do to protest was refuse to  watch the Olympics last summer.

alex o. bleecker