I had lost a friend some time back, but I am glad that I have got the relationship back. I know this sounds strange, but I am talking about meditation.

Many seem to associate meditation with religion. There are the statues of Buddha in deep meditation; the strange lotus posture of practitioners, often in a room reeking of incense; and the reference to bizarre words like Vajrayana and Vipassana.

Meditation is, however, neither exotic nor mysterious. It is a down-to-earth activity that has been a part of practically every ancient tradition of developing yourself. It is a practice that brings peace and calm, helps you overcome tension and lets you focus on whatever means the most to you.

I started exploring when I was in Nepal. Whether it was the ever-present beauty of the snow-capped mountains or the simple, sturdy belief of the hill people in ‘going inside,’ I was intrigued enough to give it a try. I visited the Swayambhunath and Bouddhanath temples, as all tourists do, and I loved the elegance of the Lumbini monastery and the peace and quiet of the Kopan monastery. But it was the modest Seto Gumpa that had my steadfast loyalty.

Rimpoche Chokyi Nima is a pleasant middle-aged person. He has a strong build and a soft voice. For a spiritual person he has a singularly earthy style, and speaks on the most esoteric themes in the most pragmatic way. He will readily show you around the monastery and explain its procedures, but he seems most at home answering your questions at length. No question is too basic or too silly for him. He answers you simply, clearly and with utmost humility.

He helped me realize how much my past training restricts my view of myself. If I break my leg or develop high fever, I go to the doctor and take a medicine. Short of that, I rarely notice what is happening in my own body. I eat at certain hours, but I seldom notice a twinge of hunger. I work during the day, as I am supposed to do, but scarcely observe any special pleasure or discomfort while doing it. My body may be telling me of a certain unease, but I would usually ignore it until it became onerous.
​
Take another example. If my colleague was rude or my client insulted me, I would nurse my pain in silence, because that is the ‘manly’ thing to do. At best, if I shared it with a friend, he would probably curse the perpetrator and urge me to ignore it. But the pain would persist and would fade only with time.

Yet there is a better answer. All pain, like all joy, comes through the mind, and our mind is usually like an untrained horse, running unruly in different directions. There is a simple way to discipline that horse and exercise significant control over what we allow to upset or exhilarate us. Meditation, the simple act of sitting quietly and focusing, mindfully and for a short period, allows me to start reining my wayward mind.

It is amazing that, though we flatter ourselves as reasonably disciplined people, we find it infernally hard to keep our mind on a single theme, like our breathing, for a few seconds. I live in a beautiful area with charming trails, and, when I walk, I have noticed that I have often, over a twenty-minute stroll, noticed nothing. Nothing at all. I am blinded by my thoughts, imprisoned in a small cell of trivial concerns and petty regrets.

Let alone the majestic green trees in my suburb or the shiny gray clouds of the season, I go through my day, like most of my neighbors I guess, observing little, feeling nothing, caged in a daily routine of insignificance. The little attention I pay to my own body, shaving or showering, lets me detect a scratch or cut after days, and a change of feeling or sensation possibly after weeks.

​As he left his hotel in Turin Nietsche saw a coachman mercilessly whipping his horse. Nietsche ran up to the horse, put his arms around its neck and burst into tears. That was his apology to the horse.
 
We have a lot to apologize for. I live in a country where we kill 5 million animals for fur, 18 million for classroom use, 20 million for research, 220 million for hunting, and a whopping 7 billion for food. We don’t just kill them, we engage in a systematic orgy of gratuitous cruelty. The way they are reared, transported and finally slaughtered, if you only knew, would make your flesh creep.
 
Animal abuse has a long and shameful history. A Descartes-like view prevailed for a long time of animals as ‘machines’ over which the Lord had given dominion to humans. Their heartless exploitation led to some anti-cruelty laws in the 19th century. These laws, both at national and state levels, have now been virtually eviscerated and the situation in the US is getting worse.

​The reason many of the laws were passed was less to spare cruelty to animals than to avoid such cruelty being replicated on humans. The scope of such laws is now limited, their enforcement languid. In Europe you cannot move animals by train or truck for more than eight hours without food, water or rest; in the US you can do so often for 36 to 48 hours. While states are expected to have laws for humane slaughter, several do not ban vicious methods like a sledgehammer and several others overlook most violations. Penalties are often trifling, $100 to $250, and the laws simply have no teeth. Implementation is at best half-hearted, because at state level the prosecutors are overburdened with other duties, and at the national level it is responsibility of the Department of Agriculture, whose principal loyalty is not to the animals but their owners.
 
But the biggest loophole is that these laws apply mostly to domestic animals and don’t apply to farm animals, who represent the vast majority of the seven billion animals killed each year. This huge population has no protection from appalling cruelty. Because these animals are destined to be killed for food, the sickening assumption is that anything goes. Pigs are castrated, their tails chopped, without anesthetic. For better veal, calves are given only liquid diet and forced in stalls they can’t move. Crippled or day-old animals that can’t walk are dragged to their slaughter. Conscious animals are shackled and hoisted by a hind leg for a coup de grace. Chicken beaks are sliced and they are confined in the smallest space possible; laying hens are starved to force them to the next laying cycle; male chicks are simply suffocated.

a​This can happen because a few giant corporations control the major farms. Twenty companies produce 80 percent of US poultry; in fact, four produce nearly a half. Four companies control one-third of the turkey market. The top four companies have 69 percent of the beef market. Five companies sell 20 percent of all eggs. Their lobbyists have rammed through Congress the Animal Enterprise Protection Act to penalize any effort to fight these inhumane practices. Malpractices at big farms have come to light only when activists have secretly videotaped abuses at great personal risk. State laws in many cases even preclude the use of such material to prove the charge of animal cruelty.
 
As a result, people in general are unaware of the horrendous treatment. To hide the reality of suffering animals, meat always arrives in a consumer’s kitchen reshaped, cooked, artfully packaged, with not a hint of the blood and anguish involved. The food industry has developed an extensive vocabulary of deception: cows come to our table as beef, calves as veal, deer as venison, sheep as mutton and pigs as bacon, sausage or pork. It refers to animals as biomachines and grain-consuming or food-producing units.

​The terrible truth is that, absent cultural pressures, the economic pressures dominate and the US corporations – in sharp contrast to the improving practices of European countries – are steadily fine-tuning their husbandry practices to extract more dollars from their hapless animals. The legal façade of the Animal Welfare Act provides no protection, for it allows, amazingly, any practice that can be shown to be “normal” or “customary.” In other words, I can implement any cruel practice in my farm with impunity if I can show that ten other farms are doing it too.
 
Gandhi insisted that the moral progress of a country was to be judged by its treatment of its most helpless denizens, the animals. All pretences apart, we don’t seem to have advanced much.

Our elders advised us not to talk of ourselves.  It was supposed to be impolite. At least, impolitic. It was better to let the other person speak. Of course the consequence was that we encouraged the other person to speak of himself or herself. Perhaps that wasn’t such a bad thing.
​
My father had a gift for friendship and a lot of diverse people streamed through our living room. I noticed that he had endless curiosity about his guests’ work. If an ophthalmologist came for tea, he might ask what kinds of eye problems were most troublesome. If a lawyer visited us, he would ask him how the constitution affected his daily work. When I asked him one day why he did so, he was quite candid. “Many people spend most of their waking hours at work. That occupies the central part of their life. So, if you ask them, they can tell you the things most important to them and most interesting to me. I learn from them. I get to know them.”

I too have learned from him. I have found that if I let people talk about themselves, their work and their interests, I am amazed at the kind of enthralling tales they come up with. A criminal attorney once told me of his first murder case and how it turned into a nightmarish experience that changed his life. Improbable as it may seem, no less fascinating for me was an after-dinner chat I had with a mining geologist who explained how he went about making a million-dollar decision about where to excavate for precious ore reserves. If the specialty of a person I meet is some arcane, unknown profession, my curiosity is even greater and I urge her to tell me all about her work.
​
Since I have traveled a lot, I have been thrown into the company of strangers on planes and trains, in clubs and restaurants, around sandy beaches and exotic resorts. It has been fun listening to professors and pilots, nurses and neurologists, finance specialists and flimflam artists. Their stories, of their work and of their life, have often kept me spellbound.

One day it occurred to me to turn the table, so to speak, and try and tell some of my stories. I was emboldened by my favorite Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s insight that there is at least one story embedded in the life of every person. Often much more than just one. I felt I needed to tell my stories. I needed to bear witness to my hopes and fears, my hurts and happiness. Perhaps those might resonate with someone who would feel those were also his hopes and fears, hurts and happiness.

Also, my story is not just mine. Others have moved through my life, often leaving a lasting impression and sometimes an indelible one. I learned very little in school, but one teacher encouraged me to write and another prompted me learn multiple languages. Neither did I find the university conducive to any real learning, but I encountered one professor who provoked me to think for myself, boldly and independently.
​
My father, more than anyone else, modeled a receptivity to other people, especially people different from us, and showed how a friendship can open the door to other beliefs and values. A very different kind of person, my mother, placed a lot of value on kindness, and made me see how important it was to suspend judgment if one wanted to be humane. My brothers, cast from an entirely different mold, constantly challenged me to question every iota of belief before succumbing to it.

My friends, drawn from a strange melange of countries, parties, faiths, classes and professions, have pulled me in different directions and stretched my ideas often beyond the range of comfort. If one has helped me see the misery of Palestinians – I saw a little with my own eyes -- another has urged me to see the motivation of their alleged oppressors.
​
Women in particular have given me great joy and exhilaration and have also periodically hurt and humiliated me, but either way it has been a scintillating experience. I would have known so little about myself without those encounters.
​
So, defying the counsel of wise elders, I want to speak of myself. I want to capture a little of my story, ineptly, unevenly and admittedly with abundant bias, and say what I remember without apology and explanation. It just happens it is not only my story.

​“I had left her,” Roy said.

“I had left her for no good reason, except that one day I wanted to leave her. I was young and silly, and needed no good reason to do anything.  Maybe I had tired of my life at it was, or maybe I wanted to try something new. I don’t remember what I told her, but whatever I told her couldn’t have been a good reason, for there wasn’t any.

“I had a few things in her apartment,” Roy continued, “I picked them up, dumped them in a bag she had once bought for me as a gift and just walked out. She was too stunned to speak. I didn’t offer any more of an explanation.

“I gave up the small apartment I had and stayed with a friend for a couple of days. Probably more than a couple of days. Then I left London. Since I didn’t have a steady job, I traveled for several weeks. Until I settled, without much thought or planning, in Edinburgh. Eventually I took a job in a newspaper."

He paused and added, “I never wrote to her. While I was traveling, I probably sent her a picture postcard or two. I did so in a casual, careless sort of way. I didn’t say much except that I was traveling and had thought of her.

“That was that. The relationship had ended. Those postcards were the last vestige. Nothing remained after that. I never wrote to her again. I did not call her. It was the end. I lived in Edinburgh nearly two years. Though her thought occurred to me occasionally, I never so much as considered getting in touch with her.

“I had a few fleeting relationships. They meant little to me or to others. The work in the newspaper office kept me busy, but it never enthralled or excited me. It was pleasant enough, and I had a few friends. I continued for almost two years, though it had already dawned on me that it was not work that I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
​
“I gave notice and bought a ticket for Spain. I had a cousin in Madrid I could stay with for a few days, and it would give me time to relax and decide what I would do next.”

Roy took a deep breath and continued, “The night before I was to leave I packed my few belongings in a suitcase and a couple of books and toiletries in my handbag. I sat in the empty apartment and suddenly felt very empty. What had I accomplished in life? Very little. What did my existence matter? Very little again. Nobody cared what I did, or even whether I lived.

“As I said this to myself, it occurred to me in a flash that I had once mattered to one person. Did she care now? I did not know. Would she care to speak to me now? Perhaps not. I had this irresistible urge to speak to her. I wanted to hear her voice.

“I called her. Three rings. She picked up. I said my name and added, hesitantly, that I wanted to speak to her.

“An audible intake of breath. She said, ‘Please go on.’

“I said to her that I realized that my life had been a waste. I had accomplished nothing and made no difference to anybody’s life. I simply didn’t matter.

“She asked me to stop. Then, without a warning, she started whimpering. After a while she whispered, ‘You mattered to me.’

“I explained that I had resigned from my work in Edinburgh and was leaving for Madrid the next morning. I had no particular plan. I was just leaving.

“She was silent for a while. Then she asked if I was passing through Heathrow and, when I confirmed, she said, ‘Don’t go. You know I live reasonably close to Heathrow. Come and see me. Then you can decide. Just come.’
​
“My departure was in the evening, I told her. Also, my ticket permitted a stopover. I would come and see her, I said. She said she would be waiting for me.

The next morning I arrived in London. As I waited in Heathrow, I walked to a phone and jingled the coins in the pocket. I remembered her number perfectly. But I did not dial it. What would I say to her that was not a lie? What could I possibly tell her that had a smidgen of truth or credibility? Why did I offer to see her again?

I waited, drank endless cups of espresso, and then, as the shadows fell, I boarded the flight for Madrid.”

“How could you?” I asked, anguished. “You kept her waiting!”

“It was shameful,” Roy conceded, “but it was the right thing to do.”
​
Then he nodded and commented, “It was enough for me that somebody was waiting for me. I could go on and leave her in peace.”

I was at a superbly orchestrated wedding in Loudoun County: an old country church, beautifully decorated, an elderly pastor with a bible in hand, and elegantly dressed men and women waiting expectantly in the pews. Precisely at the right moment began the third movement of Bach’s violin concerto in E major and the bride marched forward on the arm of her father. I had known her as a young girl and wanted to see how splendid she looked in her bridal dress. But I couldn’t. Two photographers were marching along the bride and taking shots every few inches. I couldn’t see past them.
​
The rest of the afternoon there were many replays of this drama. The wedding ceremony concluded with the groom kissing the bride, nervously and awkwardly, but at the multiple photographers’ insistence they had to reenact the scene a few times more. Toasts had to be repeated, as were some witty remarks by the groom’s cousin, all at the behest of the avid photographers. I thought I detected a slight look of relief on the couple’s face as their car finally took them away from the guests – and the photographers.

This accent on recording reality seems suddenly universal. You can go to the Grand Canyon and find more people taking pictures than observing the grandeur of the gorge. You can join the May crowd and visit the Eiffel Tower, and you will see hundreds furiously photographing the tower from every angle rather than taking a good look at it. At the zoo in Washington, dozens seem more interested to record the animals than notice their beauty or behavior.

No doubt the popularity of social media has heightened the trend. No private or social event goes unrecorded and then promptly reported in Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or SnapChat. Every birthday cake, wedding dress and family reunion is duly splashed in multiple photographs of dubious focus and dismal composition. Probably bakers are baking cakes, designers are sketching dresses and hosts are planning parties with the resulting photos firmly in mind.
​
Why does one take photos? You take a photo to aid your recall. You take a photo of your child so that you can look at it years later and remember how she looked as a baby. You take photos of your sunset gondola ride, for you love to think of your glorious summer in Venice even while you are freezing in Fargo or Fairbanks. The album brings back charming memories.

The other reason one takes photos is to share your experience. You send photos of a wedding or birthday to your cousin who couldn’t attend either. You make sure that Grandma gets to see snapshots of the reunion her gout did not let her attend. Were you to get to the peak of Everest, you may share with the world the unique view you beheld.

Is this what is spurring the tendency to shoot and publish virtually everything?

At least a part of the answer lies in the vast number of photographs that center on the photographer or the source. Aside from the scourge of selfies, which are nearly always an eyesore, many pictures are of I-and-the-Tajmahal variety that leave little doubt  which of the two objects is truly important. Perhaps we all crave a measure of immortality, and leaving a visual imprint on Facebook pages is some people’s way to grope toward that end.
​
But there is a price for this.

I was wandering in New York’s Whitney Museum, now located in a striking Renzo Piano building next to the Hudson River, and was suddenly transfixed by a remarkable canvas by Edward Hopper. It shows a nude woman standing in a shaft of sunlight from a window in a practically barren room. I stood petrified for a long time, watching and wondering: Is that a cigarette in her fingers? When I came out of trance, I took a shot of the canvas, and meditated on it on my trip back home.

Nothing detracted or even distracted from my joyous discovery of a work by a favorite painter or my leisurely absorption of it. Snapping it on my phone was a separate, subsequent act that let me see a little more of it. Seeing and recording were discrete actions, distinct in time and purpose. Shooting did not take away from a ‘mindful’ immersion in the painting itself.
​
Looking back, it makes me conscious of what we lose when we start snapping photos the moment we see something interesting: we really don’t see what sustained seeing alone lets us see.

​He was a scientist and she was a language student. They came from different corners of the globe: he from southern England, she from northern Finland. Coincidentally, their paths crossed.
 
While in grammar school, Lawrence played cricket energetically, but after a match, unlike his mates, he would sneak back into school to do something different: explore the skies with a refractive telescope an alumnus had gifted to the school. He joined an astronomy club and even assembled a telescope for his parents’ backyard. He graduated with distinction and went to London with his classmates to celebrate.

​That is where, in a nightclub in Piccadilly, he encountered Annikka. She studied languages and had come to London for six months, both to earn some money and to improve her English. She had found a job in a hotel, but realized quickly it was no place to practice English as her colleagues were all Asian immigrants.
 
Now, in the nightclub she was dancing with a man who spoke with an Oxbridge accent. They kept seeing each other, and five years later they were married.
 
In the decade that followed Lawrence finished his doctoral research under a Nobel Laureate and went on to do post-doctoral work in observatories in Belgium and France. A US university offered him a tenured position, which became the principal seat of his subsequent work. He wrote major articles, gained numerous citations and pioneered radio telescope use for galactic studies.

​The couple moved into a comfortable home in Chicago. Annikka did part-time work, but a young son and daughter demanded the lion’s share of her attention.
 
Then, one day Lawrence returned from a project in Peru complaining of diarrhea and backache. For academics back pain is a common complaint, but in this case their life was to change radically. The pain quickly proved both acute and intractable; it started unaccountably and continued indefinitely, sometimes cripplingly. Doctors misdiagnosed it as arthritis and fibromyalgia and prescribed wrong medicines. The pain continued and became worse. Twenty years later, a specialist identified it as arachnoiditis, a dire spidery pain, caused presumably by a misapplied Epidural during a hemorrhoidal operation during adolescence.

Frantically searching for relief Lawrence started taking opioid painkillers, first morphine and hydrocodone and eventually oxycontin. Then larger and larger doses, and more frequently, until he was using different doctors to multiply prescriptions that could give him some remission of agony and let him resume his work. He became addicted to opioids and would go to any length – exaggerate or misrepresent – to induce doctors to prescribe larger doses. He wanted a few pain-free hours to be able to pursue his dream work.
 
The effect was the opposite. It made him dependent on even larger, and eventually less effective, doses. They made him a different man. He was no longer the person who played soccer with his son or shared a story with his wife. He was never very interested in domestic chores, but now he had no connection with those. He became careless about his grooming, and his hours of eating and sleeping became erratic. His overweaning preoccupation with his work had not made it easier to live with him. Now, his frantic effort to continue his work, despite his physical limitation virtually isolated him from his wife and children.

Annikka, who had again returned to full-time work as a language instructor once the children had grown up, did not know what to expect when she returned home. Increasingly she drew sustenance from her work life, for life at home had turned slowly untractable.

​As Lawrence took larger and larger doses of painkillers, his walking sometimes became uncertain and he would suffer intermittent periods of confusion. He would have to go for detoxification and come back better, but in a few days again, as pain returned, he would start on opioids heavily. The cycle of addiction, detoxification and relapse got shorter as his pain grew more acute.
 
One morning, Annika entered his room and found it unusually quiet. Lawrence was not breathing; he had swallowed all his pills and put an end to his life.
 
I wonder if the surgeon who placed the needle of an Epidural syringe in the wrong place in a young man’s lumbar could ever imagine the change he wrought in the career of a scientist and in the life of the people around him.

​My great grandfather, whom I never saw, died in the house in which he was born in India. My grandfather moved just once, when he changed his home from the village to the metropolis of Kolkata. My father moved nine times. The first when his uncles ejected his mother from the parental house, the second when he could not pay the rent, and the third when he could -- by taking a job in another city. Then he found a good job in Kolkata and returned, but the job entailed moves, and so we lived in four more houses. When he retired, he chose to live in two smaller houses.
 
I heard about the first four moves, but the latter five I experienced as his young son. These were traumatic experiences for me. I was perfectly content in each house and did not want to move. Every time we moved, even if it was to a larger or better house, I longed for the earlier house and mourned its loss with endless nostalgia. Given the chance, I would have preferred to die in the house in which I was born, just like my great grandfather.

​That was not to be. I worked for international groups, a UN entity and the diplomatic service, and acquired a spouse who too did overseas work. It was a big deal if I lived in a house more than three years. If the country had a coup d’état or a civil war, I moved much faster. I learned to accept the loss, not just of familiar bearings, but all that goes with them: neighbors, friends, grocers, barbers, even street vendors and known taxi drivers. I learned to live friendless and with strangers.
 
But, while my houses changed, so did the world around it. The Web grew; email became common; we all started sending photos to friends and calling them across continents. My children went to college in other countries, but they called me and wrote me often. I could enjoy new friends and colleagues without losing my link with older acquaintances. When my daughter graduated and threw her cap in the air, I could see the Pyramids at the back in a video. When I flew to Cuba I could Skype and tell her what I was seeing. The loss had become a little bearable.

Just the world? No, I have changed too. As I moved from house to house, city to city, and country to country, my food, my clothes, my habits, my whole point of view changed. I don’t think and feel the way I used to any more just as I don’t eat what I once ate happily. Loves and hates, wars and riots, children and refugees, all have infinitely added and enriched my life.
​
​I would have indeed liked, like my great grandfather, to have died in the house where I was born, in a tiny brick cottage in central India on a cloudy autumn morning (said my mother), but I am not unhappy that my children seem destined to live in many more than the thirty houses I have lived in.

From the Tan Son Nhat airport she took a taxi and, bypassing Ho Chi Minh city, went straight to the Vũng Tàu port area. The area had changed, and it took her time and much walk before she found the spot she was looking for. Yes, this was place she caught a boat in the dead of night thirty years ago.

Linh was 24 then. But she had to take a decision that would have daunted someone double her age or experience. She had to decide whether to take the boat.
​
She was Vietnamese, but of ethnic Chinese origin, a Hoa. For centuries turbulent changes in regime in China had pushed thousands of migrants in Vietnam, and in early twentieth century the exodus rose with the civil war in China. The Hoa community was diligent and enterprising, and in time prospered in trade and business. Both North and South Vietnam declared interest in integrating the community in Vietnamese society but at an onerous price: they had to adopt Vietnamese names and abandon their culture.

North Vietnam’s relations with China deteriorated with the Vietnam War of 1967-68. The Hoas’ position became untenable after the reunification of Vietnam. The authorities banned private trading, closed thirty thousand businesses overnight, confiscated currencies, and forced owners to work as farmers or as soldiers. All resistance was met with violence. A mass exodus began.

Now, in the summer of 1979, Linh had nothing to keep her back in Vietnam. There was no future for her or her three year old son except dire poverty and social ostracism.
​
The only alternative was to flee the country illicitly, in an unsafe boat run by coyotes, and pay an extortionate price for a nightmare journey. Accidents and drownings were common; so were skirmishes and violence. Pirates robbed and raped migrants, regularly and mercilessly. And at the end waited an uncertain future: nobody knew which country would accept them, or even what shore they would be able to reach.

Linh gritted her teeth and made up her mind. She took every penny she had saved and sold everything she owned except the clothes on her back or on her son. With the money she bought a few small ingots of gold, the only payment the coyotes would accept. Then she negotiated the earliest possible day of escape: the following Saturday night, when the piers were quiet and the guards often drunk.
​
Linh knew night boarding was the safest in eluding the port police but, physically, the most dangerous. There were narrow planks one had to balance on to reach the cavern of the boat, and people had been known to fall and drown. With her delicate frame, Linh had to balance both her child and the small bag in which she carried an extra pair of clothes, some water and dry food. She teetered cautiously along the plank and reached the boat. It was already packed to the gills with fleeing men and women. No matter, the coyotes kept adding more passengers, until, in the corner she had found, her child had to crane his head to breathe.

The horrendous journey lasted three weeks, twenty-one days of heat, stench, parched lips and near starvation. Their boat was in Hong Kong. Half-dead with exhaustion, Lynh waited with her child, along with the others, for a word from the authorities. The good news was that they wouldn’t be sent out in the sea again; the bad news was that the refugee camps were full and they would have to wait for days.

The refugee camp run by the Red Cross in Hong Kong was a quickly assembled affair, inadequate both in resources and compared to the need. It was crowded, congested, one might say brutally basic. But Lynh was finally safe. Her child, though in tatters, gambolled gaily with the other children also in tatters. Lynh started entertaining the dream that she would have a break and one day have a place of her own. She could then dress her child well and give him a good education. It wasn’t a unique dream among the skeletal men and women who had experienced the worst and survived.

​Three months later, unlikely as it was, Lynh’s dream came true. A New York church group offered sanctuary and support for Lynh and her son. The Christmas of 1979 brought them the promise, not just of safety, but also of a  different life.
​
The US shores awaited Lynh, doubtless with huge challenges, of learning a new language and adjusting to a different culture, but also with the assurance of security and freedom. She could choose her life. Her son could be the man he wanted.
​
Linh paused in her narration.

Now 54, trim and petite, with a round face and radiant smile, Linh sat in a bistro with me, a glass of red wine in her hand. She said, “I don’t know how I found the gumption to risk that boat trip. I was desperate. I just wanted a new life for me and for my child.”
​
I looked at her and wondered about the hundreds of other desperate women and children, ready to risk all for the chance of a new life, and the obduracy of our prejudices that want to close the door and raise a wall.