"I packed a blue Samsonite suitcase with my belongings -- a couple
of pairs of jeans and shirts, UB40 tapes, the Swiss army knife I
had stolen from my mother, my Tibetan prayer book, and a red
plastic Camay soap dish I bought in Dharamsala that had become a
good luck charm for me."
With these, all his worldly possessions at the age of seventeen,
Daja Wangchuk Meston caught an airliner to America, the unfamiliar
land of which he was a citizen, and began his arduous personal
journey to discover and mend his long-severed ties to his family,
his country, and, in a very real sense, his own identity.
In this moving memoir, the author tells the incredible story of
a young man who used his Buddhist upbringing and the love of a good
woman -- his young wife -- to learn that forgiving others can play
a critical role in healing a damaged soul.
Daja had much to forgive. In the early 1970s, at the age of
three, he was taken by his hippie American parents to Nepal and
left in the care of a Tibetan family. The Tibetans in turn placed
him in a Buddhist monastery where, at the age of six, he was
ordained to be a monk. There, in scenes reminiscent of the novels
of Charles Dickens, he was ostracized by the other boy monks, who
taunted him for his Caucasian physical traits, left so hungry he
stole scraps of bread, and slept on a flea-infested straw mat. He
was an outsider in an insular monastic world, unable to understand
what had befallen him and longing for the warmth of his mother's
embrace.
His mother became a Buddhist nun, and caring for a child, she
thought, would impede her spiritual journey. Her occasional and
brief visits with young Daja became increasingly rare. As he grew
up, there were often years without a single maternal visit.A His
father, unbeknownst to the boy, had suffered a mental breakdown and
returned, helpless, to Los Angeles.
The story of Daja's self-generated ouster from the monastery as
an adolescent (he pretended to have slept with a prostitute), his
eventual migration to his homeland, his lifelong attempt to
understand and reconnect with his parents, and his eventual and
dangerous work on behalf of Tibetan rights under Chinese oppression
make for a compelling reading experience.
But more than that, the story of Daja Meston reminds us of the
universal human need for roots and family bonds. It is ultimately
an unforgettable story of love, hope, and forgiveness and of a
gentle man with an enormous capacity for all three.
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