Halfway through my 12 years in China, I discovered that an office manager I had just taken on spent his every free moment reading ancient Buddhist texts. At first I connected this to the trauma of a close shave with death in a car crash that had left him permanently disabled. But when I looked further, I realized that the personal quest for meaning was widespread in our small office.
Two other close colleagues were interested in Tibetan Buddhism (and quite passionate about Tibet). Another attended an ‘underground’ Christian church. Then there was the cleaner, who also cooked us wonderful lunches. She was a retired factory worker whose ‘work-unit’ pension had evaporated when the factory went bankrupt. She then quietly joined the ranks of the quasi-Buddhist Falun Gong – a movement which blended spiritual teachings with breathing techniques and exercises but which the Government banned in 1999. ‘Mama Liu,’ as we called her, was a kindly pillar of her community who volunteered in a youth prison. She turned up at work one day in tears because the police had raided her home, seized her Falun Gong literature and told her to watch out or she would end up behind bars herself.
