Excerpt from Comes the Peace Chapter One: Room 301

I stood on the third-story windowsill of a hotel in a remote part of Tibet, said, "Here I go," and jumped.

Within seconds, my body landed fifty feet below in a dusty street. My heels shattered on impact. I crumbled on the ground. Peasants and pedestrians in gray and-blue Mao jackets and caps likely gathered around me, wondering who I was, a white-skinned foreigner, my face unshaven, my hiking boots caked in red mud, my wire-rimmed glasses unbroken but askew. Thick-tired bicycles, their wire baskets heavy with fruits and vegetables, veered wobbly around me. Vendors in the street's open-air stalls abandoned their row of shiny apples and plums and rushed over. A handful of Tibetan monks in maroon robes, dotting the nearby green hillside like fallen rose petals, glanced up, their meditation broken. They wouldn't have known how alike we were, that their robes and prayers were mine as a child.

It was a dry, hot August afternoon in 1999. The sun seemed unusually bright. I had been sitting on the windowsill of my corner hotel room for more than an hour, staring at the marketplace below. When I jumped I had no intention of living. I was in a terrible situation and felt like death was the only way out.

I was in the custody of Chinese authorities, unable to leave my room or make phone calls. A stocky, clean-cut security guard was stationed in the hallway. When I opened the door earlier, he put his hands against my chest and gently pushed me back inside my room. He didn't speak English. I didn't speak Chinese. He pointed to the bed, directing me to sit. The room was more sanitized box than comfortable hotel room. The concrete walls, floor, and starchy sheets were white. A single fluorescent tube dangled overhead. There was no phone. I turned on the television set and flipped through the four channels. All carried the same government-controlled programs denouncing a popular religious group as a cult.

I was twenty-nine years old, without any real direction in my life, and had been living in Boston. I had traveled to a remote province in China on a humanitarian mission that had gone horribly awry three days earlier, when a squad of security officers from the Chinese foreign ministry had taken me and two companions into custody. I hadn't wanted to make the trip in the first place, because it seemed dangerous. The officers confiscated my Minolta camera, seven rolls of film, and notes.

We had come to look at the site of a proposed project, to be funded by the World Bank, that would involve bringing fifty-eight thousand mostly Chinese farmers into Tibetan areas. Our aim was to gauge local Tibetan sentiment. Since the Chinese government had promised unfettered access, I thought we would just explain to the officers what we were doing and be released.

Instead, we were loaded in separate jeeps and taken on a thirty-hour drive to Xining, a city on the northeastern border of China and Tibet. Along the way, I tried to explain that we had done nothing wrong, that we were simply interested in the project. The guards listened in stony silence. At 2 a.m., we pulled up in front of a dimly lit vacant hotel. We got out and were escorted to different rooms.

A series of interrogations followed. I felt I was being ordered to confess to crimes I didn't know I had committed.

I was led down a tiled corridor to room 301. Inside, the curtains were closed. Against the far wall, a thin, light-skinned man in a dark green military uniform eyed me from behind a desk, where his folded hands rested. The medals pinned to his uniform glistened. Around him, a handful of men stood on chairs and tables, their faces hidden behind cameras with bright lights beaming at me. The one with the still camera moved from one corner of the room to another, snapping photos of me from different angles. Two men huddled on a couch, smoking cigarettes. A cup of black tea cooled on the table in front of me. The window was open. A hot breeze blew in. The curtains puffed.

An empty chair directly across from the officer was waiting for me. An ugly woman with cream-colored pants and deep-set eyes, the interpreter, sat next to me. The corners of her thin mouth drooped in an angry frown. A tape recorder whirred quietly.

I stared at the uniformed man, waiting. He spoke deliberately and slowly in a low, gravelly voice. The translator waited until he was done, then relayed his message.

"What is your name?"

"Daja Meston."

"Spell it."

"D-A-J-A M-E-S-T-O-N."

"When did you come to China?"

"In August."

"Why did you come to China?"

"I came to see the World Bank project site."

"What places have you been to?"

"My flight landed in Beijing. From there I went to Xian, Xining, and Dulan."

"What did you do in these places?"

"Not much. I went to visit the monasteries and to see the grasslands where the Tibetan nomads are."

He paused and leaned forward. "You have broken the laws of the People's Republic of China," he said.

My offense, he said, was taking photos of an abandoned prison labor camp in an area that was off-limits to foreigners without a permit.

I remembered a few days earlier. We wanted to see land connected with the World Bank project and hired a local man to drive us. On the way, he stopped on the road outside the prison to stretch his legs and get a drink of water. I took some pictures because we had stopped and I was taking pictures of every place we stopped. I had no idea it was off-limits. No signs were posted. Coming back on the same road later that day, I saw a sign nailed to a tree outside the prison grounds that had not been there earlier. "Restricted Area. Foreigners without a permit not allowed beyond this point." I wondered later whether the new sign was put up to trap us into breaking the law.

"I didn't ask to be taken there," I explained. Blaming the driver was a perfectly reasonable explanation and true. I was confident that this questioning was all just a formality that would end with me being scolded and sent back to the United States.

Instead, he pressed further, his tone growing angry and impatient. "Why are you really here? Who sent you?"

I lied. "No one sent me. I'm a student researcher. I came on my own." My heart pounded. I prayed they could not tell I was lying. The organization that paid for my trip was the leading opponent of the World Bank project and well known internationally for defending Tibetan rights and criticizing China. Any association with it would incriminate me and my two companions, including an innocent, soft-spoken Tibetan man who had agreed to be our translator. He was the one I was most concerned about. I remember the terrified look on his face, his eyes widening and the color draining, when the security guards took us into custody. I knew he had a family. At least I had an American passport and a plane ticket home. He could be thrown in jail for life. In theory, according to Chinese law he could even be executed. Anything I said could be used against him. I couldn't take any chances implicating him.

The questioning continued for six hours. A security man kept refilling my teacup to keep me awake. My muscles began tightening. Trying to be cooperative, I signed a half-dozen statements written in Chinese. My hand shook as I did so. I dipped my thumb in red ink and fingerprinted each page as they demanded. I gushed, "Thank you," in Chinese every time they offered some tea. The video cameraman got on top of the bed with his shoes still on and directed the flood of camera lights on me. I wanted to look away but everywhere I glanced, eyes glared at me.

I had had only a few hours of sleep in the last forty-eight hours and eaten nothing but a couple of stale crackers stuffed inside my waterproof jacket. My eyes burned from fatigue. I couldn't concentrate on my answers. In my mind, I replayed what I had said in the last three days so I didn't contradict myself. Did I say I was an undergraduate student or a graduate student, that I was studying international development? What if one of my companions mentioned that an organization sent us? I would be caught in a lie.

As the hours passed, any sense of privilege I had, of being an American, having a passport, of being involved, albeit as a critic, with the prestigious World Bank, of being right and innocent, evaporated. My neck developed a nervous twitch, jerking sharply to the left, as if it were rebelling against my decisions. No one back home knew that I had been arrested and taken here. Everything I said or did haunted me. I began regretting the picture taken days earlier by a passing tourist: I was stupidly grinning and flashing a defiant peace sign in front of a mural of Chairman Mao at Tiananmen Square. I kicked myself for signing the papers because I had no idea what the statements really said. For all I knew, they had tricked me into admitting that I was a spy.

Scenes from the movie Red Corner played through my head. I became the character played by Richard Gere—an attorney captured in China, tortured, and thrown in a dark prison cell—with the Chinese authorities running after me. I get caught. They put me through the corrupt legal system without any legal representation. I am found guilty of espionage and spying. I imagined myself walking past the thick main gate of the prison. A guard in the prison tower above, looking down on me, watches every step I take. A metal door slams, leaving me alone in a dark, dirty cell, where I am tortured, spit upon, beaten, and forgotten. To me, it was a very real possibility. A friend of ours, a musicology student, had gone to Tibet to record folk songs three years earlier. He visited us a few months before he left. We had not heard from him since. He had been arrested on charges of espionage and was still serving an 18-year jail sentence, in spite of efforts by his family and the international community to get him out.

"Why are you treating me like a criminal?" I asked. "I am not a criminal."

When there was no response, I made the ultimate demand. "I am an American, and I have the right to representation from the U.S. consulate. I need to make a call to my embassy." I had scribbled the phone numbers of the U.S. consulate in Guangzhou and the embassy in Beijing on a small piece of paper and tucked them in my wallet.

The chief interrogator responded, "This is not important now. You have not told us everything. You need to think carefully and tell us everything."

I stared at his uniform and began sweating. As a young boy, whenever a police officer walked by, I hid under benches and behind clusters of bamboo until they passed, afraid that they would arrest me. I'd forgotten how terrified I was of authority figures until that moment.

With that, the interrogation session ended and I was led back to my room. I turned off my lights and climbed into a starchy white bed, my eyes wide open staring at the dark above me.