Following is an excerpt: 
As a child educated in the U.S. through the late 1950s and early 1970s, I learned little about China that was not negative. I knew it to be the “Sick Man of Asia,” and to have fought and lost the Opium Wars to the superior Western powers. It was a country that could not feed, clothe or shelter its own people; I grew up hearing of the “starving children in China.”

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Following is an excerpt:
During the past three years, I have met His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama three times: twice as his host at Hunter College in New York and once as his guest in Dharamsala, on the Indian side of the Himalayas, the site of Tibetan government-in-exile. People have asked me what is a leftist scholar engaged with civil rights and labor issues doing with a religious leader like the Dalai Lama. My answer is — it came naturally.

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Contemplating a Statue of
Douglas MacArthur on Corregidor Island

Evening star, still star, brilliant gleam in
The sky how I wish Douglas never returned

Had taken that slow boat to China instead
By way of Okinawa, by way of Japan.

Doggone Dugout Doug, what was in
That pipe you smoked, thinking you
Were our jut-jawed liberator when you

Were the oppressor, when the dreams
You handed the little brown brothers
Were as fleeting as corn-cob smoke

When all there is to show for it in the
Monsoon air of Corregidor, this lair
Of Chinese corsairs, Spanish jailers
And Yankee officers, is this bald-headed

Expatriate Minnesotan in the boots of
His occupier father determined to keep
These islands slices of American pie?

He is in love with the guns now silent
And his twisted odes on freedom
Lie as flotsam on the dark waters of
History, in love with the ruins of a life
That never was.

Literature changes as it travels, creating new languages, new ideas, and new critics. Literature may even create a “third space” for telling stories differently than before. Thus, as Amitav Ghosh has stated, “stories are all there are to live in, it was just a question of which one you chose.”