“Is the World Becoming More Free?”

Graphic from Amerasia Journal 15:1 (1989), "Commemorative Issue: Salute to the 60s and 70s; Legacy of the San Francisco State Strike." See the Table of Contents: http://www.aasc.ucla.edu/aascpress/ajindex/ajtoc.asp?id1=15&id2=1 For ordering information: email Ming Tu—ytu@aasc.ucla.edu

Thinking about my friends’ children, what kind of a world they would inherit?  Would the world be more free?  What form would democracy take, East or West?  What would my child dream?  When my child grew up, would their sweat and blood still be exchanged for gold on the global market?  I did not have the answer to any of these questions, but on the occasion of Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo receiving the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, I nonetheless asked myself these questions.  You can see my thoughts on Chinese workers in “Blood in Exchange for Gold” at the U.S.-China Media Brief site.

Is the World Becoming More Free?
By Russell Leong

October 8 2010
Malibu/Cape Town/Oslo/Beijing

Is the world becoming more free?
I hear mountains whisper that
A man, texting on his expensive cell phone in Malibu
Drives his sports car over the cliff.

Is the world becoming more free?
I smell the oil of a thousand motors
Barges disgorging into the waters
of the sullied Yangtze.

Is the world becoming more free?
I feel the rustling of thin blankets
Over the roofs of Cape Town as mothers
tuck in their children tonight, to sleep.

Is the world becoming more free?
From an elegant podium, in Oslo
A man announces the prize for peace
for yet another man behind bars, in Beijing.

Your body is imprisoned
But your mind shatters the glass wall.
Whirling in thought and action
Each letter you write splinters
The glass eyes of rulers.

A car shatters, the river is poisoned.
A Norwegian pontificates, a Chinese imprisoned.
All rulers betray history
with glass eyes and false teeth.

A child dreams of a meal, a roof, a book
the freedom to free this world
When she awakes from her nap.

(The 2010 Nobel Peace Prize was given to Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Chinese writer, dissident, and literature professor).