Writer. Award-Winning Author. Activist. Performing Artist.
SKY TRAIN:
Tibetan Women on the Edge of History
Writer and activist Canyon Sam uncovers the history of Tibet from the perspective of its women in a lyrical memoir that spans more than twenty years. Traveling on the newly opened, Beijing-to-Lhasa train in 2007 she crossed the Himalayas to find women from her earlier oral history project and stayed with the Tibetan family with whom she’d lived in 1986. As she reveals the unexplored stories of women’s resistance, courage and spiritual resilience through fifty years of Chinese occupation, and gives a first hand account of the changes brought by the controversial new railroad — Sky Train — she comes to embrace her own capacity for faith and acceptance...
Bend Like a River:
A Chinese American Woman’s Tibetan Journey
Part spiritual coming of age story, part meditation on race and identity, part trauma recovery account, written in her lyrical, funny, visceral style Bend Like A River: A Chinese American Woman's Tibetan Journey by Canyon Sam is a memoir of one year in the mid 80s:
A 29 year old Chinese American and fourth generation San Franciscan flees Reagan-led America to the P.R.C. to fulfill a life goal to live in China for a year. A burned out activist seeking inspiration from the socialist utopia in her ancestral homeland she instead witnesses shocking authoritarianism and apathy as she travels off the beaten path. Seeing her dream dissolve she detours to Tibet, the remote spiritual civilization which opened to visitors for the first time in history. Befriended by an English-speaking young local with dreams of the west she finds a nation emerging from near wholesale destruction. Nonetheless over her two month stay she grows fascinated with the culture and the people’s remarkable spiritual faith.
At summer‘s end she completely changes course; she decides to follow the Tibetans to their capital in exile in the Indian Himalayas, Dharamsala. Immersed in Tibetan culture she explores Buddhism and meditation -- culminating in an unforgettable private audience with the Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama. Her exploration then leads to the holiest site in the Buddhist world where her deepening meditation practice yields shattering insights and she finds the inspiration she has long sought.
On a birthday like no other, Canyon Sam reflects on celebrating beauty and practicing joy and compassion in the face of an increase in anti-Asian violence.
READ MORE ON LION’S ROAR