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Killer’s new path
Killer’s new path
Long-imprisoned Chinese immigrant finds meaning in Buddhism
Friday, February 02, 2007
Rita Price
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
http://www.dispatch.com/news/religion/faith-story.php?story=dispatch/2007/02/02/20070202-E1-00.html
Most days, he can put all the pieces in place. Other times, he’ll be cleaning toilets or lining up for a head count or getting ready for bed in the room he shares with nine other men, and Hanwen Xie will wonder: Did this happen?
He had always followed a plan. Hanwen did what his parents and his country wanted him to do. He worked hard, skipped grades and was chosen to leave communist China to study engineering in America.
Everyone agreed he was brilliant.
"It’s like all my life, I was taking some kind of test. Actually, I was always a step ahead. I’d make a plan and finish it early," Xie said.
"Tests. It’s a strange way of preparing people for life."
So Xie didn’t anticipate the "explosion" that went off in his head on Nov. 8, 1988. That’s the day he found out that his wife was having an affair with her boss, the owner of a Downtown Chinese restaurant.
Xie was 27 years old, a new father and stressed-out graduate student at Ohio State University.
He went to a pawnshop the next day and bought a gun.
Then he walked into the Joy II restaurant on N. High Street and sat down in a booth with Frank Chan. Kitchen employees heard the shot and came out to see Chan bleeding from his forehead.
Xie made no attempt to flee. Witnesses said he waited for police to arrive and held out his hands to be cuffed.
"The last fight I had, I was probably 11 years old," Xie said.
He is 45 now. Xie has been in an Ohio prison for the past 18 years, serving a sentence of 20 years to life for murder. No family or friends visit. When he gets out — if he gets out — he likely will be deported to China.
"The intelligence and energy I had, wasted," he said, smiling gently. "Inadequate and intelligent — a very strange combination."
Yet Xie seeks a way around the ruins. Inside the misery-filled Corrections Medical Center on Harmon Avenue, a place he might never leave, Xie and a Midwestern Buddhist lama named Kathy Wesley aspire to a new morality.
You must catch yourself, Xie repeats. Catch yourself.
‘ An extraordinary student ’
They sit across from each other in a small vending area, with no table between them. The noisy hum of a pop machine cuts into the conversation every few minutes, while a prison staff member monitors the meeting in silence.
After five years of study, Xie already is at a place some Buddhists never reach, said Wesley, resident teacher at the Karma Thegsum Choling Buddhist Center in Columbus.
He plows through centuries-old texts and hungers for more.
"Everybody learns to meditate, but not everyone learns this type of deeper, more insightful meditation," she said. "He’s an extraordinary student. He would be an extraordinary student if he weren’t in prison."
Buddhism, Wesley explains, is a faith whose morality is based on cause and effect. Thoughts are causes for effects. So Buddhists seek to tame the mind.
"We are what we think," Shakyamuni Buddha, the religion’s founder, said in his first sermon. "All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world."
On this day in the sunny vending room, Wesley and Xie have been allotted 90 minutes together. Because they have visitors, Xie takes a break from their detailed discussion and offers a simple definition of Buddhist morality:
"Do no evil, practice virtue, subdue your mind."
This can be accomplished in prison, he says. It’s just tricky.
Xie sometimes has to meditate amid chaos. Inmates and guards stared as he performed, over many months, a series of 100,000 prostrations. "That’s heroic," Wesley says, laughing.
Every day, Xie, a healthy inmate assigned to work at the prison medical center, cleans the rooms and bathrooms of hospitalized inmates. He reads to an old, illiterate inmate and writes letters to the man’s family. His behavior record in prison is spotless.
Before they end their study session, Wesley talks about the Buddhist belief that suffering arises from unmet desire and want. Quell desire, and suffering naturally disappears.
Xie knows this lesson. The first time he had a parole hearing, the board told him not to come back for 10 years. He was crushed.
"Ten years ago, I would have spent this whole morning worrying," he said. "Now I say, ‘My long-term plan is, I’m watching Buckeye football on Saturday.’ "
Wesley also touches on the rested mind, how it keeps a person from being overpowered. "If you’re inside the thought, you’re swallowed," she said. "If you’re overpowered by a thought, you do what it wants you to do."
Wesley does not mention the killing. She doesn’t have to.
‘ I’m a big fan of Jesus ’
In a letter to his father back in China, Xie gave the short, humorous version of his spiritual journey.
"It’s come full circle," he wrote. "I’m trying to study Tibetan Buddhism from a white woman. Don’t laugh."
Xie didn’t expect his father to understand exactly. "He was a member of the Communist Party, so he took all religion as superstition," Xie said.
Not that others understand, either. In the worlds of prison ministry and born-again inmates, Christianity reigns. Xie tried that path but didn’t like where it led.
"I find the whole notion that one God controls everything very alien to me," he said. "So I decided to stop bumping my head against the wall on that one. I’m a big fan of Jesus, but I’m practicing something else."
Even before he met Wesley, Xie read a book — We’re All Doing Time — by prison spiritual mentor Bo Lazoff. To prisoners, Lazoff speaks of ways to live a meaningful life behind bars. To society, the author talks about "how crazy it is" to attempt rehabilitation without valuing kindness above all other forms of training, education or therapy.
"I was fascinated by its honesty," Xie said. "It’s the first religious book that took me by surprise."
Ask Xie about anger and regret, and he jokes that "They have become my roommates."
But he refuses to export the burden of his rehabilitation to the family of his victim. Virtues such as humility and modesty are something of a trap, Xie thinks, and lead to arrogance. To apologize to the Chan family would be selfish.
"They want me dead. To remind them otherwise does not seem an attractive option."
Xie also chose not to stay in close contact with his son, now a college student in this country. "I didn’t want to drag him into all this," he said. His ex-wife remarried long ago.
His 37-year-old brother and a beloved grandmother, poor and uneducated all her life, both have died. "She couldn’t even write her name. But there was something basic and decent about her," Xie said. "If there’s anything decent about me, it probably comes from her."
Xie comes up for parole again in 2008. He assumes he will leave prison someday, but he doesn’t want to wish upon a date.
In the meantime, he continues to meet with Wesley every month or so. A Roman Catholic by birth, Wesley, 52, was taught by nuns but fell for the teachings of an 82-year-old Tibetan man.
She wears a Mickey Mouse watch and Buddhist prayer beads.
"I’m from the middle of Ohio, and you were born across the sea, and here we are," Wesley said to Xie. "People make their connections."
Even after nearly 20 years, it’s still a little like looking at someone else, Xie says. But he can catch himself now.
"It’s the only way left to look at my life," he said, "and not write it off as a failure."
rprice@dispatch.com
Long-imprisoned Chinese immigrant finds meaning in Buddhism
Friday, February 02, 2007
Rita Price
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
http://www.dispatch.com/news/religion/faith-story.php?story=dispatch/2007/02/02/20070202-E1-00.html
Most days, he can put all the pieces in place. Other times, he’ll be cleaning toilets or lining up for a head count or getting ready for bed in the room he shares with nine other men, and Hanwen Xie will wonder: Did this happen?
He had always followed a plan. Hanwen did what his parents and his country wanted him to do. He worked hard, skipped grades and was chosen to leave communist China to study engineering in America.
Everyone agreed he was brilliant.
"It’s like all my life, I was taking some kind of test. Actually, I was always a step ahead. I’d make a plan and finish it early," Xie said.
"Tests. It’s a strange way of preparing people for life."
So Xie didn’t anticipate the "explosion" that went off in his head on Nov. 8, 1988. That’s the day he found out that his wife was having an affair with her boss, the owner of a Downtown Chinese restaurant.
Xie was 27 years old, a new father and stressed-out graduate student at Ohio State University.
He went to a pawnshop the next day and bought a gun.
Then he walked into the Joy II restaurant on N. High Street and sat down in a booth with Frank Chan. Kitchen employees heard the shot and came out to see Chan bleeding from his forehead.
Xie made no attempt to flee. Witnesses said he waited for police to arrive and held out his hands to be cuffed.
"The last fight I had, I was probably 11 years old," Xie said.
He is 45 now. Xie has been in an Ohio prison for the past 18 years, serving a sentence of 20 years to life for murder. No family or friends visit. When he gets out — if he gets out — he likely will be deported to China.
"The intelligence and energy I had, wasted," he said, smiling gently. "Inadequate and intelligent — a very strange combination."
Yet Xie seeks a way around the ruins. Inside the misery-filled Corrections Medical Center on Harmon Avenue, a place he might never leave, Xie and a Midwestern Buddhist lama named Kathy Wesley aspire to a new morality.
You must catch yourself, Xie repeats. Catch yourself.
‘ An extraordinary student ’
They sit across from each other in a small vending area, with no table between them. The noisy hum of a pop machine cuts into the conversation every few minutes, while a prison staff member monitors the meeting in silence.
After five years of study, Xie already is at a place some Buddhists never reach, said Wesley, resident teacher at the Karma Thegsum Choling Buddhist Center in Columbus.
He plows through centuries-old texts and hungers for more.
"Everybody learns to meditate, but not everyone learns this type of deeper, more insightful meditation," she said. "He’s an extraordinary student. He would be an extraordinary student if he weren’t in prison."
Buddhism, Wesley explains, is a faith whose morality is based on cause and effect. Thoughts are causes for effects. So Buddhists seek to tame the mind.
"We are what we think," Shakyamuni Buddha, the religion’s founder, said in his first sermon. "All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world."
On this day in the sunny vending room, Wesley and Xie have been allotted 90 minutes together. Because they have visitors, Xie takes a break from their detailed discussion and offers a simple definition of Buddhist morality:
"Do no evil, practice virtue, subdue your mind."
This can be accomplished in prison, he says. It’s just tricky.
Xie sometimes has to meditate amid chaos. Inmates and guards stared as he performed, over many months, a series of 100,000 prostrations. "That’s heroic," Wesley says, laughing.
Every day, Xie, a healthy inmate assigned to work at the prison medical center, cleans the rooms and bathrooms of hospitalized inmates. He reads to an old, illiterate inmate and writes letters to the man’s family. His behavior record in prison is spotless.
Before they end their study session, Wesley talks about the Buddhist belief that suffering arises from unmet desire and want. Quell desire, and suffering naturally disappears.
Xie knows this lesson. The first time he had a parole hearing, the board told him not to come back for 10 years. He was crushed.
"Ten years ago, I would have spent this whole morning worrying," he said. "Now I say, ‘My long-term plan is, I’m watching Buckeye football on Saturday.’ "
Wesley also touches on the rested mind, how it keeps a person from being overpowered. "If you’re inside the thought, you’re swallowed," she said. "If you’re overpowered by a thought, you do what it wants you to do."
Wesley does not mention the killing. She doesn’t have to.
‘ I’m a big fan of Jesus ’
In a letter to his father back in China, Xie gave the short, humorous version of his spiritual journey.
"It’s come full circle," he wrote. "I’m trying to study Tibetan Buddhism from a white woman. Don’t laugh."
Xie didn’t expect his father to understand exactly. "He was a member of the Communist Party, so he took all religion as superstition," Xie said.
Not that others understand, either. In the worlds of prison ministry and born-again inmates, Christianity reigns. Xie tried that path but didn’t like where it led.
"I find the whole notion that one God controls everything very alien to me," he said. "So I decided to stop bumping my head against the wall on that one. I’m a big fan of Jesus, but I’m practicing something else."
Even before he met Wesley, Xie read a book — We’re All Doing Time — by prison spiritual mentor Bo Lazoff. To prisoners, Lazoff speaks of ways to live a meaningful life behind bars. To society, the author talks about "how crazy it is" to attempt rehabilitation without valuing kindness above all other forms of training, education or therapy.
"I was fascinated by its honesty," Xie said. "It’s the first religious book that took me by surprise."
Ask Xie about anger and regret, and he jokes that "They have become my roommates."
But he refuses to export the burden of his rehabilitation to the family of his victim. Virtues such as humility and modesty are something of a trap, Xie thinks, and lead to arrogance. To apologize to the Chan family would be selfish.
"They want me dead. To remind them otherwise does not seem an attractive option."
Xie also chose not to stay in close contact with his son, now a college student in this country. "I didn’t want to drag him into all this," he said. His ex-wife remarried long ago.
His 37-year-old brother and a beloved grandmother, poor and uneducated all her life, both have died. "She couldn’t even write her name. But there was something basic and decent about her," Xie said. "If there’s anything decent about me, it probably comes from her."
Xie comes up for parole again in 2008. He assumes he will leave prison someday, but he doesn’t want to wish upon a date.
In the meantime, he continues to meet with Wesley every month or so. A Roman Catholic by birth, Wesley, 52, was taught by nuns but fell for the teachings of an 82-year-old Tibetan man.
She wears a Mickey Mouse watch and Buddhist prayer beads.
"I’m from the middle of Ohio, and you were born across the sea, and here we are," Wesley said to Xie. "People make their connections."
Even after nearly 20 years, it’s still a little like looking at someone else, Xie says. But he can catch himself now.
"It’s the only way left to look at my life," he said, "and not write it off as a failure."
rprice@dispatch.com
0
Comments
Thanks for posting this.
-bf
___________________
"BE KIND" - the religion of ShangriLa--from the movie, "Lost Horizon"
Meditate by emptying yourself and letting the universe fill you.
Go Green!!!