Miss Wu

We are waiting for the elevator and Miss Wu lights up like we've just come off silent retreat and she's been saving a story.

"Ah, yes. I need to tell you," she begins, as if we're picking up a conversation midstream. "I grew up in China, close to Tibet. I know what you are doing. Very famous Rinpoche—the head of tradition in the biggest temple on the edge of Tibet. My mother…" She searches for the word. "What is the word—surrender there."

"Surrender?"

"Not the word. Like Americans—accept Christ. She do that with Buddha."

"Your mother took vows in Tibetan Buddhism?" I ask, wanting to be sure I'm hearing correctly, mindful of the politics braided through identity and geography.

"Yes. Exactly." Her moon-bright face beams. "We went on big tour with Rinpoche. He took us to special ceremonies in Nepal. Ceremonies for the dead, in between life and death." She lowers her voice as if we share a secret language.

"You did a ceremony for someone who died? For someone's spirit?" I ask.

"Yes! Exactly. But it have very strong effect on me. It made me remember. Past life." She taps her forehead and opens her hand—an explosion. I see it: the flash of light, the sudden memory, the Buddha meditating under the Bodhi tree—only in a too-bright hallway with a correctional officer two steps away.

Then she winks—ancient, cosmic. "I know who you are. What you do."

She'd been waiting two weeks to tell me.

I've felt this before. When I was twenty-seven, I wandered into the "drug den"—the warehouse where people lay tripping on mismatched sofas—and met Ada, the gatekeeper. Everyone was intimidated by her. I was too—starstruck, but not by celebrity. More like a comet had entered my atmosphere and I could already feel the heat of it burning across the sky.

Ada tested me. Left cash scattered about, wads from a grand to ten grand. Everyone else took some. I didn't. When she left the room, I stayed put, oddly reverent. The test was the lesson.

I spent two years with Ada. The main thing I learned from her, and then saw again in every tradition I studied, is that things are not what they appear. I took my vows in Buddhism not too long after. They teach to see it all as a dream. Ada said: See it all as play, as theater. Same same, only the latter arrives with an eternal wink—which I quite like.

And now I'm sitting in prison. This isn't a deviation from that vow. It's a continuation. Through Ada, through Miss Wu, that same eternal wink peeking through, just this time it's breadcrumbs scattered on a windowsill instead of money across a desk. That same actor in new costume, now dressed as a Chinese auntie feeding birds. In prison. Telling me how Jesus teaches the same thing as in Buddhism. Of course.

Back in the dorm after visitation, Miss Wu picks up our conversation again as if no time had passed. She asks what I'm in for. I say, "Conspiracy to force labor. But I'm here for teaching about sexuality and meditation."

"You taught tantra meditation?" Her eyes nearly leap from her face. "In the United States? American women could not understand. Even in Asia, only advanced people understand that." She laughs hard enough to fall off the steel stool.

"Well, yes. I figured that out when they convicted me."

Her face flickers between amusement, concern, and awe. "I am here for conspiracy too," she says, now the very image of a laughing Buddha. "But mine is from past life. I overspent my karma." She tells me about conferences she organized—five hundred monks, sixteen monasteries, all the top lamas and teachers. Then she says we'll do the next one together. I do the math with the unknown variable of my sentencing and, honestly, my entire future.

The mystery opens, as it always does. I have the same flash I had with Ada when I chose her wild ride because what I saw with her felt hyperreal, stronger than anything I'd known, like stepping through the curtain from the simulation into the real. Potent enough to dissolve my fixed ideas about what it should look like—the robes, the solemnity, the candles, the dharma books.

I'm in prison with Miss Wu, and we both know the only secret, the one that keeps her laughing so hard I want to sit close, just to catch her if she falls off that little metal stool.