What I learned about freedom in a secret Chinese prison | Lei Cheng
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. For more than a decade, journalist Lei Chang built a successful career reporting on China's economic growth for outlets such as CNBC Asia and the China Global Television Network. But in 2020, her career came to a sudden halt when the Chinese government jailed her under false accusations and kept her detained for three years. Lay took the TED stage to share lessons learned from her imprisonment, namely that only through losing freedom do we learn to truly appreciate it.
Tiesitkö, että joka neljäs yli 40-vuotias mies kokee virtsan karkailua? Se on todella yleistä, mutta siitä ei silti juuri puhuta. Tenamen suojat on suunniteltu erityisesti miehille. Huomaamattomat, varmat ja luotettavat. Ota tilanne haltuun Tenamenin avulla.
My talk is about what I didn't have for a long time. I received free accommodation from the Chinese government for over three years for so-called leaking state secrets overseas at the worst time for Australia-China relations. And the first phase was called RSDL, Chinese spelling for hell. Then in detention, the sort that makes jail seem like Ibiza, And it was through that ordeal, called the wonder diet, that I realized freedom is wasted on the free. Let me explain. When you only have a few dollars, you know how to spend it. When you win the lottery, it's easy to squander and hard to get your priorities right. Same with freedom. You can be paralyzed by choice. You can't comprehend the vastness or the preciousness.
So how do you make freedom count when you're lucky enough to have it? To start, what it felt like to be not free. In RSDL, I had two guards glued to me front and side at all times. I was made to sit for 13 hours straight each day. I had to request permission to make the smallest movement. And you know what I wanted to do the most? I wanted to run. And usually I hate running. I couldn't talk, which to me is major torture. I wanted to talk to anyone. But in real life, I have sometimes worn ear pods to shut people out. And I would have done anything to learn. except when I was outside, I wasted the chance. I was too busy. Then I moved to detention. I had three cellmates, and that already felt like freedom paradise.
Nobody in the cell regrets things like money or assets, but we were kicking ourselves over the travel we didn't do, the love we didn't show, the risks we didn't take. Imprisonment is like a mini-death. It's a taste of the real thing. It hit us that one day we'll lose the chance to do everything, even the stuff we hate now. So now I do things I want immediately. Another way to value freedom is to be super aware of the forms of prison. My son asked me, if a kid goes to the same nursery, elementary, high school, is that a 13-year sentence? It got me thinking about life as a death sentence and the prisons we put ourselves in. Property, objects can tie us down. Relationships can be shackles too. And we sometimes give up our civil liberties in exchange for a neat society.
But the maximum security prison is our mind, our fears and conventions and biases. And that's why the officers in detention, who are so bound by doctrine, couldn't understand that we could learn with delight and make fun behind bars. I talk about imprisonment. But in fact, everyone here, we've all had some loss of physical freedom. COVID lockdowns. We've all been sick in bed. But when we lose physical freedom, it's an opportunity to find freedom within. And that's how I could, when I was blindfolded and handcuffed, think myself to infinity. through imagination, knowledge, and a BTFI serenity. Beyond the fuck it. It means no matter how bad things get, riding out the worst part, which for me had been wanting to bash my head open against the tiles to shut off the mental anguish.
It had been being stripped naked in a cage. So the ultimate state of being is to be serene. But you can't get there until you've exhausted the other extreme, anxiety, pain, despair.
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