As a curator and writer concerned with social movement histories, Ryan Lee Wong brings to the table an unflinching scrutiny of our inherited contradictions. Through his debut novel, 

, a story about activist dissatisfactions and an immigrant mother’s untold political past, I found his take on the paradoxes of 21st century political consciousness, by turns profound and amusing, more than relatable. Here he unpacks dual legacies that he finds entwined in Orwell’s celebrated essay “Shooting an Elephant.” On the one hand, there’s the public episode that sparks the personal evolution of the famous political critic, and, on the other, a reminder of the anticolonial roots of our contemporary American taste for mindfulness practices.

It sounds like the setup to a joke: What happens when the cop meets the monk? What could the public embodiment of law and order in hard boots say to the sandaled renunciate on the private spiritual path?

A hundred years ago, a colonial cop met a group of Buddhist monks, and their encounter foreshadowed the struggles of the century to come: between religious tradition and political modernity, between national resistance and colonial domination—and the unexpected blurring of those binaries.

Before George Orwell became one of the great critics of state control, before he coined terms like “Big Brother,” “Thought Police,” and “doublethink,” he was Eric Blair, a cop. The young Blair exerted state power as an Imperial Police officer in British-controlled Burma. Orwell begins his 1936 essay “Shooting an Elephant” by describing his daily humiliations on the job, a job necessarily done in public, on the streets of occupied Moulmein. Rising anti-colonial feeling meant Orwell and other police officers were mocked at every chance, “insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance.” He recalls being tripped by a Burmese player during a game of football and laughed at by the crowd. Then he adds:

“The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.”

A group of Burmese monks in front of a temple in Rangoon, Burma, 1907.  Photo by Adolphe Philip Klier, courtesy of The National Archives UK.

Orwell—a white Englishman baptized in the Anglican Church—had no context for these Burmese Buddhist monks. Perhaps this explains why Orwell’s annoyance turns violent, as he reflects on the conflict within him:

“With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in 

, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts.”

Orwell doesn’t want to kill the person who tripped him, and only very reluctantly shoots the titular elephant of the essay, yet these priests become his enemies. The difference between the cop and the monk couldn’t be more stark. One wears the uniform of power: the angular and modern tailoring, the visible gun, the badges and boots. The other wears the uniform of renunciation and contemplation: the shaved head, the flowing saffron robes, the begging bowl. The cop upholds state law by maintaining order and obedience; the monk follows the 

, the law of interconnected and ever-shifting reality. And for all the cop’s weapons and imperial might, the public space belongs to these men in robes and not him.

Orwell admits he was “young and ill-educated” and “had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East.” He was not equipped to understand nor articulate his rage toward these monks. And yet the monk’s uniform is meant to provoke exactly the kind of crisis they did in young Blair: “How do those priests live?” Then, “How do 

 live?” “Who is that?” Then, “Who am 

He must have resented that these monks didn’t seem to have “anything to do” while he was busy doing the “dirty work of Empire.” His generalized racism found easy focus in these inexplicable priests, adding to the orientalist fog through which he saw the Burmese as “evil-spirited little beasts” and a “sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes,” and Burma as “a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts” and a “miry waste of paddy fields.” He held the stereotype of Buddhists that dominates Western consciousness even today: that Buddhists must be silent, serious, withdrawn from the public, and always polite. His encounter with the monks—and their deviation from imperial decorum—chipped away at all those assumptions.

                                                                    ***

Orwell saw much yet understood little. He didn’t know he was confronting not just random jeers, but the very front line of resistance to his presence, to imperial British rule.

In 1885, the British empire removed Burma’s King Thibaw from his palace. They broke centuries of the Burmese royal patronage for Buddhism, the main support for monastics and temples. Buddhist monasteries historically served as the anchors for virtually every village in Burma—the main source of education and communal ritual, as well as a pathway for many young people to become monks. The British disrupted this, too, by building Western schools that taught both English and Christianity.

Buddhists faced a crisis. If the priest’s role is to care for a community and religious practice, what is their role in the face of a colonial invasion—being policed and harassed, watching their culture and religion be destroyed? Surely the priest had to go beyond the walls of the monastery. Indeed, historian Donald Eugene Smith wrote in 

that monastics became “uncompromising nationalists.” Monks understood that independence from Britain was essential for their survival, so they threw their support behind the independence movement, including the Thakins, a young leftist group that included the revolutionary Aung San.

One notable leader of the independence movement was the monk U Ottama, who returned to Burma from India, where he’d studied Gandhian movements, and in 1921 delivered a famous speech calling on the British governor of Burma to “Get out!” He was immediately arrested and spent most of the next six years in jail, the very years Orwell was stationed in Burma. U Ottama grounded this anti-colonial struggle in Buddhist teachings and Gandhian nonviolence, then later incorporated socialism, creating a blueprint that would influence Burmese politics for decades to come.

Another way that Buddhists countered the encroachment of Christian missionaries—the accomplices to empire—was by extending more teachings to the laity, particularly 

, or insight meditation. Vipassana was simple and accessible enough that, with training, laypeople could practice it in their homes. It was a Buddhist populist response to the Christian message of universal salvation. By following the Buddha’s instructions to be aware of the body, feelings, mind, and elements, sitters could gain insight into the nature of suffering, which they could then apply to daily intentions and actions, and lead to nirvana, or release from suffering. This agency over suffering, sourced from a sitting meditation practice, could even lead to social agency amid the oppressive structures of an imposed government and religion.

Monastics like Ledi Sayadaw, U Narada, and Mahasi Sayadaw began teaching vipassana to both monastics and laypeople; U Ba Khin and S.N. Goenka would go on to establish training centers throughout Burma, India, and the world. Far from destroying Burmese Buddhism, British rule triggered the spread of an anti-colonial diaspora that would make vipassana of Burmese Buddhism known and practiced by millions of people around the world.

In “Shooting an Elephant,” Orwell goes on to describe his own insight, the incident that showed him the nature of imperialism. He receives a report of a rampaging elephant and is summoned to track it down. He wanders through a poor village until he finds the elephant grazing in a field, its rage passed, no longer a threat. Yet a crowd has gathered, expecting him, as a Brit and police officer, to kill it anyway.

Orwell comes to the famous lines: “I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. . . . He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.” He shoots the elephant. He feels absurd, driven above all by his “struggle not to be laughed at.”

Perhaps we should thank those monks who jeered the young Eric Blair, who provoked in him a crisis of conscience. Blair resigned from the Imperial Police and turned to writing under the pen name George Orwell. The monks helped turn this enforcer of colonialism into a critic of it, helped turn a cop into something more like a monk. Rebecca Solnit, in 

, writes about Orwell’s monastic turn, retreating not only from propping up a decaying empire, but also from his harrowing experience as a leftist partisan in the Spanish Revolution. He moved to a cottage outside London to cultivate not just critical words but a garden of roses. Solnit argues that Orwell’s ethics meant not only attacking authoritarianism, but celebrating the sensual and beautiful world that authoritarian rule destroyed. Later, Orwell lived on the remote Scottish isle of Jura where, despite the death of his wife and his failing health, at a distance from the horrific front lines of WWII and the coming Cold War, he wrote one of the most enduring modern tales of state power: 

George Orwell with members of the Independent Labor Party unit on the Aragon Front outside Huesca, Spain, March 1937. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The global spread of vipassana and other forms of meditation has taken a disturbing turn today: This practice, originally sparked by an anti-colonial movement, is now used by police departments, neocolonial corporations, and military forces to more efficiently do violence, to manage the symptoms of PTSD without addressing its causes. Many Western teachers strip meditative practices of their “cultural baggage,” a racist term that means, in this case, the cultural and social histories that supported vipassana, the very soil that nourished it for millennia. Vipassana becomes just another neoliberal assistant like pharmaceuticals, exercise, and tech to “optimize.”

And yet, to use vipassana for neocolonial ends means removing its foundation: ethics. The Buddha was clear that wisdom rested on a ground of ethics, that the poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion could never lead to liberation. A deracinated vipassana can certainly help one calm down, can help optimize one’s time, yet without an ethical ground it will be only a brittle calm, a shallow insight. To practice vipassana without ethics is to build a car without a chassis—it will roll forward, but not very far.

Orwell warned that true control wasn’t cops in the streets, but the Thought Police inside one’s mind. Since 

, the Thought Police have entered our most private spaces, spread voluntarily on social media, and now replicated by machines in AI. We take on the task of replicating a violent social order ourselves. We wear the uniform of the cop as we police others’ speech and identities, as our consumerist choices further an economy of greed and extraction.

Orwell’s essay, read alongside the history of resistance in Burma, offers a two-pronged solution to this dilemma: No cop has to wear his uniform forever; no monk has to remain silent about their social moment. Like any confrontation with power, removing the cop’s uniform is risky—it leaves one as vulnerable as the monk. And there is nothing more painful, nothing more freeing, than removing the masks we wear. This is the potential of an ethical vipassana, of the social critic’s truth: to see the cop in our mind, then have the insight to jeer at him.

, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, the son of a fifth-generation Chinese American father and a Korean immigrant mother. He lived for two years at Ancestral Heart Temple, a Zen monastic center, and served as the Administrative Director of Brooklyn Zen Center for three years. He has organized several exhibitions on the Asian American movements of the 1970s.

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Ryan Lee Wong

No Privacy, No Public

The Cop, the Monk, and the Elephant

Test

 is A Blade of Grass’s outlet to collaborate with practitioners and learn through their perspectives. While we understand that our communities have long been in a state of crisis, the inauguration of the current political administration accelerated these crises with a strategy to overwhelm constituents. With the ground shifting rapidly throughout the first half of 2025, our conversation with artist and writer Dan S. Wang reminded us that moments like this are not new to communities and elders who have long engaged political struggle.

As guest editor of this year’s issue of 

, Dan brings a rich history of organizing with artist collaborators and collectives and contributing to social movements throughout the Midwest and beyond. Dan has produced work with artist groups Compass, Madison Mutual Drift, and Red76, and he was a founding member of Chicago experimental space Mess Hall. Dan’s recent residency and exhibition 

 at Dartmouth College explored political memory, revolutionary strategy, and leftist failure. In 2022, Dan co-edited with Anthony Romero and Daniel Tucker the book 

Lastgaspism: Art and Survival in the Age of Pandemic

, a collection of interviews, critical essays, and artist portfolios that—in their words—“offers a framework to help us make sense of the interlocked crises of the unfolding present and asks with critical optimism what can happen in this time of transition.”

 contributions that will continue to unfold throughout the rest of the year.

At the quarter mark of the 21st century, more than two decades after the Patriot Act and now at the dawn of ubiquitous AI, privacy is nothing but a bad joke and our encrypted browsers won’t save us.

Which is not to say that the public sphere is healthy. In the United States, between Clintonian neoliberalism and Trump’s crony capitalism, everything “public” has been heavily degraded, disfigured, shut down, or shut out. Most public services are on life support. Public sector workers are the go-to punching bag for conservatives. Public education has one defender for every hundred critics. Public lands will be sold to real estate vultures for a song if the Republicans get their way. And public expression? Forget it. Circulation is so uneven and attention so fleeting that any given public gesture, message, or display might as well be private—in which case, refer to the bad joke above.

Over a three-part rolling release, this year’s edition of 

 seeks to make sense of the collapsed public/private scheme, once a workable distinction, now an ideological wreck. By addressing this condition directly and obliquely, the hope is that the conversations, essays, process notes, and other contributions amount to a genealogy of “private” and “public” while grappling with a world in which it is no longer possible to hide, and yet in which the spaces of mutual visibility and common communication continue to fracture and shrink.

The wish is to create forms of social engagement untethered to the outdated dichotomy, but that can realistically contend with inherited systems and distributions of power that were built on those presumptions of public versus private. If this edition of 

makes strides toward that end it will have been a success, all the more so as a project completed under a totalitarian regime on the ascent. It must be said, the events of 2025 and beyond—today, yesterday, any day you are reading this—temper our plans and expectations. Whatever adjustments we make as the year unfolds will stand as a record of this time. Progress is the hope, survival the goal.

This editorial platform was created in collaboration with curator and writer Risa Puleo, who served as an advisor and thought partner to A Blade of Grass in 2024. 

 is guest edited by Dan S. Wang with support from ABoG Program Directors Allie Linn and Lee Heinemann with Executive Director Lu Zhang. ABoG’s board is ashley sparks, Elissa Blount Moorhead, Diya Vij, Gregory Sale, Michael Premo, and Michael Quattrone. Rebekah Kirkman copyedited these contributions and Team designed the identity and interface for 

Dan S. Wang

Over a three-part rolling release, this edition of 

 seeks to make sense of the collapsed public/private scheme, once a workable distinction, now an ideological wreck. 