This is my story.
From conflict to peace.
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When I was growing up in Montreal, Quebec in the 1960s, it was common to see walls, signs, public mailboxes spray painted in French, "Down with the English," "English out of Quebec" and "FLQ," the French terrorist group that was fighting for independence for Quebec from Canada. By the time I was in high school, the FLQ were planting bombs in mailboxes.
In high school, we found a bomb at our house. It didn't go off, and we never knew who had put it there. When I was 19 years old, I hitchhiked and worked in Europe and Israel for a year, where I saw and experienced other conflicts. I married a Chinese man from Hong Kong and raised my children in Los Angeles, where I taught English to immigrants from China, Viet Nam, Taiwan and Japan, and ran into more conflicts. Along the way, I noticed that almost every group, whether ethnic, religious, professional, educational, cultural or political, follows the same, often unspoken, rules, and I began to write essays about them. They were published in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers and magazines. |
When I began talking to others about their experiences, I realized I had a fascinating book in the making. Their stories became Groups and Power: How Groups Survive, Thrive and Die, which answers the question I asked myself when I was young: Why does someone who doesn’t know me, hate me? It also answers other questions I struggled with for decades: Why conflicts arise between groups, and how to resolve them. 
Graffiti from Front de libération du Québec (Quebec Liberation Front) was a common sight. Photo by Toronto Star.
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