An adventure book, chronicling China's poverty alleviation

On May 12, 2008, our planet ripped itself apart, and a portal to hell opened on Earth in Sichuan province.

I don't just mean hell as a metaphor. The quake zone literally assumed a vast geography inhabited by tens of millions of people, wailing and gnashing their teeth, and nearly 90,000 dead or missing.

I start my new book, Closer to Heaven: A Global Nomad's Journey Through China's Poverty Alleviation, there because I was supposed to be there. But because of a scheduling change, I wasn't.

I later spent a total of eight months making 15 trips through the quake zone, and spent my birthdays, which often overlap with China's Tomb Sweeping Day, at a mass grave.

What I saw over the years was a miracle, as the rescue and recovery lifted the survivors in Sichuan further and further from hell, and closer and closer to heaven.

It seemed unfathomable－until it became reality.

This led me to another quake zone, in the nomadic Tibetan communities of Yushu on the remote Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

Sichuan taught me to find light in the darkness. Qinghai taught me to create light when there seems to be none to be found－literally.

I started working on the plateau by installing solar panels in an isolated school without electricity.

From there, friends and I went on to electrify most schools throughout Yushu's Qumarleb county.

We also provided metric tons of clothes, computer labs, libraries, food, medicine, coal and even yaks, when a blizzard killed most of a school's herd. Indeed, when I first arrived in China, I never imagined I'd end up buying, riding, milking and getting kicked by yaks－let alone harvesting their dung for fuel.

Even there, on the "planet's third pole", China's poverty-alleviation miracle means that the Qinghai I've returned to recently is a different place than I first saw in 2011. It's unrecognizable now. This seemed unimaginable then.

Since the government has brought unthinkably rapid development, we've shifted toward providing surgeries for nomadic children and university scholarships for nomads.

One surgery was for a girl with a severe cleft palate. Other kids called her "monster".

She'd lived in such a remote area that she was amazed when she first rode an escalator in Beijing. She was shocked by the "stairs that move themselves".

A friend paid to fly her home after the surgery. She was amazed because she didn't know that planes flew above the clouds. And she said: "They fly above the clouds! Above the clouds! And I'm flying above the clouds! I feel like an angel! I'm closer to heaven!"

She was no longer a "monster".She felt like an angel. And I, too, felt closer to heaven.

My book, Closer to Heaven, published in English and Chinese by China Intercontinental Press, is the capstone of my life's mission to contribute to and tell the story of China's poverty alleviation miracle from the front lines.

It's not your typical China book.

I discover unexpected dimensions while riding ostriches, visiting leprosy villages and exploring virtual reality parks run by farmers.

I talk about sexual rehab with people left paralyzed by quakes, meet Hero Pig and eat horse intestines with an elderly nomad who hunts with eagles on horseback.

I join the "bangbang army", ride hogs with an elderly motorcycle club and much, much more.

These journeys have been adventures. They've brought me from the darkness of the quake zone toward the light, from the United States to the "roof of the world" and closer to heaven.

And they've been a firsthand exploration of how China, in turn, has lifted so many people from the hell that is poverty and closer to heaven, as it exists on this Earth.