By A father’s diary, an artist’s memoir.

By the author of the best-selling Three Golden Keys.

While my father was in China and Tibet, he kept a diary, which was later locked in a red box. We weren’t allowed to touch the box. The stories I heard as a little boy faded to a hazy dream, and my drawings from that time make no sense. I cannot decipher them. It was not until I myself had gone far, far away and received the message from my father that I became interested in the red box again . . .

In New York, Peter Sis receives a letter from his father. “The Red Box is now yours,” it says. The brief note worries him and pulls him back to Prague, where the contents of the red box explain the mystery of his father’s long absence during the 1950s.

Czechoslovakia was behind the iron curtain; Vladimir Sis, a documentary filmmaker of considerable talent, was drafted into the army and sent to China to teach filmmaking. He left his wife, daug