It's a Jumble

  I’ve finished reading Jung Chang’s  Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China , the classic memoir of one family’s experiences in China through Japanese occupation, the start of the Communist revolution, the utter madness of the Cultural Revolution, and beyond. Nearly every page provokes horror and outrage and incredulity, although there are also stories of stunning courage and human kindness. I started this book because I wanted to better understand how a nation gives into a charismatic dictator and slides into madness. I still don’t understand, no more than I understand certain events and movements of our present time.   There are so many passages that I underlined while reading this book. Passages relevant to our current time, passages depicting mass delusion and hysteria, a fevered cult of personality, zealotry, scapegoating, political cowardice, and the use of politics to grift and settle petty personal feuds.   Of the many passages I’ve underlined, I think o...

It was a literary pilgrimage, of sorts. It had been over twenty years since I last set foot in Great Britain. I was a college student back then, in Cambridge for six weeks on a summer study-abroad program. I was taking courses in poetry. I was in love with the English Romantics, and I was in England for the first time. Twenty-five years later, I was back with my husband and children. Our daughters’ first time in Europe. We wanted to do touristy things—the Tower of London, the London Eye, Westminster Abbey (we never did get to that last, but it’s another story). We took a boat ride on the River Thames. Became familiar with the  Tube. Walked through Piccadilly Circus, Soho, Chinatown, and all over until our feet hurt. We saw the great contrasts of London, the startling juxtapositions of history: the ancient walls of the Tower of London, over a thousand years old, on one side of the Thames; the glittering Shard, that thrusting skyscraper of glass, on the other side. We ...