Kit Bakke's Blog, page 10

Ni Hao is Chinese for Hello

I've just returned from three weeks in China and am bursting with reactions, memories, advice, and mostly, encouragement. Go! That's the first piece of advice — don't hesitate to travel to China on your own. The days of being unable to manage China as an independent traveler are long gone. English is used in the subways of the large cities. Hotels are full of helpful, young staff people with college degrees in English literature. Drivers and guides-for-the-day (again, twenty-somethings with English lit degrees) are plentiful, cheerful, and affordable. Menus have pictures. ATMs are plentiful in the big cities.

I traveled with my husband and another couple. We did our homework ahead of time and made all our hotel and flight reservations in advance. Overall, we spent four days each in Beijing and Shanghai, then two or three days each in Hangzhou, Kunming, Lijiang, and Shangri-La.

Yes, Shangri-La — a small but growing town at the 10,500 foot level in the Himalayas on the far southwestern edge of Yunnan province, near Tibet and Burma. It's an ethnic Tibetan community whose village fathers were savvy enough to change their name to draw the tourist trade. Today it's a fascinating mix of subsistence farms (mostly barley and turnips), no plumbing, arranged marriages, hundreds of prayer flags, free-ranging livestock on the outskirts, and, in town, there's an airport, broad, new (mostly empty) boulevards, new schools, electric plants, hotels, and car dealerships.

China faces enormous challenges, and its government is doing some things right and some things wrong. As in any country, there's a disconnect between the politics and the people. China may have a totalitarian government, but it also has 1.3 billion people with a 5,000 year history who now, for the first time, have access to electricity and education.

The country is far too large for generalities. It would be like saying you know America because you've seen New York and Disney World. But here are a couple of quickies: We saw many Buddhist temples, all in daily use. We saw many statues of Mao. We visited artists and painters who are pushing boundaries with modern depictions of China's worst environmental and human rights abuses. We ate terrific food every single day. They really do dance and do tai chi in the public parks. The air quality in Beijing is abysmal — the sun was always reddish and I doubt anyone ever saw the moon. We had guides in Yunnan point out "the most polluted lake in China" and various paintings and sculptures "damaged in the Cultural Revolution." Shanghai is a global city with every high-end European retailer present and accounted for. You can't drink the tap water anywhere. All of China is one time zone. Handpainted Chinese calligraphy is ethereally beautiful.

Besides the usual guidebooks, I read several excellent books to prepare for the trip. Nien Cheng's gripping Life and Death in Shanghai, Anchee Min's more literary but less informative Red Azalea, Peter Hessler's wonderfully paradoxical River Town, and John Pomfret's insightful Chinese Lessons were the best. All but Hessler's book center on the Cultural Revolution and what it did to those who survived and those who did not.

Here's a picture of part of the Forbidden Palace in Beijing at about 3 pm. See what I mean about the air pollution?

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And here's Jade Dragon Snow Mountain from Lijiang. So quiet and beautiful!

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Book Lists

My husband Peter likes both Nick Hornby and Sarah Vowell, so I thought I'd hit pay dirt when I bought him a Nick Hornby book that has a Sarah Vowell introduction. As it turned out, he found the book a bit repetitive and quit about half way through, so I gave it a try.

I can see Peter's point, but I still love the concept. Shakespeare Wrote for Money is a compilation of Hornby's columns for The Believer in 2007 and 2008, in which he listed the books he'd bought the previous month, and commented on the books he'd read that same month. A bonus treat for me, since I'm working on writing one, were the couple of months Hornby spent discovering, reading, and greatly enjoying young adult novels. Hornby's lists of books bought and books read always overlapped, but were never identical. Book-choosing is such a personal pleasure; it was fun to imagine Hornby picking which books to read, and which to postpone until later, and how those choices might have been similar or different from mine.

So I thought I'd list the books I've bought recently, and the ones I've read in the last month or so.

Books bought: Book Thief by Markus Zuzak; Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel; Brooklyn by Colm Toibin; Music by Nicholas Cook; To Music by Ketis Bjornstad; The English Novel by Walter Allen; Community and Commitment by Rosabeth Moss Kanter; Angel in the Forest by Marguerite Young; Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See; and, Utopia by Thomas More.

Books read: Community and Commitment; Brooklyn; most of Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee; a 1940s British murder mystery which I've already forgotten both author and title that I borrowed from a friend for a trip; Walden Two by B.F. Skinner; Utopia by Thomas More; and, The Paris Review Interviews with Women Writers, edited by George Plimpton.

Perhaps a theme emerges. A theme of confusion perhaps. Sherlock Holmes might notice that: 1. I don't read much from the New York Times Bestseller lists; 2. I read fiction and nonfiction; 3. I seem to have a thing for women writers, maybe; and 4.What's all this about utopias and music? Perhaps in the comments section we can explore this further.

The books we read are dependent on the sources we tap for book recommendations — friends, bookstore employees, printed reviews, the internet, covers that jump out at us while browsing, authors whose names we recognize as having enjoyed before. I enjoy combing bibliographies and references from books I'm already reading — like a frog leaping from lily pad to lily pad, I can go from book to book without ever leaving a book. On the other hand, I'm one of those people who've never joined a book club because I don't want other people to tell me what to read, and yet, of course I take other people's suggestions all the time. Recently, I've been pelted with more than the usual number of "you must read this!" comments (including from Walter, my hair guy) for The Help by Kathyrn Stockett. Friends who know you well enough to recommend books that you would have chosen for yourself are a treasure.

We read for differing reasons — to escape, to relax, to learn, to prepare, to keep up — and there are books to meet all those needs. Even the act of reading has meaning, regardless of content. At a recent Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators conference, I heard a literary agent say that books are among the few places children can go nowadays to engage their minds in privacy and imagination.

I couldn't agree more. And that goes double for adults.

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Civilized Society from the Citizen Up

~ Feb 15, 2010: President's Day ~

Like sudsy spume on a sandy beach, my recent reading has tossed up a couple of interesting comments about solitude, independent thought, and civilized society. I scrawled the quotes on little scraps of paper and they have been lying loose on the coffee table for weeks. It's time to look them over one more time and then clean off the coffee table.

The first one is from a letter written in the late 1920s by the Englishwoman Vera Brittain (First World War–nurse, pacifist, socialist, and author of the heart-wrenching Testament of Youth) to her best friend Winifred Holtby (novelist, journalist, and fellow pacifist). Miss Brittain was visiting the U.S. for the first time, and she is telling Miss Holtby what she thinks of America:

"America is a civilization whose members spend all their energy in adapting themselves to each other and on the whole they succeed very well — I never met so many people with such a fear of originality, solitude and independent thought."

Originality and independent thought do not thrive in the herd; they require solitude, and I think Americans are even more afraid of solitude today than they were when Miss Brittain wrote that sentence. Perhaps we are more afraid of it today because even less of it is available, and more effort is required to find it. Solitude requires turning off the television and radio, not checking email, not twittering, not texting, not telephoning, not being somewhere with piped-in music and always-on television screens. These days, solitude requires decision and a detour.

It's a suspect decision, too. The message in our everyday air is that solitude means nobody likes us and that, if we move from one minute to the next under our own steam we'll make a mistake or "miss" something. Life in herd mode is safer; regression to the mean is easier.

My second scrap of paper quotes Jane Addams, from her book, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, published in 1930. Jane Addams was also a pacifist. She founded the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (still in existence) and opposed U.S. entry into the First World War. As a result, she lost most of the public good will that her Chicago settlement house work had gained her. Gradually, after the war, people calmed down and she was feted nationwide when she became the first U.S. woman to win a Nobel Prize (ironically, for peace) in 1931.

Miss Addams makes this statement:

"The patriotism of the modern state must be based not upon a consciousness of homogeneity but upon a respect for variation, not upon inherited memory but upon trained imagination."

Wow! That wakes me up nicely. Although we exist in social groups, our families, societies and nations won't succeed if their members all the same; they will succeed only if our differences are appreciated! Patriotism is not about using the past to constrain the future, but about using our variations to enlarge the future!

"A trained imagination." I love that concept. Imagination requires independent thought — imagination develops in solitude like film develops in darkness. A person can't find her imagination, let alone train it, in the midst of our saturated, attention-demanding, noisy, instantly-reacting world.

I like how these two quotes move us from individual choices to social and political choices and back again. They aren't separable: civilized life requires independent thought, which requires solitude. Civilized society requires tolerance, which requires imagination, which takes us back to independent thought, which takes us right back to solitude.

 

Like sudsy spume on a sandy beach, my recent reading has tossed up a couple of interesting comments about solitude, independent thought, and civilized society. I scrawled the quotes on little scraps of paper and they have been lying loose on the coffee table for weeks. It's time to look them over one more time and then clean off the coffee table.

The first one is from a letter written in the late 1920s by the Englishwoman Vera Brittain (First World War–nurse, pacifist, socialist, and author of the heart-wrenching Testament of Youth) to her best friend Winifred Holtby (novelist, journalist, and fellow pacifist). Miss Brittain was visiting the U.S. for the first time, and she is telling Miss Holtby what she thinks of America:

"America is a civilization whose members spend all their energy in adapting themselves to each other and on the whole they succeed very well — I never met so many people with such a fear of originality, solitude and independent thought."

Originality and independent thought do not thrive in the herd; they require solitude, and I think Americans are even more afraid of solitude today than they were when Miss Brittain wrote that sentence. Perhaps we are more afraid of it today because even less of it is available, and more effort is required to find it. Solitude requires turning off the television and radio, not checking email, not twittering, not texting, not telephoning, not being somewhere with piped-in music and always-on television screens. These days, solitude requires decision and a detour.

It's a suspect decision, too. The message in our everyday air is that solitude means nobody likes us and that, if we move from one minute to the next under our own steam we'll make a mistake or "miss" something. Life in herd mode is safer; regression to the mean is easier.

My second scrap of paper quotes Jane Addams, from her book, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, published in 1930. Jane Addams was also a pacifist. She founded the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (still in existence) and opposed U.S. entry into the First World War. As a result, she lost most of the public good will that her Chicago settlement house work had gained her. Gradually, after the war, people calmed down and she was feted nationwide when she became the first U.S. woman to win a Nobel Prize (ironically, for peace) in 1931.

Miss Addams makes this statement:

"The patriotism of the modern state must be based not upon a consciousness of homogeneity but upon a respect for variation, not upon inherited memory but upon trained imagination."

Wow! That wakes me up nicely. Although we exist in social groups, our families, societies and nations won't succeed if their members all the same; they will succeed only if our differences are appreciated! Patriotism is not about using the past to constrain the future, but about using our variations to enlarge the future!

"A trained imagination." I love that concept. Imagination requires independent thought — imagination develops in solitude like film develops in darkness. A person can't find her imagination, let alone train it, in the midst of our saturated, attention-demanding, noisy, instantly-reacting world.

I like how these two quotes move us from individual choices to social and political choices and back again. They aren't separable: civilized life requires independent thought, which requires solitude. Civilized society requires tolerance, which requires imagination, which takes us back to independent thought, which takes us right back to solitude.

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Novels with Indices

At a holiday dinner party, I was introduced to a woman who had recently seen the new Sandra Bullock movie, The Blind Side. She liked it very much, bubbling, "and it's a true story!"

Why do movie publicists insist on telling us that their film is "based on a true story"? Because they know that we connect more deeply to true stories. And why is that the case? Because despite the American emphasis on independence and individuality, there's another, perhaps more sensible part of us that is reassured by the similarity of our loves and struggles. We like to be reminded that we are all in this together; there is a part of us that is inevitably drawn to the chance to see ourselves in others and others in ourselves.

I go to maybe one movie a year, and I read far more nonfiction than fiction, mostly biographies. Contemporary fiction tends to be too formulaic to hold my interest, and I'm at an age when I don't have time to burn anymore. When I do read fiction, I like to have it aged, like a wine, before I crack it open. But biography is my hands-down genre of choice.

Last month, I discovered a biographical treat in a wonderful Oxford series called "A Very Short Introduction." Oxford has issued Very Short Introductions since 1995 and now there are over two hundred topics covered in as many volumes. The books are a lovely small size 6 3/4" by 41/2", soft cover but with front and back flaps, very pleasant to handle. Some of the subjects must have been harder to make into Very Short Introductions than others — Nationalism for example, or Logic or International Migration or Psychiatry. Others, maybe Relativity or Schopenhauer or The World Trade Organization might have provided less of a challenge to the assigned writer.

But it was Biography that I read, written by Hermione Lee, the well-known British biographer of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton. I bought a copy for myself and one for my brother, who is the genealogist in the family — his occasional essays on family members qualify as biographies in every way . . . which raises the question: "What is a biography?"

Obviously there are many styles of biography — syncophant whitewashed versions, ax-grinding versions, boring versions, wildly Freudian versions. Stepping back from those choices, the biographer must first choose a subject — again, there are many interesting or tedious options. The traditional biography covers a birth-to-death time-frame, but some of the most fascinating ones focus on several people who lived and acted together on a particularly climactic stage.

Ms. Lee quotes John Updike as saying that biographies are just novels with indexes, which nicely sums up the trail-mix of supposition and documentation that every biographer must serve up. The best biographers are continually chewing on the problems of how their subjects define and shape the purpose of their lives, and how they give and find value in those choices. Thinking about these issues in the context of someone else's life is easier than confronting them in one's own life, but reading a good biography can give us a helpful nudge in the direction of a more personal application.

Ms. Lee argues that philosophy and biography both try to describe and understand human thought and activity. The narrative of a human life leapfrogs between a person's thoughts (which we cannot see) and a person's activities (which we can see). But what is the connection between the two and how is each weighted differently in different people's lives? In part, that is what the biographer is trying to answer by sifting through letters, pictures, journals, articles, reminiscences, lies and truths about his or her subject.

Each of our lives is a true story, and like all true stories, the characters have the opportunity to grow and change in ways that are sometimes surprising, sometimes predictable. This never-ending combination of strangeness and familiarity is what casts the spell that binds us together.

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History Worth Repeating

Last week I helped facilitate a luncheon discussion of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's book Half the Sky. Subtitled "Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide," the book has generated much conversation here in Pacific-Rim Seattle; it is full of ideas for action and extends its reach through the website www.halftheskymovement.org. The content is enormously powerful: stories of women's oppression (slavery, rape, death) in the developing world, and their incredibly heroic and tenacious battles for just a tiny slice of the daily personal freedom, physical health and safety, and emotional and intellectual fulfillment that so many Americans take for granted.

The eighteen Seattleites at lunch were women ranging in age from their young twenties to their early seventies. They worked in different fields and most didn't know each other. Some were already involved in organizations that support women's educational, health, or employment initiatives in developing countries; some had lived for a time in Asia or India; others were just curious. Some had experienced gender discrimination or violence themselves, some had not. All appreciated the complexity of the issues, and were not afraid of the messiness of reality.

They came together at the invitation of an energetic young woman who has the trick of making tough conversation (slavery, rape, death) honest, productive and not paralyzingly guilt-producing. She arranged to have our lunch catered by a local farm and restaurant that sells its products to our neighborhood farmers' markets. Our cook and server was the wife of the farm's butcher. With cheerful panache, and her six month old son strapped to her side, she served up incredibly tasty soups, quiche, pumpkin pie and apple crisp made with the farm's butter, eggs, cream, bacon, honey, chicken, pork and vegetables. Even the bread was made with wild yeast.

The growth of farmers' markets and local food-buying reflects the "Think Globally, Act Locally" approach to problem-solving. The idea is to consider the problems of the world, but realize you probably can't do much to affect global change, so you should focus your charitable efforts in your own neighborhood.

But Half the Sky pleads the opposite case. Imagine you cannot leave your house without your husband's permission, imagine facing a one-in-ten chance of dying in childbirth, imagine being kidnapped as a 12-year-old, locked in a brothel and beaten daily for not smiling enough during forced sex. Imagine that world was local. Then act globally.

George Santayana wrote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Often used to encourage students to study harder, the phrase assumes most of history is a record of bad and wrong things. In fact, there are a good many progressive lessons in history that we would do well to remember and repeat.

One of these lessons that Half and Sky urges us to emulate is the British effort to abolish the slave trade in the 1830's, led by William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson. Slavery didn't exist on the British Isles. It wasn't local — unlike in America, the vast majority of British citizens never personally saw the degradation of human slavery, while at the same time they greatly benefited economically from their country's participation in the global slave trade.

Wilberforce and Clarkson led an unrelenting campaign to describe the moral horrors of slavery in scrupulously fact-checked detail. Public outrage eventually forced Parliament to ban slavery and the slave trade, even though the country lost an estimated 1.8% of its GNP by doing so, effectively transferring wealth and power to its enemies France and Spain.

Half the Sky argues that Britain's success at ending its association with human slavery in the early 1800s is exactly what Americans should do now with respect to ending our acquiescence to the oppression (out-and-out slavery as well as systematic discrimination in education and health care) of women in much of Asia and Africa. There are more women enslaved in brothels in the world today than were ever transported on slave ships across the Atlantic in the 1700s and 1800s. We don't see it, it's not local, but it's what Half the Sky calls a "transcendent" moral outrage, one in which outsiders (us) can "truly make a significant difference."

How did my luncheon conversation change me? The opacity of cultures, the overwhelming nature of the injustices, and the sheer "foreignness" of the developing world have been a barrier to thinking that I can, in any meaningful way, alleviate the suffering of an African child or a Indian teenager or a Afgan woman. That barrier is lower now. Useful action is possible.

I think I may start with introducing a few new conversational topics over the Thanksgiving turkey this year. I also have some creative gift ideas for those on my Christmas list who already have everything that truly matters, except, perhaps, the gift of helping oppressed women fight to live a fully human life.

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Political Presbyopia

I recently read a friendly biography of Beatrice Webb, the British reformer. Although annoyed at the book's general lack of analytic depth, I did find a few nutritious nuggets of thought to chew on. Beatrice Webb (1858-1943) was a self-taught social scientist and political progressive who didn't approve of a society that allowed so many of its citizens to live without "sufficient nourishment and training when young, a living wage when able-bodied, treatment when sick, and (a) modest but secure livelihood when disabled or aged." She was good at envisioning a better future, but not so good at seeing the currents of the present.

With her husband Sidney Webb and a group of friends, she shaped the Fabian Society, and later founded the London School of Economics. Members of the group were also instrumental architects of the pre-World War I Labour Party, and launched the New Statesman. Beatrice and her friends believed in preventing poverty, not charitably relieving it. They held sensible — but advanced for their times — views about the value of public health and a minimum wage, and they advocated governmental support for children and the elderly. They believed more and more people would inevitably come to agree with them and then society would gradually evolve into a better place for all.

Like her, I have always had trouble understanding how anyone could be opposed to building a community where no one was starving or homeless or illiterate or (dare I say it?) without access to primary health care. I tend to get impatient at well-fed, sheltered, well-insured people who do not seem to mind that millions of their fellow citizens are not so well protected.

Mrs. Webb thought of herself as "one of the B's of the world — bourgeois, bureaucratic and benevolent" as opposed to her friend and fellow Fabian Bernard Shaw, whom she saw as one of the "A's of the world — aristocratic, anarchist and artistic." The "B's" of the world tend to think that everyone tries to be as rational as possible when making both personal and political decisions.

Reading the biography, I realized that I also am a "B." Like Beatrice Webb, I continually undervalue the forces of personal emotion (jealousy, fear, anger) that underlie people's political stands. "All their lives," the biographer says in one of her rare on-target comments, "the Webbs were insufficiently aware of the deeper currents of irrational public opinion." (This sort of sentence is exactly why I keep reading books that might otherwise not be very well-written).

The Webbs really thought people could be swayed by sensible, moral discussion, and that, in the end, rich people could be peacefully persuaded to share their wealth for the good of all.

Reading the book reminded me of my appearance in 1969 in a Chicago courtroom. I had been arrested and jailed, and was now was being arraigned in the aftermath of a violent anti-war demonstration. When given the opportunity to plead guilty, I instead carefully explained the vicious, imperialistic nature of the American presence in Vietnam to the judge, whom I mistook for being a little like my father, an open-minded intellectual who loved philosophical conversation. I acted as if I was in a graduate school political science seminar, not a courtroom. I acted as if I were in a rational environment. My grasp on the present was clearly much shakier than my vision of a better future.

Successful reform requires both.

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