Books, Books, Books

Nice thing about really long plane rides is the chance to catch up on reading.  Read three books during my recent trip to China.  While I had picked two of them randomly (just wanted really skinny books for my suitcase) the selections all turned out to be weirdly resonant for my first (and likely only) trip to a Communist nation. 

First up was Anthem, by Ayn Rand.  The story of a nameless young man living in a highly controlled society, he is an intelligent, feeling person who has been assigned to work as a street cleaner.  His curiosity gets the better of him and he experiments with leftover Science equipment (a serious breach of protocol) while simultaneously becoming attracted to a young woman working in the fields.  The spare prose beautifully reflects both the bleak existence of his world and the angst he feels in being trapped in a place with no individuality.  Written in the 1940s it could have been penned for China's Cultural Revolution, which occurred some 25 years later.  This is the society the Cultural Revolution might have produced had it continued.  I didn't love the end of the book due to some patriarchal attitudes (again, written nearly 80 years ago) and an unexpected twist in his final discovery, but the tone of the tale perfectly matched the feel of modern day Beijing in surprising ways (older factory workers are put to work as street sweepers).  Ms. Rand makes the point that brilliance can come in small packages.  In this case, a novella of only 123 pages.

Next up was China in Ten Words by Hua Yu.  Again, a perfect choice, as each of the short essays explored issues I was witnessing each day of my visit, and doing so in concise, perfectly selected prose.  There are essays entitled "People", "Leader", "Reading" and more, each covering Mr. Yu's personal experiences and history, along with Chinese history and the country's current path.  Yu rarely makes full-on conclusions, such as "good" or "bad" but simply tells the story and lets the reader decide.  The combination of his words and what I was learning and seeing in China created a rather indelible impact, helping to understand, and perhaps mourn, China a little bit.  The only criticism of this book is that China is moving so quickly that the essays, penned in 2011, are already looking a bit dated in 2019.  The true sadness is this ... Yu makes a great personal connection to China's recent past, drawing out an understanding of difficult times, but the book is ... you guessed it ... banned in China.

Last was Thomas More's Utopia, this one translated and notated by Paul Turner.  I'm glad of the lengthy introduction and extensive notes.  It helped me understand better a book everyone seems to talk about but perhaps have not actually read.  We talk of "Utopia" a good deal, but it is clear that More was not really describing a perfect society (the actual translation for Utopia is "no place" and the narrator of this fiction is a man named Raphael Nonsenso).  This mythical land has war and slavery and capital punishment.  There is also euthanasia and divorce, which Thomas More was unlikely to actually support.  There is paradox.  More talks about religious tolerance, sort of.  Atheists are tolerated as long as they keep it quiet but those who break canon law can be killed.  It's all a bit of a muddle.  Through the notations by Mr. Turner I began to see the book as a kind of Science Fiction of its day.  From H.G. Wells to Star Trek, Science Fiction has often been used as a kind of cloak to talk about modern day issues.  In 16th Century England More could not speak out about practises in the court which he disliked.  By penning this semi-humorous, outrageous tale he could hide criticisms in ridiculous banter and pray that Henry VIII didn't quite catch his meaning.  The book was oddly predictive.  Written in 1515 it nearly perfectly describes the excess of the The Field of the Cloth of Gold, a meeting between Henry VIII and his French counterpart, Francis I, five years before it actually happened.  (Maybe Henry never got around to reading this particular book).  It also predicted More's own death.  Near the end he states that the residents of this nonsensical nation, praying to their God, say they would "rather come to Thee by a most painful death, than to be kept too long away from Thee by the most pleasant of earthly lives."  More's counterpart, Raphael Nonsenso, somehow knew that his brand of honesty could never be tolerated by a nation's leader.  In any case, the reading was thick -- had to stop to digest frequently -- but interesting.  The Communist thread which ran throughout (again, not something More supported) was interesting to consider, given that this was created some 500 years before Mao got his grip on China.  I wonder if Mao read this, or what More would have thought of Communist China.  Real communist states don't really live up to the ideals set forth here, but then any society with real people, as opposed to fiction, must deal with the real human traits of ambition, pride and envy.  Seeing Mao's China and More's Utopia side by side was nonetheless interesting and made for a good final read on my last week or so there.