Sublime

In 1989 an official who had been working in famine relief told me that he believed that the total number of people who had died in Sichuan was seven million. This would be 10 percent of the entire population of a rich province. An accepted estimate for the death toll for the whole country is around thirty million.

Hai Ruo exclaims in delight at the gifts. She begins to take the doll apart: inside it is another, and another and another. "Amazing! One woman turns into five!"

"That's you," says Eva. "Wife, mother, teashop owner, head of the family, the sisterhood's big sister."

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha writes, “Arrest the machine that purports to employ democracy but rather causes the successive refraction of her.” The most damaging legacy of the West has been its power to decide who our enemies are, turning us not only against our own people, like North and South Korea, but turning me against myself.

Later, after our family was dispersed in all directions and my grandmother and I were living in that dugout hut on the other side of the Tumen River, she told me a story she’d heard long, long ago from her great-grandmother. It was the story of Princess Bari, whose name meant “Abandoned”. She would always finish the story by singing the last lines

I looked at the minister of culture. His expression was impassive. I asked him why he seemed so unruffled by the whole thing. “In China, we aspire for greatness,” he told me. “If it does not happen the first time, we simply continue until we achieve greatness.”

No people had a more profound attachment to the past than the Chinese. In the face of this enormous obstacle to reform, Mao’s strategy was simple: Instead of struggling against the past, he turned it to his advantage, associating his radical Communists with the romantic figures of Chinese history. Weaving the story of the War of the Three Kingdoms

Our Chinese donors told me that they were used to the idea of the Chinese traveling abroad to learn, but were so proud that Schwarzman Scholars was reversing that and bringing the best foreign students to China. To them, it was a sign of China’s restoration to the place it had occupied for thousands of years.

Within less than two years of the Treaty of Nanking, predicted the free-trade Friend of China, ‘the Tartar of Central Asia will trim his beard with Sheffield scissors, and every spinster in Peking must have a Coventry ribbon’.35