History – Asian Lands – education and deconstruction.com

Swimming to Freedom

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “Swimming to Freedom, My Escape From China and the Cultural Revolution” by Kent Wong, published in 2021. Wong was born in 1948 in a coastal town in China. Mao became the official leader of China in October 1949. So that Wong’s father could keep his job at the customs agency, the family moved to Hong Kong. However, they returned to Guangzhou because the father missed his homeland.

Mao brainwashed people into believing that the Americans and their puppet, Chiang Kai-Shek were evil imperialists. The people in northern China were mostly peasant-farmers, while the people in southern China worked in factories and were better educated. More northerners starved to death, as local Communist leaders stole their harvests of grain. So after the food sources of chickens, pigs and horses were exhausted, the people resorted to cannibalism.

From the mid-1960’s, onward, Mao recovered his all-powerful position and cult of personality in the Chinese government. The Chinese times, they were changing in many ways, including:

Anyone who joined the Communist Party enjoyed a significantly better lifestyle than not.
Beginning in the early 1960’s China was gradually becoming less friendly with Russia, claiming via Mao’s drama-queen performance that Khrushchev had criticized their Communist idol, Stalin, and that their ideologies differed (actually, China didn’t want to pay Russia the humungous financial debt it owed).
Contrary to a decade earlier, the schools began to teach the English language instead of the Russian language.
High school kids were sent to the countryside to be “reeducated” (do hard manual labor) with the peasants.
Mao brainwashed the teenagers into becoming child-soldiers called Red Guards.

Across the country, the Red Guards got uniforms, marched in parades, and once they got weapons, they acquired the power to behave like Nazis. And did. They harassed people on the streets, looted stores of cigarettes and cold drinks. They incited terror by whipping people with a belt, in the public square.

In 1966, there arose two different gangs of Red Guards, who were enemies of each other. The main target of the Red Guards, though, was any “Black” family (see the paragraph below) or individual who showed capitalist leanings (thoughts, actions, writings of any kind) or association with bourgeois rich people. Every man, woman and child in China had what amounted to an FBI file on them from the time they were born, as they were legally required to register with the government.

A family was labeled Black if, prior to Mao’s reign, it had been in any kind of business or had been affiliated with Chiang Kai-Shek. One family member could shame the entire family, and cause it to be labeled Black. Wong’s family was labeled Black because they had lived in the Chiang-affiliated, British colony of Hong Kong, and his father had criticized workplace conditions.

Red Guards ransacked the family’s house for any evil materials, but found none. A Red family consisted of loyal Communist peasants. After a while, people of all ages whose families were Black were sent to the countryside. Only loyal Party hacks and rich people dodged the recruitment process.

The internet has greatly automated the kinds of surveillance, censorship and propaganda practiced by China (and the United States!) since Wong’s generation. Political retaliation has never been so easy.

On the other hand, the unbloodied elites (i.e., Donald Trump, Zelensky, etc.) don’t need to actually go into physical combat the way their countries’ militaries (or their cult-of-personality members) do. They simply sit in a TV studio to boost media ratings during a slow-news period, and have a screaming match like the clowns on the “Jerry Springer Show” used to do.

Dictatorial leaders in recent history whose names are still known, of course, have varied in their evilness and attention whoredom. However, only two (Hitler and Stalin) dominated lands (not including Churchill– whose empire was in decline) that potentially had the resources (not including nuclear weapons) to take over the entire earth. They might have, if events had happened a bit differently.

Mutual Assured Destruction has thus far kept world leaders from obliterating one another. There are other factors at work that provide a smidgen of hope for the continued survival of global humanity:

Because nations of the world are so economically interdependent or incestuous of late, no matter how much their leaders rant, rave, brag and deny– their governments are liars regarding trade negotiations.
It has become routine for leaders to incite a hue and cry from their citizens via instantaneous communications methods. This means fewer people are paying attention to the propaganda that is filtered through the narrow lens of a small number of media outlets (which are monster-sized, but not as influential as they used to be).
At least in the United States, more and more families of different ethnicities and religions are converging or assimilating, so hypocrisy among xenophobes is on the increase. The voices of the xenophobes will be eclipsed eventually when the U.S. leadership becomes more diverse. It might take a while, but it has to happen.
Nowadays, violent places of the world are confined mostly to ones that have a reputation for centuries of tribal or religious warfare, as practically all the resources have been looted from once-colonized territories.

The above are reasons why world conquest is too difficult to achieve for any current aspirant. Even so, here’s a little ditty on Trump’s latest speechifying to Congress.

JUST AN OLD FASCIST LOVE SONG

sung to the tune of “Just an Old Fasioned Love Song” with apologies to Three Dog Night, their estates, and to whomever else the rights may concern.

Just an old fascist love song, emanating from the idiot-box,
and wrapped around the words, is the bragfest of a power-hog who’ll never go.

In-history you’ve heard it before. Hypocrisy rolls on.
Money, power, political-hacks. They’re never really gone.

Just an old fascist love song.
One I’m sure they wrote for GOP.
Just an old fascist love song.
Coming forth from backroom bargaining.

Boosting ratings but failing to question,
because their intellect’s low.
To emphasize Trump’s love affair
with phoniness and meanness, that we’ve come to know.

In-history you’ve heard it before. Hypocrisy rolls on and on.
Money, power, political-hacks. They’re never really gone.

Just an old fascist love song.
Coming forth from backroom bargaining.
Just an old fascist love song.
One I’m sure they wrote for GOP.

Boosting ratings but failing to question the song.
Just, an old song, coming forth.
Just (just) an old song.
One I’m sure they wrote for GOP.

Just an old fascist love song.
Coming forth from backroom bargaining.
Just an old fascist love song.
One I’m sure they wrote for GOP.

Anyway, read the book to learn of the author’s adventures (which included serious hardships, although he avoided getting shot, drowned, bitten by a shark, or killed by a typhoon) during his quest for a better life.

Slow Noodles

The Book of the Week is “Slow Noodles, A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss and Family Recipes” by Chantha Nguon, published in 2024. Born around 1961, the author endured the hunger, hard manual labor, bullying from the authorities and other aspects of her decades-long survival struggles through fantasizing about the food her mother cooked for her. Cooking became a life-saving skill later in her life.

In March 1970, Cambodia underwent a regime change. Lon Nol replaced Prince Norodom Sihanouk, and got a lot of financial aid from the U.S. for claiming he was anti-Communist. The new dictator also got military help in the form of American B-52s’ indiscriminately killing people in the countryside. The goal was to rid Cambodia of Vietnamese and non-Buddhist people. The author’s mother was Vietnamese, so the author was considered genetically Vietnamese, too. They were eventually forced to flee to Saigon.

All through the 1970’s, the region of Southeast Asia was particularly hard-hit by genocide, atrocities and torturous practices perpetrated by war criminals who obeyed their respective dictators. As an adolescent, Nguon was subjected to personal hardships, including the deaths of her older sister (who served as her surrogate mother until her mother arrived in Saigon) and her mother.

Nguon, like countless, anonymous hundreds of thousands of other refugees, could have died of disease, starvation, bombings, guerrillas’ bullets, pirates, or land mines, or a combination thereof. On rebuilding Cambodia after Pol Pot’s reign, she wrote, “The big foreign aid groups did their best, but they had no idea how to reshape a civilization from nothing. Who does? Donors, NGOs, and politicians want speedy tangible progress. The natural bias is ‘Hurry up and heal. We have other emergencies to attend to.’ “

Read the book to learn about the kinds of assistance the author provided to her fellow Cambodians, and much more about her food, life and times.

Other Rivers

The Book of the Week is “Other Rivers, A Chinese Education” by Peter Hessler, published in 2024.

In 1996, under the auspices of the U.S. Peace Corps, the American author taught a university course in Fuling, a small city in China. The students weren’t allowed to question the authority of their textbooks, which among other debatable historical statements, said, “..the Constitution of 1787 established the dictatorship of the American bourgeosie.” The government assigned most of the graduates to teaching jobs in rural middle schools. It’s unclear whether the culture has changed from that in the movie Not One Less, a portrayal of a teacher at a rural elementary school in China.

In 2019, the author moved back to China to teach at the elite Sichuan University, where tuition is about $700 annually. The College of Marxism’s building also housed the journalism department. The campus was full of security cameras. Nevertheless, China’s education environment was not so strict as it had been fifteen years prior.

The school’s instructors turned a blind eye to students’ subscribing to technology services (called VPNs) that encrypted their interactions on the internet– allowing them to view websites censored by the Chinese government– so as to better complete their assignments. But they were risking arrest by the government.

The author’s two American daughters began the third grade at a Chinese public school. They spent hours and hours learning the written characters of the Mandarin language. Their mother, whose great-grandfather was Chinese, helped them. Parents of their classmates posted to the instant messaging service called WeChat, day and night; hundreds of messages a day. The school used the parents as free labor, to communicate policies regarding homework assignments, uniforms, etc.

The nonpartisan Peace Corps had had a presence in China for twenty-seven years, when in the third week of January 2020, two Republican U.S. senators (Marco Rubio and Rick Scott), ignorant of what the Peace Corps was, with no authority over it, Tweeted that, going forward, there would be no more volunteers assigned to China. There were, at the time, twenty-seven Peace Corps alumni working for the State Department. The anti-China messaging had nothing to do with COVID.

Toward the end of January 2020, when the spread of COVID reached a certain level, under international pressure, the Chinese government imposed a version of martial law. People were confined to their homes, which tended to be enclosed with walled areas where the government could easily close exits and entrances. Residents could also thus be corralled and surveilled more easily.

In the city of Wuhan– the place of the first COVID case– about nine million people were affected by the lockdown. In early spring 2020, the quarantine was lifted. By mid-spring, the U.S. allegedly had a death toll ten times higher than that of China.

Daily, the author and other parents of school kids were required to report their children’s temperature beginning at 6:30am, and their temperature was to be reported four more times throughout the day. The school schedule included pauses for handwashing, and of course, the WeChat information-sharing never stopped.

One particular man who had a mild COVID case was quarantined for more than two months in a medical facility, even though his eight-day travel history (collected by spies) showed him to have infected ZERO individuals.

The author spoke with lots of people, some of whom, risking arrest, resisted certain aspects of the Chinese government’s oppression in everyday life. These rebels operated as scattered alliances of a few people, rather than as one large organized group, so they wouldn’t appear to be organized. This has worked for various terrorist groups through the decades, and was supposedly the case for the January 6 (American) protestors.

Read the book to learn much more about Chinese way of life, and its nature during the COVID pandemic through the author’s eyes.

tokyo junkie [sic]

The Book of the Week is “tokyo junkie [sic], 60 Years of Bright Lights and Back Alleys… and Baseball” by Robert Whiting, published in 2021.

Whiting was born at the dawn of the 1940’s in northern California. In January 1962, while in the U.S. Air Force, he was assigned to Fuchu Air Base in a Tokyo suburb. He fell in love with Tokyo and the culture of its people, despite its sexism, pervasive sex trade, hatred of foreigners, and government censoring of its media.

Tokyo was undergoing a makeover to prepare for its debut as the venue of the 1964 Olympics. During the Vietnam Era, American college campuses exploded in protest against the war. The Japanese government supported the war. By 1969, Japanese students were protesting, too.

Over the course of decades, the author witnessed how the city changed from a war-ravaged backwater to an economic powerhouse. After WWII, the U.S. maintained a military presence in Japan, and nursed it back to economic health. This process was reflected in Japan’s education system, which mandated rigorous, nerve-racking entrance exams, which had a decidedly capitalist bent.

Another aspect of Japanese culture that showed its emulation of the United States, was the popularity of its professional baseball. However, the Japanese put their own twist on it. They allowed a few Americans to play on their teams, but criticized them for doing too well or too poorly. Too much competition would make the opposing team feel bad, but a player yielding too much to an opposing team, would be told to do better for his own team. Cooperation and sacrificing for one’s own team were key aspects of play.

The author noted one positive behavior pattern the Japanese were taught from birth. That was– maintaining the highest respect for other people’s property, and for public property. Their “lost and found” returned personal items to their owners (even cash, without a penny missing!) as a matter of the right thing to do. Tokyo is one of the cleanest cities in the world because the people feel a collective sense of ownership of their streets, so they don’t “foul their own nest.” Ironically, their politicians are notoriously corrupt.

Read the book to learn much, much more on the author’s take on how Japanese culture changed following major historical events such as Olympics, financial ruin, earthquakes, tsunamis, and globalization.

Blue Sky Kingdom

The Book of the Week is “Blue Sky Kingdom” by Bruce Kirkby, published in 2020.

The Canadian author recounted how he, his wife and two sons– seven and four– went on a radical sabbatical for half a year. The parents had always enjoyed adventurous nature trips on various continents– whitewater rafting, hiking, kayaking, canoeing, and bicycling; not to mention camping. In the mid-2010’s, they began their journey to the Himalayas– Ladakh in northern India, near the Tibet border.

The family got sponsorship from Travel Channel, but had to shop around for a tour manager whose liability insurance allowed children under twelve on the trip. They had to hire local people (who knew the territory and languages) to help them: carry their equipment, cook their food, and know what to do in case of emergency (given the life-threatening terrain and weather), etc. The trip required months and months of planning. Well, the impossible took longer.

The family took various forms of transportation to get from their home in rural British Columbia, to Asia; car, canoe, train, ship. They then backpacked through various parts of Asia. In India, they stayed at a guest house where the air conditioning was broken. As the temperature was over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, they crowded into the cold-water shower stall, which had mildewed tiles. “A group of monkeys watched curiously from outside a window perched in a strangler fig [tree].” To try to cool off, they also ate mango ice cream.

Both parents wanted their family to experience the precepts of Tibetan Buddhism, including but far from limited to: minimalism, tranquility, non-attachment, non-materialism, and transcendental wisdom. So they lived in a monastery, partook of prayer sessions and ceremonies, and taught English to the monks-in-training. The older son, especially, who was on the autism spectrum, took to his surroundings. The author described, through a series of anecdotes, their unique adventures. The takeaway is that the author realized that he became stressed when he was able to check his email in the remotest corner of the world.

Read the book to learn about every last aspect of a simple lifestyle that is quickly disappearing– due to the globalization of capitalism (Hint: “But here [at a luxury hotel] in modern Delhi, such attributes [shorn skull, maroon robe indicating a Buddhist monk– a powerful figure in Tibet] were meaningless [for getting a visa to travel to Canada]. I, on the other hand, possessed light skin and a credit card, which could open almost any door.” The United States– whose economic model is emulated by the rest of the world– is becoming more and more a nation full of athletes, gamblers and public-relations mouthpieces.

ENDNOTE: In Tibetan Buddhism, wisdom and compassion go together– the antithesis of the current Republican presidential candidate in America. Like a dictator, he sneakily sows doubt about the effectiveness or validity of:

all manner of international conferences and summits (except for Davos);
citizenship of his enemies;
the American election process;
the American justice system;
the American tax system;
immigrants’ positive impacts on the U.S. economy; and
America’s international trading relationships; etc., etc., etc.

for the purpose of amassing power.

An intellectual sows doubt for the purpose of furthering the knowledge-base that will improve humanity (and winning a Nobel Prize). Of course, NO presidential candidate has ever been ideal. But the best one would have the:

influence of JFK;
charisma of Reagan;
life-experience of Eisenhower;
intellect of Bill Clinton; and
temperament of Obama.

Here’s a little ditty describing Trump’s modus operandi.

CYNICAL

sung to the tune of “Physical” with apologies to the estate of Olivia Newton John and whomever else the rights may concern.

TRUMP’S sowing doubt with all-things ON your mind,
clouding the conversation.
He’s gotta smear eveRYone Left.
He goes low and MEAN.
He questions your citizenship incessantly.
Then he’s SUDdenly moody.
All his cronies rally round him
about going tax free!

He wants you to get cynical, cynical.
He wants you to get cynical.
Because if you’re cynical,
the IRS and courts will let him walk,
let him walk.
The IRS and courts will let him walk.

He’ll incite more violence.
We’ve been too nice,
tried to keep the dialogue civil.
It’s getting hard to tolerate this hack.
He goes low and MEAN.
His victims understand his point of view.
He owns his base mentally.
They should know, he’s destroying us, institutionally.

He wants you to get cynical, cynical.
He wants you to get cynical.
Because if you’re cynical,
the IRS and courts will let him walk,
let him walk.
The IRS and courts will let him walk.

Let’s be American, American, by voting AGainst him.
Let’s be American.
Or the IRS and courts will let him walk.
Or the IRS and courts will let him walk.

Red China Blues

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “Red China Blues, My Long March From Mao to Now” by Jan Wong, published in 1996.

Born in 1952, Wong grew up in Montreal. Since her parents were originally from China, she went to search for her roots there, beginning when she was in college. She spent her three-month 1972 summer vacation in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards ransacked temples and burned books, painted walls red, and posted Mao’s quotations. Chinese natives had severe shortages of consumer goods, which were exported for hard currency.

The author was assigned a minder (supervisor / spy) and a driver. The unwashed masses were squashed into noisy trams while top government officials rode around in red-flagged limousines whose windows were covered in gauze.

Wong was taken somewhere different every day, such as the Canton zoo, or the countryside. The latter was ninety miles away from Beijing. To get there, she had to take an overcrowded bus with live chickens, plus a six-hour ride on three ferries.

Fresh-faced, earnest, brainwashed cultists (Chinese youths) put on a show for Wong (a special foreign visitor). She had arrived fresh-faced and earnest, and became a brainwashed cultist herself. The most prominently featured book at the bookstore was Selected Works of Mao Zedong in various languages.

Wong became a lucky beneficiary of Mao’s campaign to open up China economically and culturally. As is well known, American president Nixon opened the door for economic benefits. The author got permission to study the Mandarin language at Beijing University. She and her dorm-mate, another foreigner, were treated like princesses rather than common Chinese peasants.

Even so, the author acquired the martyr complex of true Mao worshippers– she was eager to go to the countryside to do hard manual labor. She did, but she saw that her fellow workers had gotten tired of the leaders’ hypocrisy, and the deprivation suffered by, and oppression of ordinary Chinese people.

Mao’s latest nationwide political program was winding down. His anti-education mandate was changing. His minions began to encourage school attendance, but there was rote learning, which still put the kibosh on independent thinking. The goal of the Communists was to produce blindly obedient robots who could recite Marx, Engels , Lenin, Stalin and of course Mao, verbatim.

In the early 1980’s with a new leader, China caught the capitalism bug. But there was still loads of corruption. The government still oppressed ordinary Chinese people. Even though the author was a Canadian expatriate, she looked Chinese, so this actually gave her a distinct advantage as a journalist for a Canadian newspaper. She was able to gain the trust of the people she questioned.

Nevertheless, even the author suffered an outrageous incident: “The police not only didn’t apologize, they announced they would keep our car another month… on June 5, 1990, we got our Toyota back, a year less a day after the police had stolen it. The gas tank was empty, the odometer was broken, the cigarette lighter was gone, and cigarette butts and popsicle sticks littered the interior.”

The author acquired direct experience in two economically and politically diverse environments over the course of decades– Canada and China. By the end of the 1970’s, she had become disillusioned with the workers’ paradise, but didn’t regret the education she got.

Wong saw how, into the 1990’s, Beijing’s roads became clogged with luxury vehicles, as the new rich sought to keep up with the Joneses. At the book’s writing, she could identify dogma and hated it. She believed in dignity and building resilience through experiencing hardship. She contended that rational thought should be sufficiently simple to explain to a five-year old.

Read the book to learn of many other experiences in the author’s life, and of the major late-1980’s historical event the author witnessed, that showed that China was still not ready to join the modern nations of the world that practiced democracy and rule of law.

The Forgotten Highlander

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “The Forgotten Highlander, An Incredible WWII Story of Survival in the Pacific” by Alistair Urquhart, published in 2011.

Born in 1919, the author was drafted into the Gordon Highlanders (a Scottish military outfit ultimately supervised by the British government) sent to Singapore in late 1939. By early 1942, the Japanese had marched into Malaya and Singapore in order to grab their rubber and tin. The region got scant military protection from the British, as there were other territories Churchill deemed more worthy of protection.

Stationed at Fort Canning, the author was taken as a prisoner of war in February 1942. The Japanese exploited him and his fellow Scottish, British, Australian, Canadian, American and Dutch soldiers for slave labor to clear the jungle and build a railway that stretched 415 kilometers from Bangkok in Thailand, to Burma. The latter land provided rice and access to oil fields. The feat was completed by about sixty thousand men in about sixteen months, resulting in countless, anonymous deaths.

The Japanese also forced the Thais, Indians, Malayans and Tamils to help with constructing a bridge on the River Kwai. Unlike in real life, the Hollywoodized movie “Bridge on the River Kwai” featured nicely clothed, well fed workers, sexy female natives on hand, and a labor boss who collaborated with the Japanese.

In real life, the POWs were starved to death, arbitrarily beaten mercilessly, subjected to vermin such as lice, ants, bedbugs, rats, maggots, flies and weevils, and to tropical diseases such as cholera, malaria, diphtheria and dysentery. Due to lack of treatments for the aforementioned, there were deaths and more deaths.

Read the book to learn of numerous additional details of the author’s war experiences, and of how the British government imposed insult to injury on surviving, rescued POWs such as the author (hint: The British demanded that the author comprehensively prove that he deserved a disability war pension, but the Japanese military failed to keep records of its POW-related actions– many of which violated the Geneva Convention provisions, that resulted in millions upon millions of deaths and ruined lives.).

I Should Have Honor

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “I Should Have Honor, A Memoir of Hope and Pride in Pakistan” by Khalida Brohi, published in 2018.

Pakistan’s Muslim men have a tradition of arranging marriages for their prepubertal daughters to clans they deem worthy. None of the female family members have any say in the matter.

It was through a stroke of great good luck that Grohi’s father (born in the mid-1970’s) received an education, instead of facing a fate of ignorance, poverty, goat-herding and hard manual farmwork as his siblings did. Too, the author won the “world parents lottery” in many ways. Her father refused to agree to marry her off before she was born (!) Her parents provided the same resources and opportunities to her and her sisters, as to her brothers. She attended school and was allowed to do almost anything her male counterparts were allowed to do.

The author was born in the late-1980’s, although when she began to travel internationally, her later-created identity documents were inaccurate by about a year. She became fluent in English and Brahui. During her childhood, her financially struggling, ever-growing family moved around a lot. At first, they lived in multi-generational households in rural villages and later on, upgraded to the cities of Hyderabad and Karachi.

Even so, Grohi’s mother and females in her large extended family were still enslaved in a life of domestic chores, which included feeding their farm animals and making cow-dung patties to be burned in cooking-fires. In other words, in most Pakistani Muslim households, the females were kept barefoot and pregnant.

On an even more extreme note, in the single-digit 2000’s (!) the males were allowed to physically abuse their wives (for any reason they rationalized, or none at all), and allowed to kill a female who brought shame to the family through misbehavior such as eloping. The latter situation occurs about a thousand times a year in Pakistan. Gossiping is the number one activity in rural-village communities, so everyone was under pressure to conform to the elder males’ rules.

The author realized that religion, caste or tradition had nothing to do with how such a punishment was justified. The elders were simply alpha males with hubris syndrome who were insecure, or enraged at the disobedience of their daughters. Grohi tried to change that. She founded a non-profit organization that empowered females by spurring discussions in Pakistan and internationally regarding gender equality. After much trauma, she was forced to switch to a less confrontational approach– by apologizing to the males, and convincing them:

that physically harming females was dishonorable;
that allowing female family members to work outside the home would financially help the household (and for that, they might need education), and
that the points above were their idea.

Read the book to learn an additional slew of information on the author’s family, and her trials, tribulations and triumphs in trying to change Pakistan’s entrenched gender-segregated, cruel culture.

A Refugee’s American Dream

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “A Refugee’s American Dream, From the Killing Fields of Cambodia to the U.S. Secret Service” by Leth Oun with Joe Samuel Starnes, published in 2023. The book appeared to be credible although it lacked Notes, Sources, References, or Bibliography and an index.

Leth was born in October 1966 in northwestern Cambodia. He lived in a Buddhist neighborhood of seven households; it was communal, and living conditions were primitive. But his parents believed in education. Leth’s school was a half-hour’s walking distance. He began attending at six years old. The most excitement the peasants had was provided by a neighbor in the wider community. That wealthy family had a home entertainment system consisting of a screen and projector that showed Charlie Chaplin films with French subtitles.

Up until spring 1975, when extreme political turmoil turned his life upside down, Leth was allowed to bring his pet dog with him to see Cambodian and Chinese movies in a theater in Battambang City, near his home village. When the war came to his area, he saw “helicopters shooting fireballs from the sky, trees burning and exploding, trying to kill the Khmer Rouge soldiers in hiding.”

The Khmer Rouge guerrillas committed unspeakable atrocities, dubbed the “Killing Fields” by Western historians, but there was much was more to it than simply torturing and killing people in fields. Westerners who call mass deaths in modern times the “Killing Fields” are just as ignorant about world history as those who call certain leaders “Hitler” when they have no clue what they’re talking about.

Most Khmer Rouge foot soldiers were teenage boys toting AK-47’s. They were bossy and sadistic, like Nazis. The difference was, though, that Cambodia’s new dictator, Pol Pot, took lessons from Stalin’s and Mao Tse Tung’s Communist playbooks through: redistributing property to the government; turning the entire common population into peasant-farmers; and punishing everyone who had previously engaged in capitalism-related activities. They imposed an anti-intellectual godless regime that demonized all things Western. Most of his life, the author’s father had been (not by choice) in the Cambodian military, so he was doomed to be taken away and killed by the Khmer Rouge.

Obviously, the author lived to tell his tale, but he barely survived. At one point, he lived in a refugee camp, which he described thusly: “More huts were built in the dirt of the sprawling community surrounded by barbed wire beneath the mountain. The lines for food and water grew longer and slower. The latrines grew more crowded and smelled terrible.”

Read the book to learn many more details of the fate of the author and his family.

Shanghai Acrobat

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “Shanghai Acrobat, The True Story of Courage and Perseverance from Revolutionary China” by Jingjing Xue, translated by Bo Ai, published in 2021.

Born in 1947 in Zhejiang Province in China, the author was sent to live at an orphanage when he was two years old. He never did find out exactly why, as his biological parents were alive. Anyway, the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe recruited him when he was nine years old. Other members of the group were as old as fourteen. He happened to possess the right temperament to endure its rigorous training (that included corporal punishment) and get good at balancing on his hands in various precarious positions.

There were daily academic lessons, too, and a lot of political ideology thrown in. The instructors constantly emphasized the teachings of Mao Tse Tung, and bragged about what a prosperous, wonderful country they lived in. Mao took the calculated risk of allowing performers and athletes to travel outside China where they might learn about other peoples’ lifestyles and defect– so that he could show off his own people’s greatness.

By the late 1950’s, the author was traveling and performing with the Troupe. In 1960, they went to cities controlled by the Soviets, and ironically, to African countries (such as Sudan, Ethiopia, Guinea and Morocco) whose native peoples were starting to throw off their colonialist yokes.

In the early 1960s, owing a ginormous monetary debt to the Soviets and not wanting to pay it, China decided the Soviets were wrong to stomp on the memory of the great leader Stalin (who had died in 1953 and whose crimes were revealed a few years later); Mao theatrically broke off diplomatic relations with the Soviets.

In 1967, Mao capriciously imposed his new twisted logic (a different set of ideas from that of his previous campaign)– the belief that the lowest economic class (the workers, the peasant-tenants) needed to fight the higher economic classes (the bosses and landlords)– because capitalistic activities were anathema. There were a few occasions in which the author was yelled at for saying the wrong things to some non-Chinese people, even though he thought his comments would jive with Mao’s teachings.

As part of the new campaign (called the Cultural Revolution, begun in 1965) to rid China of the dissidents of the moment– performing acrobatics was out of fashion. The radicals loyal to Mao policed the Troupe, finally disbanded it, and psychologically and physically tortured the director in public self-criticism meetings. The author’s acrobatic career was (temporarily, though he didn’t know it at the time) over. He was sent to the countryside for “reeducation.”

With 20/20 hindsight, the author wrote, “To those of us who had been through the Cultural Revolution, the Watergate political scandal was nothing. We couldn’t understand how the American people could force Nixon to resign for ‘peanuts.’ ” It is unclear what kind of propaganda the author and his contemporaries were fed to come to that conclusion.

For, they might have known nothing of Nixon’s real war crimes. But even if Nixon had been innocent of war crimes, he and his underlings still committed election crimes, and worst of all, violated his numerous enemies’ civil rights– evil actions that were considered against the law in the United States. The last fifty years have seen a bit more moderation in China’s political leadership. And radicalism in the United States.

Human nature is such that there has been some convergence (!) between China’s and the United States’ ideologies in:

surveillance of citizens
incarceration of citizens
economics
education, and
other areas of life.

It’s all in the propaganda fed to the people.

Read the book to learn much more about the author’s life and times, and his fate.