Miscellanea - The Bookworm Beijing

Archive for the ‘Miscellanea’ Category

Remembrance Poppies for the Royal British Legion

Poppies for The Royal British Legion are available at The Bookworm.

Donations will go to support the Legion’s mission: providing financial, social and emotional support to the millions of British men and women and their families who have served or are currently serving in the Armed Forces.

The tradition dates back to WWI, when fields of red poppies bloomed on the battlefields of Belgian Flanders, a sign of renewed life in the wake of the devastation.

The poppies inspired Colonel John McRae, a doctor with the Canadian Armed Forces, to write “In Flanders’ Fields,” a poem that quickly became some of the most famous lines to be written about the first World War.

In Flanders’ Fields

In Flanders’ field the poppies blow
Between the crossed row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders’ fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe;
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high,
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders’ fields.

Tombstone: Remembering The Great Famine

Yang Jisheng, 72, spent a decade working undercover, secretly amassing official proof of China's great famine. "When you are writing history, you can't be too emotional. You need to be calm and objective," he says. "But I was angry the whole time. I'm still angry."

Yang Jisheng, 72, author of Tombstone, now available in English

“It’s not often that a book comes out that rewrites a country’s history.”

There are few Chinese families, mine included, who were not touched in some way by The Great Famine. Thirty-six million people died in the aftermath of Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward.

NPR’s Louisa Lim has just filed an important 2-part report on efforts to record the devastations of Mao’s Great Famine.

Part I: The lifelong work of a tenacious Xinhua reporter who refused to let history forget the man he called his father.

Part II: The ongoing effort of young Chinese people to gather and preserve a oral history if the period.

From Part I:

“For Yang Jisheng, now 72, the famine hit home while he was away. He was 18, busy preparing a newspaper for his boarding school’s Communist Youth League, when a childhood friend burst into the room and said: “Your father is starving to death.”

Yang rushed home to find a ghost town — no dogs, no chickens, even the elm tree outside his house was stripped of bark, which had been eaten.

Yang Jisheng, 72, spent a decade working undercover, secretly amassing official proof of China’s great famine. “When you are writing history, you can’t be too emotional. You need to be calm and objective,” he says. “But I was angry the whole time. I’m still angry.”

The teenager took rice for Yang Xiushen, the man he called his father, but who was really his uncle. But the elder Yang was no longer able to swallow and died three days later.

“I didn’t think my father’s death was the country’s fault. I thought it was my fault. If I hadn’t gone to school, but had helped him dig up his crops, he wouldn’t have died,” Yang remembers. “My vision was very limited. I didn’t have the information.”

Listen and remember.

The Grumpiest Authors in Literary History

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the grumpiest one of all?

From the folks at Flavorwire, a great list of literary curmudgeons.

Here are some highlights:

Literary Grump Exhibit A:

Maurice Sendak

The writer/illustrator of Where the Wild Things Are had this to say of the novelist Salman Rushdie: “That flaccid fuckhead. He reviewed me on a full page in the New York Times, my book Dear Mili. He hated it. He is detestable. I called up the Ayatollah, nobody knows that. What else shall we talk about?”

Literary Grump Exhibit B:

Norman Mailer

The famously pugnacious writer said of long-time nemesis Gore Vidal (I’m beginning to see a trend here): “I’ve had to smell your works from time to time and that has made me an expert in intellectual pollution.”

Literary Grump Exhibit C:

Gertrude Stein

Least it be implied that grumpiness is the exclusive province of men, Gertrude Stein was known to quip, “If you can’t say anything nice about anyone else, come sit next to me.”