Riding The Iron Rooster - Paul Theroux

    1988; 481 pages.  Full Title: Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Travel; China; Railroad Travel; Non-Fiction.  Laurels: 1989 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award (winner).  Overall Rating : 5½*/10.

 

    China.  1986.  Mao Zedong died ten years earlier, and Deng Xiaoping now heads the country.  Under his guidance, the dreaded Cultural Revolution has died out, and the subsequent  economic reforms and the opening of Chinese markets have led to dozens of Western corporations vying to form joint ventures there.

 

    Enter the American author, Paul Theroux, with the aim of traveling around in China and writing a book about it.  That's no small feat, since China is freaking huge.  You can freeze in the north, with winter temperatures dropping to as low as -40°C.  You can swelter in the south along the tense border with Vietnam.  Western China is incredibly dry and barren, and eastern China is incredibly crowded.

 

    To boot, Paul Theroux isn’t satisfied with being a sightseer and going on a bunch of tours with other westerners.  He wants to see the “real” China – the out of the way places, and talk with the “real” citizens.  But traveling by car would take forever, and you can’t get to most of the remote places by plane.  That leaves one other option, but fortunately it is probably Theroux’s favorite means of transportation.

 

    Traveling by train.

 

What’s To Like...

    Paul Theroux loves trains so much that instead of flying to China to start his odyssey, he takes a train clear across Europe and Asia (England to France to Germany to Poland to Russia to Mongolia) to get there.  The first chapter in Riding The Iron Rooster is devoted to that journey, highlighted by the fact that the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred while he was traversing Russia, meaning he possibly got zapped by the escaping radiation.

 

    There are 21 more chapters, most of them covering the various train trips he took during his yearlong stay in China.  I noted at least 28 cities that he visited, including hitting two of them, Canton and Shanghai, twice.  The book’s title refers to a grueling 4½-day (one way) train trip from Beijing to Urumchi, a city in the middle of nowhere in the deserts of western China.

 

    I delighted in Paul Theroux's vocabulary choices.  Some of my favorite (English) words are given in the next section, but Theroux also shares lots of Mandarin Chinese words and phrases in pinyin (without the tonal marks, but we’ll cut him some slack on that).  There’s even one Tibetan phrase.  You’ll find lots of the useful travelogue information about the quality (or lack thereof) of the food, accommodations, touristy trinkets, weather, local populace, and transportation in the various cities, hotels, and railcars wherein the author stayed.

 

    You get a fair amount of history (the sad plight of Pu Yi, the last Chinese emperor), trivia (“Ulan Bator” means “Red Hero”), handy railroading tips (they change the bedding very early and very forcefully in sleeper cars), interesting folk remedies (medicinal urine), and the slew of books that Paul Theroux read while getting from place to place, including one titled The Golden Lotus, a 500-year-old Chinese book of erotica that makes 50 Shades of Grey look tame.  I learned what the universal phrase “Shansh marnie” means, and in light of our present Covid pandemic, was sobered by the fact that the Yunnan and Qinghai sections of northern China were just recovering from a serious outbreak of the bubonic plague when the Theroux was visiting there.

 

    My favorite trip was the visit to the Harbin Ice-Sculpting Festival, which took my (figuratively) and the author’s (literally, since it was -30°C) breath away.  The list of Chinese inventions amazed me.  I was tickled that “heffalumps” get mentioned twice, and had to wiki Sam McGee to understand that reference.  It was neat to see “Om mani padme hum” mentioned; it's my favorite Tibetan Buddhist mantra, although I learned it with an aspirated “hrih” added to it.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Fossick (v.) : to rummage; to search through (Aussieism).

Others: Importune (v.), Tumuli (n., plural), Twee (adj.), Stodge (n.), Solecism (n.), Meretricious (adj.), Spiv (n.), Recrudescence (n.), Comprador (n.).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 183 ratings.

    Goodreads: 4.03/5 based on 8,574 ratings and 343 reviews

 

“Things That Sound Wrong, But Aren’t…

    “I have my mother’s sister in a box.”  (loc. 4135)

 

Excerpts...

    The following day I sneaked downstairs, skipped breakfast, and was on my way out the front door of the hotel when Mr. Fang hurried towards me, making a noise.  It was a kind of laughter.  By now I was able to differentiate between the various Chinese laughs.  There were about twenty.  None of them had the slightest suggestion of humor.  Some were nervous, some were respectful, many were warnings.  The loud honking one was a sort of Chinese anxiety attack.  Another, a brisk titter, meant something had gone badly wrong.  Mr. Fang’s laugh this morning resembled the bark of a seal.  It meant Hold on there! and it stopped me in my tracks.  (loc. 2778)

 

    In Canada people joke and gloat about the cold.  In Harbin and in Heilongliang in general no one mentioned it except outsiders, who never stopped talking about it.  I bought a thermometer so that I would not bore people by asking them the temperature, but the damn thing only registered to the freezing point – zero centigrade.  The first time I put it outside the red liquid in the tube plunged into the bulb and shriveled into a tiny bead.  So I had to ask.  It was midmorning: minus twenty-nine centigrade in the sparkling sunshine.  By nighttime it would be ten degrees colder than that.  (loc. 5130)

 

It is wrong to see a country in a bad mood: you begin to blame the country for your mood and to draw the wrong conclusions.  (loc. 4667)

    Sadly, there’s a lot to quibble about in Riding The Iron Rooster.  From least important to most:

 

    There are more than a dozen typos, although most of them looked like scanner errors, so maybe they’re only in the e-book version.  I don’t expect the author to catch these, but the proofreaders should be fired.

 

    There’s a very handy 2-page map at the start of the e-book, with a very annoying page margin down the middle that blotted out critical parts of the map.  Surely a better one could’ve been found.  There’s a smattering of footnotes that are quite enlightening, but seem to be only used in chapters 8, 12, and 16.  There is a small amount of cussing, and discussion of some weird things like penile reattachments.  There’s also a steamy excerpt from The Golden Lotus, but hey, you've already been warned about that.

 

    Twice we have to endure the author telling us about his dreams, and he seems to have a thing having Ronald and Nancy Reagan in them.  He also insists on using the anglicized spellings of Chinese proper nouns, the most glaring being choosing “Peking” over “Beijing”.  But this was 1986, and maybe "Peking" was the preferred linguistic choice for western writers back then.

 

    Finally, and most egregious, the author seems to have a predetermined crappy attitude about China, its government, its food, its weather and almost all of its citizens, and it shows throughout the book.  1986 was a relatively joyous time for the Chinese: Mao Zesong and the horrors of the Cultural Revolution were things of the past.  The people who Theroux meets and talks with are happy and outgoing, yet he’s fixated on making them recount and relive those awful days of internal terrorism from ten years earlier.

 

    The Chinese government eventually gets wind of the Theroux’s sentiments and assign a chaperone to accompany him in his travels.  They are polite and full of information, but Theroux delights in ditching them every chance he gets and quizzing everyone about one topic only: how bad they had it during the Cultural Revolution.

 

    In the final chapter Theroux journeys to Tibet, and unsurprisingly he’s completely enamored by everything Tibetan.  They may not bathe, but he doesn’t mind.  They may yearn for independence and for the Dalai Lama to return, and he heartily supports that.  The weather may be just as cold as in Harbin (except that the here altitude here is above 7,000 feet and it’s hard to breathe), but he rejoices in the brisk conditions.  If only all the Chinese would pack up and leave Tibet, Theroux would be completely happy.

 

    5½ Stars.  For the record, I totally sympathize with the Chinese government and their decision to assign a chaperone to monitor Theroux's travels and interviews.

The Great Wall - Julia Lovell

   2006; 351 pages.  Full Title: The Great Wall – China Against the World 1000 BC – AD 2000.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : History; China; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    The thing about the Great Wall of China is, it’s so positively great.  That’s why the Chinese call it that.

    I still remember the iconic picture of it, when President Nixon was visiting for a photo op back in 1972.  The wall looked like something you’d see on a medieval castle.  And to think it was actually built 2,000 years ago!

    I can’t imagine how much labor went into the construction – making a single wall stretching all across northern China.  Still, it was a good investment.  It was made to keep the barbarians out, and with the exception of Genghis Khan, it worked pretty well.

    And it’s huge!  Did you know it’s the only man made object on Earth that can be seen from the moon?  Neil Armstrong is on record as having spotted it while he was traipsing around up there.

    Sadly, most if not all of the above is inaccurate, being hyperbole written mostly by Western visitors to impress their countrymen back home and, in a lot of cases, with the idea of spurring trade between China and Europe.  We’ll list the correct facts at the end of this review.

What’s To Like...

    The Great Wall is a clever undertaking by Julia Lovell to tell the history of China by juxtaposing something the Chinese have been doing for several millennia – building walls.  Trying to squeeze 3,000 years of events into 351 pages of text (plus another 50 pages of Appendices, Notes, a Bibliography, and an Index) is essentially an impossible task, particularly when presenting it to people whose knowledge of Chinese history is limited to Confucius, the Mongols, and Mao Zedong (the author’s spelling).  Surprisingly, Julia Lovell succeeds admirably.

    The book is divided into 12 chapters, plus an Introduction and a Conclusion, and is presented in more or less chronological order.  Wherever an opportunity arises, wall-building is spotlighted, even when the walls were obsolete, and even when the "walls" refer to internet firewalls and those around shopping malls.  The maps, notes, and pictures all work smoothly, and I liked the use of pinyin (minus the tonal marks, but that’s not a complaint) and lots of examples of classical Chinese poetry.

    Unlike several reviewers, I thought Julia Lovell had a very balanced view of the various factions.  She gives a “warts and all” view of the various Chinese dynasties, the various nomadic tribes to the north, and the various more-recent European powers wielding their gunboat diplomacy.  The life of Sun Yat-sen gets fleshed out here, and there’s lots of interesting trivia, such as Mao Zedong being an enthusiastic but amateur versifier.

    My favorite Chinese poet Li Po gets some ink (although his name is rendered “Li Bo” here), even if he’s portrayed as a “drunken, duelling, romantic wanderer who is said to have drowned after leaping, drunk, into a river to embrace the reflection of the moon.”  Maodun was new to me – I wouldn’t want to mess with him even if I was his father.  I enjoyed meeting the early Turks, who were a major adversary of Chinese expansionism way back in the 6^th century AD, and I was startled to learn that it was a Tibetan tribe that destroyed the Yan dynasty.  I liked that oracle bones were used for divination for centuries, and that chess was being played in China as early as the 12^th century AD.

    Since I took two years of Mandarin a few years back, I already knew that there are a bunch of dialects spoken throughout China (including Cantonese in the south), but that since they all use the same script, everyone in China can understand any and all written communication by their countrymen.  The southern city of Hangzhou get brief mention; it brought back memories from a business trip I took there 15 years ago.  The eight-year-long imperial debate about which of the five “cosmic elements” would be used by the Jin Dynasty made me chuckle.  An executive committee where I used to work once took eight months and many meetings to discuss what the company colors would be.  Dilbert would have sighed.

    The Great Wall is written in English, not American, but I didn’t find that distracting.  Stylistically, I’d label it a “scholarly” presentation, almost a polar opposite of the way Sarah Vowell or Mary Roach writes, and very effective here.

Kewlest New Word ...

Corvée (adj.) : referring to unpaid labor (as towards constructing roads) due from a feudal vassal to his lord.

Others: panegyrics (n.); enfeoff (v.); havering (v.); poetaster (n.).

Excerpts...

    [Erzhu Rong] crossed the Yellow River, settled on a hillside outside Luoyang and invited the capital’s aristocracy for a meeting at his campsite.  From there, after gracelessly massacring every single member – perhaps as many as 3,000 – of this state welcoming party, and drowning the dowager empress and her child-emperor in the Yellow River, he rode into Luoyang and set about enjoying court life, until he was himself stabbed to death in 530 by the new puppet emperor he had installed.  Following a plucky but doomed attempt to defend the city, the emperor was himself garroted by the murdered leader’s successors, shortly after praying to the Buddha not to let him be reborn as a king.  (loc. 1995)

    By his death in 1688 – at which point he was fluent in six languages, including Chinese and Manchu – Verbiest had laboured for almost two decades on behalf of the imperial court.  He had drawn up calendars, built huge and elaborate astronomical instruments, as well as an observatory in which to use them, and overseen the forging of 132 large cannons (on which he eccentrically inscribed the names of male and female Chinese saints), subsequently used to arm China’s city walls.  (…)

    Perhaps his most innovative moment was an early attempt at an automobile, in which he strapped a boiler on to an oven, attached a paddle wheel, gears and wheels, and steam-motored around the corridors of the Forbidden City for an hour or so.  (loc. 4286)

“Who scruples much achieves little.” (Fei Yi)  (loc. 814 )

    It’s hard to find anything to nitpick about in The Great Wall.  There were some “gaps” in the history, such as the history of the southern parts of China, the historic relation between Tibet and China, the fall of the last dynasty (Qing) in 1911, and Mao ousting Chiang Kai-shek in 1949.  But there’s only so much you can cover in 351 pages, and I doubt any of these topics could be tied in to the “wall-building” motif.

    The book was a slow read for me, but I think that’s because I was so unfamiliar with all those emperors, warlords, dynasties, and barbarian leaders.  If there was an underlying theme, it was that there is always an inherent and eternal tension when any agrarian-based “civilized” society abuts a roving hunter-gatherer one.  Or, as the book puts it, “the Chinese viewed the northern tribes as raiding barbarians, while the nomads viewed the Chinese as raiding targets.”

    8 Stars.  Some truths about the Great Wall, courtesy of Julia Lovell’s book.  The “castle-looking” part of it you see in all the photographs is just north of Beijing.  It looks “medieval” because that portion was built relatively recently, about 500 years ago, not 2000.  It’s still impressive though.

    Other sections of the wall are much older, not connected to the picturesque portion, and much more primitive in construction.  It’s only recently that the Chinese started calling it “the Great Wall”, mostly for tourism purposes.  Historically, they called it many things, including “the Long Wall”.

    The wall’s purpose is more offensive than defensive.  It kinda says “this is a boundary to our land”, just like Israel’s Palestinian wall, the Berlin wall, and Trump’s Mexico wall.  Yes, it says “keep out” as well, but as Genghis Khan apocryphally said, “the strength of walls depends on the courage of those who guard them.”

    You cannot see the Great Wall from the moon.  Yes, Neil Armstrong thought he did, but it turns out he was actually observing a cloud formation.

Who Discovered America? - Gavin Menzies

   2013; 247 pages (or 326 pages, if you include all the “Extras”).  Full Title : Who Discovered America? (The Untold Story of the Peopling of the Americas) .  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Speculative Non-Fiction; Pseudohistory; China; Discovery .  Overall Rating : 6½*/10.

    The title seems like such an easy question: Who Discovered America?  Heck, they taught us the answer way back when I was in grade school.  “In fourteen-hundred ninety-two; Columbus sailed the ocean blue”.

    Even then there was murmuring about some Viking upstart named Leif Erickson, who some claimed had the audacity to bump into the New World 500 years before Columbus did.  The experts said that didn’t count because he never established a settlement there.  And when the remains of a settlement was found, they said it didn’t count because it obviously didn't turn out to be a permanent settlement.

    Of course, if you want to get technical about it, neither Chris nor Leif was the discoverer of American, since there was already a huge population of Native Americans here when they arrived.  The experts say they came here from Asia, via a land bridge across the Bering Strait that has long since disappeared due to the sea levels rising when the Ice Age glaciers melted.  That makes sense, I suppose, and if you don’t like that theory, how else are you going to explain their presence all the way from the top of Alaska down to the southern tip of South America?

    Well, Gavin Menzies offers an alternative explanation.  He agrees they came from Asia, for the most part from China.  But instead of trekking thousands of miles through melting glaciers, freezing their knickers off, he says they sailed here in boats.

    Oooo.  The experts don't like that one at all.

What’s To Like...

    Gavin Menzies divides his theory about the Chinese sailing to America into two main hypotheses.  The first one concerns a bunch of randomly-timed ancient voyages, mostly one-way trips, over the course of several millennia.  The second one is more recent and specific: a guy named Admiral Zheng He commanded two vast armadas with the purpose of establishing trade and mapping the world.  One sailed in 1421, and explored the whole west coast of the Americas.  The other commenced in 1434, sailed down around the southern tip of South America, and explored the East coast of the Americas, then the Azores Islands, and finally visited several European kingdoms.

    It should be noted that these propositions are presented in greater detail in Menzies’ two earlier books, appropriately titled 1421 and 1434.  Our book, Who Discovered America?, is really just a later (2013) supplement to those two works, in which Menzies gives newer evidence he's uncovered that supports his claims since publishing the first pair of books in 2002 and 2008.

    The text of the book is short, only 247 pages long.  Amazon’s  blurb claims its length is 326 page, but that includes a bunch of “extra” sections – Acknowledgements, Notes, a Bibliography, Permissions, an Index, Photos, and a half-dozen other sections.  I checked out the photographs, but skipped the rest of those supplements.  Kindle-wise, the text ends at 56%.  Interspersed in the text are some neat drawings, and at the beginning there are charts of our world's major ocean currents, along with a convenient timeline of various ancient civilizations.

    Gavin Menzies does not write in a dry, academic style.  At times Who Discovered America? reads more like a Bill Bryson travelogue, for instance, when he and his wife travel to twelve cities on the historic "Silk Road" trade route, far from the touristy areas of central Asia.  Other times, it reads like an archaeology treatise, such as when he recounts Schliemann's discovery of Troy.  Also, I noticed Menzies tends to repeat his various “proofs” several times throughout the book.

    Note: The book lists the book as being written by two authors, Gavin Menzies and Ian Hudson, but most of it seems to have been written by Menzies, and his name is certainly the “hook” on the book's cover.  But for sake of brevity, I refer only to him as the author in this review.  

    Besides the “Chinese” angle already mentioned, Menzies sets forth a couple other controversial propositions, namely:

    a). The ancient Minoans could’ve reached the Americas by crossing the Atlantic.

    b.) Korean and Japanese sailors accompanied the Chinese on a lot of these voyages.

    c.) The traditional Bering land route theory is untenable for all sorts of cold-weather reasons.

    Overall, Who Discovered America?  was an interesting read, but I found most of Menzies’ “proofs” to be unconvincing, particularly the ones concerning Admiral Zheng He.  The odds that a pair of voyages in the early 1400’s, involving hundreds of Chinese ships sailing all over  both oceans and visiting all sorts of places, yet remaining completely unnoticed and leave no traces of their contacts is simply unbelievable.

    Also, Menzies loses a lot of credibility in my eyes when he touts the writings a century ago by one James Churchward.  I read four of Churchward’s books back in my youth; they put forth the proposition that, besides the lost continent of Atlantis, there was another lost continent in the Pacific, which he called “Mu”.  Churchward’s “evidence” was sketchy at best, ridiculous at worst, and he’s pretty much been relegated to the historical trash pile called "pseudohistory".  This is not someone you want to be citing in your books as corroboration.

 Kewlest New Word ...

Tumuli (n., plural) : ancient burial mounds; barrows (the singular is “tumulus”).

Others : Cartouche (n.).

Excerpts...

    Once entering the Black Current off the Asian continent, ships in the period of the Shang dynasty onward could ride along east toward the Americas, but probably could not return, as the westerly current from the Americas is too weak.  So Chinese voyages to the Americas would be in desperation, to avoid some terrible event at home without the likelihood or consideration of returning – a one-way ticket.  (loc. 744)

    The Great Dismal Swamp appears to hold just such a mighty piece of evidence.  The swamp was drained on commission by some friends of George Washington in 1769.  In the course of their work, they came across a huge old Chinese junk.  It was the stuff of rumor and legend; the fact was that no one could explain how an ancient Chinese sailing ship ended up in the muck on the Atlantic coast between North Carolina and Virginia.  (loc. 2677)

Kindle Details…

    The Kindle version of Who Discovered America? sells for $11.99 at Amazon.  1421 doesn’t seem to be available as an e-book, but sells for $8.00 in paperback.  1434 will cost you $14.49 for the e-book version.  Menzies has a semi-related book, The Lost Empire of Atlantis, and it goes for $11.99.  Speculative non-fiction books don’t come cheap.

 Gallipoli was, like the Trojan War, appallingly futile, a disgrace to European civilization.  (loc. 560 )

    The Zheng He assertions may be dubious, but the traditional Bering Land Bridge hypothesis is worthy of closer scrutiny.

    Wikipedia covers this in a posting called “Clovis First”, which refers to an archaeological site in Clovis, New Mexico, where evidence of human activity can be carbon-dated back to about 13,390 years ago. That just happens to coincide with the “beginning of the end” of the last great Ice Age, when the huge ice sheet covering Canada began to melt, starting along the western coast of the Americas.

    Even as a student, I was leery of this theory, since it postulates that once the Asian trekkers made it across to Alaska, they rapidly spread all the way to the southernmost tip of South America in only 14,000 years, which is a mere anthropological blink of the eye.

    As long as the Clovis site was the earliest evidence of humans in the Western Hemisphere, the Bering Land Bridge explanation was at least tenable, despite a lack of any direct archaeological evidence.  But since then a number of earlier sites have been discovered, most notably Monte Verde in Chile (carbon-dated 32,000-60,000 years ago) and Petra Furada in Brazil (carbon-dated 14,800-18,500 years ago).

    The excavations of these sites are not yet complete, and some of those carbon-dating numbers are still being challenged.  But if those estimates hold up, the whole “Bering Land Bridge” theory falls apart, since the great Canadian ice sheet would not yet have begun to melt.  And if that’s the case, a populating of the New World from the sea becomes a lot more plausible than traveling thousands of miles across a sheet of ice.

    6½ Stars.  In reading the reviews at Amazon and GoodReads, as well as the various Wikipedia articles on Menzies, Clovis First, and early settlements in the Americas, I have noted a marked bitterness in the tone of the dialogues and articles.  People don’t just disagree with Menzies, they call him things like “a charlatan or a cretin”.  The defenders of Menzies are equally caustic.

    Folks, History and Archaeology are not dead studies.  New findings will continue to be made, and established theories that were based on older, less-complete data, will inherently have to be tweaked.  That’s the way the scientific process works.  Menzies may not have all the right answers, but it is statistically ludicrous to assume that we just happened to find the  vrey earliest settlement in all of the New World in our first excavation at Clovis.

War Trash - Ha Jin

2004; 350 pages. Awards : Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award (2005); Pulitzer Prize nominee. Genres : Historical Literature; Fictional Memoir. Overall Rating : C+.

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War Trash offers a unique view of the Korean War from the Chinese perspective, which is : "MacArthur's army would have crossed our border and seized Manchuria if we hadn't come to Korea. We had no choice but to fight the better-equipped aggressors." The title refers to the lot of the Chinese POW's (and tangentially, the North Korean POW's) and the choices they will have when they are repatriated at the end of the war. Both the Communists and Nationalists view them as traitors, yet both sides want to use them for propaganda purposes. Once their propaganda value is used up, they can and will be discarded.

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The book is told in first-person by Yu Yuan. Because he speaks English and isn't a card-carrying member of the Communist party, he has enhanced value to both sides. OTOH, he trained at a Nationalist Military Academy, but served in the Red Chinese Army, so neither political side trusts his loyalty.

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What's To Like...

The story is fiction (Ha Jin was born in 1956; the Korean War ended several years before that), but many of the events are grounded in history. For instance, the ingenious kidnapping of an American general by the POW's actually occurred.

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The book is written in memoir style - "First I did this; then that happened." Adjectives and adverbs are few and far between. Ha Jin wrote War Trash in English, so there is no fall-off due to translation.

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But the memoir-style has some inherent limitations. Although it is superbly written, it remains a piece of fiction. It's kinda like if you were to read a novel called "The Thoughts of Mother Teresa". Even if it was a literary masterpiece, you'd most likely still prefer to read her actual words.

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Also, the plot doesn't build to any sort of climax. Yu Yuan goes to war for 50 pages; spends 270 pages in a POW camp; then the next half-century of his life is covered in 20 pages. Throughout everything, he doesn't give a fig about political ideology. All he wants to do is survive and return home to his aged mother and his fiancée. The book aptly closes with this paragraph :

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"Now I must conclude this memoir, which is my first attempt at writing and also my last. Almost 74 years old, I suffer from gout and glaucoma; I don't have the strength to write anymore. But do not take this to be an "our story". In the depths of my being I have never been one of them. I have just written what I experienced."

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I give War Trash a C+, even though it is worthy of its Pulitzer Prize nomination. History buffs and lovers of Chinese culture will find it enlightening. Everyone else may find it slow-go.

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Excerpts...

The Americans had taken us to be an army of peasants, more like cattle than men. The play seemed to have changed their perception of us a little. Later I noticed the guards would treat the few actors somewhat differently from the regular prisoners, with more respect. They would no longer curse them. (pg. 133)

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"History has shown that the Communists always treat their enemies more leniently than their own people. Only by becoming their significant enemies can you survive decently." (pg. 128)

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High-falooting word from War Trash...

Raconteur. A fancy word for a "story-teller".