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Illuminated Thoughts MAG
During the Cultural Revolution, millions of educated Chinese youth were forced to work in the countryside and learn from the peasantry. Mao believed that this would ultimately create a society where there was no gap between the urban and rural classes or laborers and intellectuals. Before he was evacuated, my father – at the time a student – smuggled several banned books with him, reading them secretly to pass the time.
My father bought me a copy of Anna Karenina
for my fourteenth birthday. That night, we spent countless hours
under the bloodless moon reading. Hunched like twin shadows over his
mahogany desk, we let the words seep into our skin like
freshly poured jasmine tea, the mint-new pages of my book soon
becoming creased
like the crinkled palms of his hands.
When my father was nine, he was plucked
from his family and sent to work in a straw-thatched village
where rice fields outnumbered people. Before he left,
he copied every last syllable of Anna Karenina
into dozens of notebooks, sneaking them with him
on his journey.
The only education my father received
was how to spend restless sunrises and
bone-aching sunsets toiling in the rice fields,
back bleeding raw in unforgiving winter winds
and scorching summer heat,
spine bent like an old book, dreams of attending university
withered to smoke.
On my fourteenth birthday, when my father
drifted to sleep after page 273 of Anna Karenina,
I kissed his cheek –
mottled with scars that remained long after the Revolution
had ended. He looked more content then
than he ever did awake, the rise and fall of his chest
as peaceful as a song.
I turned to page 274
and read for the both of us.
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