Opium by John Halpern and David Blistein

Source of book: borrowed from the library

 

I chose this book in part because of my 13 year old who has been devouring all things about the Age of Sail, so the portion of this book with the Opium Wars fit in well. And I decided to read it as well. 

 

The book starts with our earliest evidence of opium use (and addiction) going back, well, about as long as we have human history. From the beginning, opium was both a benefit - it is still our most effective painkiller - and a curse - it is and always has been highly addictive. In addition to the history of its use, the book looks at attempts at regulation throughout history, and makes a strong case that the War on Drugs is as futile and counterproductive as every previous war on drugs has been. Related to this, of course, is an understanding of addiction as a disease, and therefore a public health problem, not a moral failing best addressed by mass incarceration. 

 

The book was written by John Halpern, a psychiatrist who has worked in addiction treatment for most of his career. He also taught at Harvard for two decades. The other author is David Blistein, who has been a co-writer on a number of medical books, as well as a screen writer for PBS. My guess is that Halpern provided a lot of the medical side, while Blistein did most of the writing and research. The book isn’t meant to be original, but more of a lay-person’s version of history and present challenges. Because of this, the book extensively cites other more scholarly works dating from the past couple hundred years. From the quotes, I suspect this book is much more readable than some of its sources. 

 

The book opens with Halpern’s account of the death of his friend from suicide after a relapse into opiod addiction. There are few of us who do not know someone whose family lost a member to addiction. Opioids are a widespread problem to be sure, and working to prevent death and dysfunction is a necessary goal. Halpern is haunted by the fact that his friend never told him of his struggles - despite the fact that Halpern could have, as a professional with expertise in that area, helped him. 

 

I thought Halpern’s quote of Cardinal Bernardin of what Bernardin said to Halpern once was quite good. 

 

“I used to think that there is something extra special about being a Catholic priest, but now that I am dying of cancer and see all the care provided to me and other patients, I recognize that this ‘specialness’ can be found in many other professions. Just as it is between priest and parishioner so it is between doctor and patient. We share a moral covenant before God.”

 

This is certainly the case with my wife, who sees her nursing work as her form of ministry and her calling from God. 

 

In the introduction, Halpern also notes that the goal is to find solutions for severe and chronic pain that are not addictive, and also find better remedies for addiction. 

 

Until then, the work we must do - to confront the stigma, shame, moral judgments, and self-serving political arguments that swirl around the disease of addiction, as well as create systems that make it possible to help all those who suffer - is enormous and important. 

 

The early chapters of the book point out that culture has always been an issue with opium. Every culture tends to assume that it was other cultures that are at fault for addiction, for example, and that other peoples are more prone to addiction. 

 

This is not only an academic discussion. Four thousand years later, simplistic attitudes and cultural differences continue to be major obstacles in the way of a constructive conversation between the West and the East about opioids. 

 

There are some fascinating characters in this book. One that was particularly interesting was Paracelsus, the talented and cantankerous physician who introduced laudanum to the West. (He gets a mention in Frankenstein as inspiration for the doctor.) Just as an example, he was no fan of religion, and referred to his contemporary Martin Luther and the Pope as “two whores discussing chastity.” 

 

The Brits do not come off well in this book, nor should they. In many ways, they were the original drug cartel, literally willing to wage war to ensure increasing addiction. Opium was used by the Chinese before the Brits showed up, of course, but the British habit of smoking it with tobacco was new, and quickly became popular. 

 

Whether it was owing to a combination of these cultural influences, the discriminating use of the drug by physicians themselves, or even the weaker variety of opium being cultivated in China, all evidence suggests that in the millennia before the European merchants arrived, Chinese opium use was limited, well supervised, and safe, belying the racial stereotypes that the West would soon foist upon the Chinese as being, by nature, incorrigible addicts committed to drawing the rest of the world into their sordid drug culture. If anything, it was the opposite. 

 

One chapter is about how the British took control of opium production in India from the Mughal Empire. Their tactics seem somehow...familiar. 

 

Different regions, particularly in the south, started fighting the Muhgals for territory and independence. That, as well as infighting between tribes, sparked a multifront war that disolved the empire. The British worked on the sidelines, offering money and weapons to groups that at various times appeared to be useful, malleable allies.

 

I also found the chapters on the Canton trading fun. That trade was the source of the original “Pidgen English,” the vernacular that enabled communication between merchants from China and various other European nations. We still use phrases from that today, such as “long time no see,” “look see,” and “no can do.” It is easy to underestimate the enduring legacy of the Canton trade. 

 

Throughout all the vicissitudes of the opium trade and upheavals in Chinese politics that have taken place over the last 400 years, many of the ways that China and the West conduct business today can be traced back to the Canton trade.

 

And the opium wars in particular continue to affect our world. 

 

[T]he noted British historian Nicholas J. Saunders called the Opium Wars among the most immoral episodes in his country’s history, concluding, “These conflicts saw the British Empire officially trafficking opium, and using military might to force narcotic addiction on the people of China. During these years, Britain created the largest, most successful and most lucrative drug cartel the world had ever seen.”

Regardless, repercussions from the Opium Wars continue to resound today. As Julia Lovell, another British expert in Chinese history put it: “From the age of opium-traders to the Internet...China and the West have been infuriating and misunderstanding each other...Ten years into the twenty-first century, the nineteenth is still with us.” 

 

And don’t think the United States is innocent. There is a whole chapter on the Boston traders that made obscene fortunes investing in the opium trade. 

 

Although the United States was a much smaller player than Great Britain in the opium trade at first, American companies would eventually use equally shameless rationalizations and brazen self-interest to invest in it and, later, collective amnesia to avoid acknowledging the damage it caused. That duplicity, combined with racial prejudice, has led to the assumption that continues to this day, that America’s opium problems in the nineteenth century were caused by China when, if anything, it was the opposite. 

 

While American merchants and investors - and indeed institutions - got rich off of opium, politicians leveraged racist fears to impose our first immigration restrictions. 

 

The Second Opium War and the treaties that followed set the stage for the resentment, suspicion, self-righteousness, and frequent outright enmity that have marked the relationship between China and the West ever since - from America’s racist Chinese Exclusion Acts of the late nineteenth century to the fact that the fentanyl crisis is often unfairly blamed on China’s allegedly lax drug controls today. 

…

In the end, the China trade, and the wars that resulted from it, is a cautionary tale about drugs, money, power, and greed - and the hypocrisy that inevitably hovers in the territory in between.

 

I should also mention a forgotten episode in American history. It is pretty well known that most “patent remedies” sold in the 1800s had either opioids (heroin or morphine) or cocaine in them as an ingredient. What is less well known is that the Shakers (of all people!) grew their own opium, and did extensive experimentation to determine the optimal dose. If you were going to take a remedy, the Shaker ones were the closest to the controlled dosage and careful formulation of modern drugs. 

 

The transition to the fourth part of the book, on the 20th Century, is delightful enough to quote. 

 

And so, we leave the rampant greed, unjustified wars, misunderstood scientific breakthroughs, and often brilliant if overwrought literature of the 1800s and move on to the rampant greed, unjustified wars, misunderstood scientific breakthroughs, and brilliant if overwrought literature of the 1900s.

 

I laughed at that one. I mean, you have Coleridge in one century, and Kerouac in the next, right? And the rest of it too. 

 

Particularly the misguided laws surrounding opium, which did little if anything to prevent addiction, but had nasty consequences for vulnerable minorities. The book starts with San Francisco’s attempt to outlaw opium dens back in 1875. (Spoiler: it didn’t work.) 

 

The 1875 law set the standard for several decades of California laws against smoking opium, based on inaccurate or partial assumptions: that only Chinese-Americans would be interested in importing opium that had been processed to be smoked, that opium was only smoked in Chinese opium dens, that any Americans who smoked opium only did so at these opium dens and only because the Chinese had corrupted them, that Americans wouldn’t consider processing their own opium for smoking, that American opium dealers wouldn’t do business with the Chinese, and that importers and sellers wouldn’t be able to easily find a way to get around the new laws.

Each of these assumptions proved to be wrong.

In other words, the San Francisco law reflected the same kind of ethnic prejudice that many drug laws and enforcement strategies suffer from today. By targeting certain populations disproportionately, these laws reinforce stereotypes and discrimination, while doing little to solve the problem. 

 

That’s the history of the War on Drugs in a nutshell. It has had essentially a zero effect on either addiction rates or on availability of drugs...but it has disproportionately incarcerated minorities and the poor, while costing a hell of a lot of money. 

 

One of the fist big political stories I remember as a kid was the Iran-Contra Affair. That was only one of the various War on Drugs adjacent actions that went bad during my childhood. In this case, the CIA took down a left-leaning government in Nicaragua by funding the right-wing “Contras,” who, as they well knew, were connected to the cocaine cartels.

 

The CIA’s justification was that, while the country considered drugs to be bad, communism was way worse and, if the lives of “a few” citizens and soldiers had to be sacrificed, along with any semblance of geopolitical ethics, one simply had to look the other way - even if “one” was the president or vice president of the United States. 

 

This at the same time as Reagan and Bush ramped up the War on Drugs rhetoric, and incarcerated tens of thousands of low-level drug users. Meanwhile, Oliver North, who orchestrated the deal, never did a day of time, and remains venerated (for reasons that escape me) among right-wing Fundie sorts. 

 

In the final chapters, the authors look at a more sensible approach to addiction. They examine the approach of Portugal in particular, which has reduced its drug-related deaths substantially. (They have a death rate that is a mere 2 percent of that in the United States.) The point is to reduce harm, not moralize. 

 

The effectiveness of the program may be partly due to decriminalization itself, but as important and innovative is the unconditional acceptance of addiction as a disorder rather than a moral failing, which reduces the stigma involved in seeking treatment. Plus, instead of trying to treat addiction in isolation, healthcare workers have the resources to address the wide range of physical and emotional problems that usually accompany the disease. 

…

While the Portuguese government accepts that completely ending drug use is impossible and advocates believe it could still be doing more, millions of dollars that would have gone to interdiction and enforcement are invested in public health services, with impressive results. 

 

Again, success can only happen with a shift away from a moralistic approach. In particular, harm reduction strategies are only possible when you remove the idea that addiction is a moral failing, and that punishment of that sin is the only way out. 

 

Objections to some or all of these treatments are based on the belief that drug use is a moral failing, abstinence is the only successful withdrawal strategy, and/or that the cost is prohibitive. Regardless, to reject proven solutions because of moral or cultural beliefs is not only counterproductive, it could be considered unethical - especially at a time when addiction often begins with the use of perfectly legal drugs. As far as cost, these strategies clearly yield long-term savings because of reductions in crime and ER use - not to mention the damage addiction does to families, businesses, and the community, as well as the positive impact of users returning to school or the workplace. 

 

I remember as a kid, some of our closest neighborhood friends had parents who struggled with addiction. Their mom would often disappear on a bender and they would sleep at our house. Their dad was on methadone treatments through the VA, which enabled him to be the functional parents. Unfortunately, if he had to work a night shift or an extended shift, and mom didn’t come home… The point here is that methadone enabled him to be a functional person, a good father, and a part of society. The treatment did its work. And yet, so many on the Right HATE methadone programs, because of the moralizing. Solutions be damned, we must enforce “morality.” 

 

[Side note: this is literally how Fundies deal with everything. Moral and cultural beliefs have become ideology, which overrides in their minds any possible challenge. Reality is irrelevant. If it contradicts the dogma, it is reality which is wrong.] 

 

I’ll end with a perceptive paragraph from the end of the book. We Americans tend to think that we somehow are different, that the rules do not apply to us, that we are so far better than other people that we have nothing to learn from them or from the past. 

 

History has a lot to teach us about this crisis, but if we’re going to learn it, we need to let go of the conceit of modernity: the notion, in other words, that this crisis is worse, or fundamentally different, than any that has come before. We have to realize once and for all how absurd it is to think harsh penalties will reduce drug use when we’ve seen how those same harsh penalties have failed time after time; how preposterous it is to imagine that eradicating one source of suppl will solve anything when we’ve seen again and again how quickly a new one will arise to take its place; how arrogant it is to think we can legislate behavior when governments have failed for centuries to do just that. 

Most of all, we have to confront the unreasonable fear and unenlightened self-interest that enables our leaders to argue that addiction is a choice to be punished rather than an illness to be cured. In addition, we have to resist the seduction of seemingly easy solutions such as guarding borders, locking up users, or telling kids to just say no. 

 

I could not have said it better. 

 

***

 

For a book specifically about the history of the War on Drugs and its failure, I recommend Hep Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams by Jill Jonnes. It has some different perspectives than Opium, and I think Jonnes overestimates the possibility of restricting supply, but it has a lot of good history and thoughtful ideas. Addressing addiction requires a holistic approach, including addressing some of the root causes of addiction such as trauma, as she points out. I think my own views have shifted since I wrote that review, by the way, as the result of more life experience with how addictions have played out in the families of people I know. There are no easy answers, there is no one thing that works. But the War on Drugs certainly has been a failure by any reasonable measurement.

Post Failed-Recall Election Thoughts - Why the California Republican Party Isn't Viable

 

For those who are not from California, we just had an attempt to recall our governor. It failed pretty badly, which probably shouldn’t have been a surprise. California has twice as many registered Democrats as Republicans, Republicans are a third party these days (more independents than Republicans), and among young people, the numbers are even more grim. (Only 17% of voters 18-30 are Republicans.) No Republican has won statewide office in more than 10 years, and the Democrats have a supermajority in the legislature.

Simply put, the GOP is not a viable party in California, and hasn’t been in a long time. 

Why is the GOP not a viable party in California? The simple answer is that its policies fail to appeal to a majority of voters. That’s how elections work. Let’s look at this. What are the most significant problems facing California, and what are the GOP proposals (if any) to address them? I believe we have one immediate acute problem, and several long-term problems.

 

1. Covid-19 (immediate problem)

 

We need to control the pandemic. This will take pressure off of our medical systems, save lives, and allow us to return to a fully open economy.

The science says that vaccination is the way out of this, and probably continued masking, at least in certain situations. This in turn means that a vaccine mandate is necessary, if right wingers continue to refuse vaccinations. Furthermore, a significant majority of the population is fed up with antivaxxers, and would support school and workplace mandates. 

GOP plan: open everything up, oppose mask mandates, oppose vaccine mandates. That’s literally the plan. They have nothing else. There is literally no plan to address Covid-19. And I guess medical workers like my wife can just go to hell, or quit and let people die.

 

2. Housing unaffordability and shortages 

 

This is the issue that causes most of the other long-term issues in California, and it isn’t particularly easy to solve. We have too little affordable housing, particularly in the places where the jobs are, namely the coastal cities. (Believe me, you can find housing in California City, where they can’t even give the lots away.) 

 

Classical economics would indicate that this is a supply and demand issue. If demand cannot be increased to meet the supply, look to see what is artificially constraining that supply? 

 

It isn’t too difficult to find causes of a short supply. Most of California’s residential areas are zoned “single family housing.” One house on a lot. Even in the big cities. These zoning laws were passed starting over 100 years ago, as a means of enforcing segregation. Since housing prices have started to soar, current owners have a vested financial interest in high - and increasing - housing prices. This has made it wickedly hard to build in places where affordable housing is needed. Between the NIMBYism, the financial self-interest, and lingering classism and racism (particularly among the older people who already got theirs when things were affordable), California has struggled to find the political will to change. 

 

GOP plan: Tax cuts for the rich, environmental deregulation. Say what? That’s literally what I hear every time I ask a Republican what their plan is to create affordable housing. So, we give money to the rich (who already can afford their houses), and this magically will lower housing prices? And bulldozing more farmland in Bakersfield or building homes in the forest will magically lower prices in San Diego? The dirty little secret here is that the GOP has zero interest in affordable housing. Increasing home prices means that their aging, white base makes money at the expense of the rest of us. Better to just blame the Democrats…

 

3. Homelessness

 

Yes, homelessness has increased dramatically over the last few decades. Gee, I wonder why? There are a number of factors. The lack of affordable housing means that the disabled (who make a pittance in benefits) cannot afford housing. Lack of meaningful access to mental health care and addiction care makes it difficult to be functional, and this is far more problematic once you lose housing. The lack of jobs that pay enough for housing doesn’t help either. 

 

Addressing homelessness requires looking at all of these together. We need a LOT more affordable housing. We need to actually fund mental health care and addiction treatment. And we need to house people first, so that they can actually access the care they need. (This isn’t particularly controversial, actually, among those who have studied homelessness.) The problem is, this costs money. 

 

GOP plan: More mass incarceration. Yep, we just need to lock these people up. Which actually costs a lot more than providing housing and care, but the GOP worldview is that suffering is caused by moral failure, not illness and poverty. 

 

4. Climate Change

 

Good lord, our forests are burning to the ground, we have had increasingly brutal summer heat waves that our power grids struggle to survive, and weather in general is getting more extreme. California (and the western US) has suffered a lot more than other areas of the country, and most of us understand the crisis we face. 

 

Positive change here will require significant changes to how we do things. Renewable (and probably nuclear) energy needs to replace fossil fuels. We need to electrify our transportation, heating, and industry. We need to shift away from individual vehicles to public transportation in many cases. (See below.)

 

GOP plan: Environmental deregulation. “What climate change?” Enough said. 

 

5. Traffic

 

Even during my lifetime, I have noticed how much traffic has increased in the cities. I grew up in Los Angeles, so I know traffic. Simply put, population increases, more people on the road, more traffic. And in many cases, you can’t just build more and bigger roads. 

 

In the cities, we need to join the rest of the world and build out comprehensive public transportation systems. Most trips for most people in the cities should be on public transit. This would reduce emissions, save commuting time, and make our cities more walkable and less toxic. This is what the future should look like. 

 

For longer trips, I am puzzled that the US is so resistant to building high speed rail. Heck, Ronald Reagan proposed it for California back in the 1960s. China, Japan, Europe, and even developing countries seem to be able to build this. Why do we refuse to do so? 

 

GOP plan: More roads. No rail. That’s not a plan. 

 

6. Inequality

 

This is a problem everywhere, but it seems particularly noticeable in California, because we are the home of the Tech Billionaires. That such a wealthy state should have obscenely wealthy (and often sociopathic) people alongside so many homeless is an embarrassment. Covid didn’t help this, as most people suffered as a result of job losses, illness, increased childcare needs, and so on. In the meantime, the billionaire class added even more obscene billions to their wealth. 

 

We can disagree on the best way to tackle this problem. Probably some combination of income tax reform (so that billionaires do not pay a lower rate than the working class - which is what happens right now), a wealth tax, higher wages, and a better social safety net will be necessary. The details are one thing, but we should be able to agree that we need less inequality, not more. 

 

GOP plan: Tax cuts for the rich! Followed by spending cuts for programs that benefit the rest of the population. 

 

7. Unaffordable higher education

 

Did you know that my dad got free state college tuition back in the 1970s at CSUN? Yep. Yet white people of his age lose their shit over AOC and her proposal for free state college. Hypocrisy much? 

 

Over my lifetime, the cost of higher education has soared, and student debt has become a crushing problem, particularly for lower-income students. Since the next generation is literally our future, we need to change our approach so that they can thrive. 

 

Both left and right seem to agree that one partial solution will be to stop (and even reverse) the explosion of administrator positions. (AKA retirement spiking for older professors.) Then, maybe we can pay for full professors and fewer adjuncts (who get by on starvation wages - literally, as in food stamps for people with doctorates.) 

 

But ultimately, what will be required is actually paying the cost for educational infrastructure. This isn’t controversial for primary education, but in our current time, higher education isn’t a luxury. We need to invest in our future, like literally the rest of the first world. 

 

GOP plan: Raise tuition so it doesn’t cost the state as much. Yep. Literally. Shift the cost even MORE to younger people, so the rich get more tax cuts. 

 

[Notice I left out Crime as a problem. In general, crime has been on a downward trend over my lifetime, particularly violent crime. California is no worse than any other place, actually. And the most effective ways to address crime is to address inequality and deprivation.] 

 

***

 

See a pattern here? Notice the lack of actual policies to address the problems? That’s the GOP, and why it is failing in California. 

 

The GOP succeeds better in other places, and I think that looking at their policies and rhetoric can explain why. 

 

I have already mentioned a few of the core GOP policies, and here they are:

1. Always cut taxes, particularly for the rich, no matter what.

2. Cut programs that benefit ordinary people, because we gave that money away in tax cuts.

3. Deregulation, particularly environmental deregulation. 

4. Solve social problems by incarcerating more people. 

 

But there is one more that has been the hallmark of the California GOP since governor Pete Wilson and Prop 187:

5. Blame immigrants

 

That was, of course, Trump’s campaign. But before that, it became the policy core of the California Republican Party. Even in this recall, an issue that they kept raising was “we have too many immigrants, particularly from Mexico.” 

 

California is a “majority-minority” state, meaning that non-whites outnumber whites. We have a high percentage of our population who are immigrants, and even more who are the children of immigrants. We have an amazing multi-cultural scene in our cities. (Seriously, come check out the kinds of food you can find even in our small towns.) We are the world, so to speak. And most of us like that. 

 

In the wake of the California GOP hitching its wagon to xenophobia back in the 1990s, a lot of the whites who had their panties in a wad over immigrants left for places like Texas and Idaho and Arizona. Many of us who stayed rejected the anti-immigrant rhetoric, and changed parties. And, the non-white portion of the population has continued to grow. So, the appeal to racism just doesn’t get you enough votes here in California.

 

But it sure does in rural white America.

 

Let me be clear here:

 

The GOP has no actual policy ideas to address the problems we face. So it must rely on racial, cultural, and religious grievances to win votes.

 

Here in California, that isn’t a winning plan. 

 

So what should the GOP do?

 

It’s not hard:

 

Set forth policies that address our problems and that actually work. If you appeal to voters, they vote for you. 

 

Time to change and evolve, in other words. In the past, the GOP has had ideas. Look back to Eisenhower, or Theodore Roosevelt. Heck, even Nixon gave us the EPA. Reagan supported high speed rail and higher education. Find things that appeal to people, and propose them. 

 

I would love it if we had two functional parties here in California. But the sad reality is that we only have one. The other has retreated into xenophobia and social darwinism to appeal to a shrinking base, and has abandoned the idea of governing for the common good. 

 

Of Monkey Bridges and Bahn Mi Sandwiches by Oanh Ngo Usadi

 Source of book: I own this. 

 

This book was a nice change of pace from some of the darker and heavier books I have read lately. Simply put, it is the author’s story of coming to America as a Vietnamese child refugee in the early 1980s, and her family’s experiences from the fall of Saigon through their entrepreneurship in Texas. It is a fascinating story, full of good vibes, written by an author with a knack for telling a story. 

 

Growing up in Los Angeles during the 80s, I was surrounded by a wide variety of immigrants. The neighborhoods we lived in were working class and highly diverse. Also, because my parents grew up overseas, we were taught about the different waves of refugees, including the “boat people” from Vietnam. (One of the books I read as a kid was A Boat to Nowhere.) We also ate food from around the world, including Vietnam and other south Asian countries. Early memories include my first taste of yellow curry from the Thai family two doors down. 

 

[Side note: one of the most traumatic events of my adult life has been watching my parents, who raised me to be welcoming to refugees and immigrants, who taught me that Christianity and Americanity were not the same, and that colonialism and imperialism exploited the Third World; transform in the post 9/11 world into anti-refugee, anti-immigrant xenophobes. It was such a betrayal of the values I was raised with. Unfortunately, it parallels the general shift in the American Right over my lifetime as well. I’m not innocent either. I hate what 9/11 did to me, and it was hard work to reprogram my mind back to Christ-following values.] 

 

Oanh’s parents were running a small business - an auto parts store - in Saigon until the Vietcong took over. They managed to hide their life’s savings, and bought an orchard in a small village, and lived that way for a number of years. Later, with increasing hostility from the villagers as an “outsider,” as well as for her father’s role in managing fertilizer supplies for the government, her parents decided to first send her older siblings, then escape with her and her brother. They first ended up in a refugee camp in Malaysia, then were accepted for settlement in the US (due to relatives who had previously immigrated), spent time in a camp in the Philippines, before coming to Port Arthur, Texas. There, after working in a bakery for a while, her father opened a Banh Mi stand, a solid decade before they caught on. 

 

It is a heartwarming story, to be sure. Oanh’s parents seem like really lovely people, and she has an infectious optimism in the face of hardship. (About the only thing that she never gets over is the death of her childhood friend from dysentery. It is hard to blame her for that.) 

 

One of the things that has puzzled me over the last decade or so is how many times I have been called a communist, or at least a socialist. I am not sure what to make of this. I have, repeatedly over the course of the decade I have written this blog, made my feelings about communism clear. As Raymond Aron correctly noted, communism in its totalitarian form from the USSR to China to Vietnam, is an ideology - a cultic religion that believes rigidly in its ideas despite proof that they are not working, and thus must eliminate dissidents. It reminds me both of fascism and of the fundamentalist subculture I grew up in. All of them require believing lies and ignoring evidence. And, most centrally, ideology means that they cannot make adjustments to suit new conditions, because that would be apostasy. This is why every communist regime seems to make the same mistake of trying to completely overhaul society according to the ideology, rather than working for reform within the institutions that exist. Often, these institutions arose out of the conditions that existed and continue to exist, and are well loved by those who participate in them. Most notably, the collectivization of agriculture has led to mass starvation in each case. Which is not to say that collective agriculture can’t work: we have centuries of evidence of cooperatives like the Commons in England working fine until they were destroyed for profit. The problem is that such cooperation needs to be built on the foundation of what already exists. So, letting former serfs continue to farm the lands that they did before probably works. But making it all into a collective that eliminates the small chances for enterprise that the serfs had before tends to be a disaster. And thus it was in this book. Subsistence farmers weren’t interested in giving up the little chance for profit that they had had before, particularly as the fruit of their labor seemed to go to the favorites of the regime, not to them. 

 

But let’s back up even further. Oanh takes a bit of time to explain the background to the Vietnam Civil War (which we Americans just happened to stick our noses in) and why it happened in the first place. Vietnam was colonized by the French back in the “golden era” when all the European powers wanted to be the cool kids with countries full of brown-skinned people to exploit and enslave. So, a country that is one of the most fertile in the world (you would be shocked how much of our own food comes from Vietnam these days) ended up with a starving population any time France needed more rice. This came to a head during World War Two, when all of the great powers battling it out (except the US) started running low on food. First the French, then the Japanese, seized most of Vietnam’s rice crop to feed their soldiers; and the crop was already tiny because of the devastation of war. In 1944 alone, up to 2 million Vietnamese are estimated to have starved to death. Predictably, this led, after the war, to a civil war with the goal of forcing the French out for good, and ending foreign exploitation. 

 

Three decades later, in 1975, the Vietcong took over. It was expected that finally Vietnam would have enough to eat. Unfortunately, the misguided collectivist policies further cratered rice production. The communists probably should have worked on rebuilding the industry and infrastructure first. But ideologues tend to fall in love with the “big revolutionary ideas,” which are a lot more sexy that things like fixing roads and bridges and using tax money to subsidize improvements by the small growers. (This is a problem here in the US too, honestly. Revolution is always more sexy than reform.) For the most part, progress occurs when you give ordinary people the resources they need to build their own lives - living wages, a social safety net, public infrastructure like roads, courts, schools, and health care, fair prices for what they grow, and so on. Neither central planning nor capitalist profiteering accomplishes this. 

 

One fascinating example in the book is the way that Oanh’s village repurposed all kinds of leftovers from the war. Everything from scrapped equipment and metal pieces to the bomb casings that were prized for cooking and storage because they were nearly indestructible got reused in some way. 

 

Another passage that I found truly fascinating is Oanh’s description of her puzzlement at learning English, both at the school in the Philippines and later in the United States. In Vietnamese, which is a tonal language, the same “word” could have many different (and sometimes conflicting) meanings, based on pitch. That’s why there are so many diacritical marks in the writen language. Likewise, Vietnamese has a bewilderning array of pronouns, the usage of which varies depending on who is addressing whom, and to whom they are referring. The details of the relationship between the people is contained in the pronouns. Are they close relatives, friends, or strangers? Are they social equals or not? Are they of the same generation or is their a hierarchy? In contrast, English has a devilishly complex system of verb tenses. (Which, honestly, many native English speakers have yet to master.) Languages are complex, and arise through an organic process, which is why, just like economic systems, nobody has ever succeeded in creating an entirely new one from scratch and switching a population to it. (Ursula Le Guin imagined a society in which that was done, which is definitely the most improbable plot point in the book.)  

 

Another cultural adjustment that Oanh talks about is the difference between personal and communal space. Which she, as an introvert, found appealing about the United States. The idea that a person, even on public transportation, would have a certain space to themselves that others at least try to respect, is something many of us appreciate. 

 

Another touching section of the book is about the long-term relationship between Oanh’s family and their landlords, a white couple that was skeptical of having immigrants with a large family in their house. (It didn’t help that they had to fudge the number of children at first, because nobody was renting a small house to those many people.) 

 

The prejudice that Oanh experienced wasn’t as bad as some, but it was still very much there. 

 

From school and books, I learned that a person’s race should not matter. Yet around me, race seemed to dominate not only how people perceived us but also how we perceived them. In the abstract, I knew that friendship among people from different races, like success for Asians in America, was possible. But I had limited experience with non-Vietnamese people. 

 

Likewise, although Port Arthur didn’t seem too bad, in nearby Galveston, the KKK torched Vietnamese-owned fishing boats, and terrorized the community until a lawsuit crippled its ability to function. (This is, by the way, one of the ways we need to be tackling the Proud Boys and the other white supremacist groups that today are today threatening our nation.)

 

Ultimately, Oanh finds her place in America, which makes me happy. I wonder if she were to come here today if she would find Texas so friendly. Trump’s demagoguery regarding Covid has led to an explosion of hate crimes and harassment directed against people of Asian descent, in addition to his nurturing of hate against immigrants. There are surely exceptions, but “old white people from Texas” these days seem drunk on the bile they imbibed from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, and less likely to actually build bridges with refugees. (There is a reason that a mere 25% of white evangelicals think we should take in refugees, and that number is even lower among older evangelicals.) If the retrogressive devolution of people like my parents are any indication, our next wave of refugees from a country we blew up, then abandoned (Afghanistan) will not be nearly as warm as the last time. That makes me sad, and it makes our nation poorer. 

 

***

 

Note on Bahn Mi sandwiches:

 

Colonialism sucked in almost every way, but it did result in culinary cross-pollination and some incredibly tasty food. Case in point is the bahn mi sandwich. Made with fresh french bread (the best places make their own), they are loaded with meat, carrots and pickled radishes, hot peppers, cilantro, and sauce. There are plenty of variations on that theme. The most gringo-friendly is basic bbq pork. My kids have tried some pretty crazy ones, from ham and head cheese (seriously good) to sardines, the favorite of my 13 year old son. (Not my thing.) 

 

Here on the West Coast, you can find good bahn mi in any major city, and many smaller towns too. (Along with Vietnam’s other bit of culinary heaven, Pho.) Often, the cost is the same or less than corporate fast food, and so much better. 

 

My favorite place to get them is Huong Lan Sandwiches, in Sacramento, although there are plenty of worthy contenders throughout California. If you find yourself in the area, check out the crazy Chinese herb store, and amazing Asian grocery in the same shopping center, then heading over for some food. I recommend starting with a #5, or a #1 if you are more adventuresome, and get a soursop boba to go with it. 

 

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Source of book: Audiobook from the library, but I own and have read this book previously.

 

While most of our audiobooks for traveling have been more child oriented, we have always, even when the kids were young, mixed some classic literature in, beginning with Thank You Jeeves, I believe. Since then, we have listened to Jules Verne, Jack London, and Robert Lewis Stevenson (fairly popular), as well as Wilkie Collins (not so much, sadly) in addition to a few others. Having recently returned to reading Willa Cather on a regular basis, I decided this book would be a great one for my younger three kids, as they are at the right age. (My older two have mostly been unable in one case and uninterested in the other in coming along on camping trips, due to school and work. Time moves along…) 

 

I read My Antonia back in my 20s sometime, and really loved it. I had previously read an excerpt from O Pioneers! back in high school, and thought I should read some more. However, we didn’t own any of her books, and I didn’t get to it until I started collecting hardback classics, and thus purchased a used copy. More recently, I found the three volumes of her works in Library of America edition at a library sale, so I have decided to try to read one book a year until I finish them. (You can read my thoughts on Death Comes for the Archbishop and Uncollected Stories on this blog.)  

 

My Antonia centers on the story of the title character, Antonia Shimerda, an immigrant from Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), but the story is told from the viewpoint of Jim Burden. We first meet her at age 14, when Jim is 10, and the two of them have just moved to Blackhawk Nebraska. Jim has been orphaned, and has come to live with his grandparents. Antonia’s family has just immigrated and purchased (at an inflated price) a ranch next to the Burdens. 

 

Antonia is strong and beautiful and intelligent and hard working and bold and fascinating. She is truly one of the great female characters in fiction. Jim, naturally, has a crush on her the entire book, although she thinks of him as a kid for most of the book. In the end, they stay what they were at first, which was friends. Thus, this is a book that has a bit of unrequited love, but is far from being a romance. 

 

The book doesn’t limit itself to Jim and Antonia either. There is a whole small town of characters, and the small-town dramas that play out over the course of nearly three decades. Cather explores, with her characteristic empathy and psychological perception, the issues of race, class, and social status that play out in a community split between the wealthier and more “Anglo-Saxon” townfolk, and the farm families, who include immigrants from Scandinavia and Central Europe. The lives of the individuals intertwine with each other and with the rest of their society in fascinating ways. 

 

This book is no idyll: Antonia’s life is hard, and her good nature and free spirit often works to her disadvantage. But she is remarkably resilient, and never lets the hardships and betrayals she experiences to embitter her or grind her down. This does not mean she is perfect or unrealistic. I’ve met people like her, and she is in many ways like my own wife, although they are both true originals. 

 

I am not going to go through the details of the plot, but I did want to mention some scenes and ideas that really stood out to me this time through. 

 

First, the one false note in the book is the scene with the “negro minstrel.” By the standards of our own time, there are a few parts of the description of “Blind d’Arneau” that made me wince. I would classify them as examples of the “happy negro” stereotype that seems to persist today in white society’s expectation that our African American entertainers put on those big grins and shut up about injustice. But I need to be fair to Cather here: by the standards of her own time, she, like Mark Twain, insisted on portraying black people as fully human, fully intelligent and moral, and with a shocking-for-the-time egalitarianism. While the terms and descriptions are badly dated in that way, Cather goes out of her way to make the portrayal of Blind d’Arneau every bit as empathetic as her portrayal of immigrants in this book or Native Americans in Death Comes for the Archbishop. In fact, the line that made me wince the most was the one where d’Arneau says “let’s hear those old plantation songs!” Which is, in the 1880s setting, fully realistic. Heck, even now, I feel that some artists know they make the most money from white people by playing up the stereotypes. So, as I said, the scene bothered me a bit, but on further reflection, Cather’s sins are pretty mild, and the overall effect is to elevate d’Arneau by the standards of the time. Her greater failure could be said to lie in her choice of subject matter, mostly ignoring Jim Crow and other social issues of the time. But that wasn’t really her art; she wrote what she was great at writing. 

 

I recall being fascinated by Cather’s portrayal of Scandinavian immigrants. My family name comes from my Swedish side, and those ancestors that I can trace all came over in the 1880s and settled in the Great Plains states. Cather herself came from Virginia to Nebraska at the same age as Jim, which makes me wonder if Jim is a socially acceptable stand-in for her. (Cather is clearly crushing on Antonia as much as Jim, which makes since given her own longtime partnership with Edith Lewis.) Reading about “my people” is interesting, of course. Particularly the obvious fact that we were once “the new people off the boat” who were met by some degree of prejudice, and experienced hardship compared to the more established Americans. But also, the universal question of assimilation versus cultural preservation. The children forget how to speak the language of the Old Country, adopt American mannerisms, and so on. Throughout, Cather treats the characters gently, both the immigrants and those who are learning and stumbling through their increasingly global small world. 

 

There are some pretty lurid scenes in this book, which is one reason I wanted the kids to be older. The scene that Russian Peter recounts of himself and Pavel and the wedding party that is eaten by wolves is pretty harrowing. (Apparently, Cather was told this story by a Russian friend.) There are also no fewer than three suicides, plus a murder, a seduction and abandonment, and an attempted rape. 

 

The three suicides form an interesting contrast. We never do learn exactly what induced the drifter to throw himself into a combine. But we do see Mr. Shimerda’s growing despair about what his life has become. We do not learn until later in the book the circumstances that lead him to his hopelessness. We knew that he was a respected violinist and middle class citizen, so it is puzzling to understand why his wife would uproot and drag him to the other side of the world. It is only later that we learn that he impregnated the family’s servant girl, and chose to marry her rather than pay her to go away. His mother never accepted his wife (something I very much understand), so she was caught in a middle class society she would never be part of - and her children may well have been impoverished as a result. So, even though she is a pretty nasty woman in many ways, she is more understandable once you learn the backstory. 

 

The final suicide involves one of the nastiest and evil characters Cather ever wrote. In this case, Wick Cutter is the town moneylender, and he makes Shylock seem benign. In addition to inflicting crushing debt on anyone who has to borrow from him, he constantly feuds with his wife, sleeps around every chance he gets, and takes advantage of (we would say rape, although at the time a prosecution was unlikely) his servant girls. We already knew he was horrible by the time he created an elaborate deception to ditch his wife and return to rape Antonia. She, however, smells a rat, and Jim decides to sleep in her bed, with her safely with Jim’s grandparents. When Cutter starts to grope him in the middle of the night, Jim breaks his nose before escaping out the window. 

 

Near the end of the book, Jim has returned after a couple decades to see Antonia, who is now married with nearly a dozen children. He hears the story from the Widow Stebbens. Cutter, who is obsessed with keeping his ill-gotten money from going to his wife’s family if he should die first (they are childless), realizes that the new law providing that a surviving spouse gets a ⅓ share no matter what means he cannot prevent her inheriting, decides to take matters into his own hands. He first shoots and kills his wife, then waits for someone to pass his house. He then fatally wounds himself then shoots out the window. When the person came running, he directed him to see that his wife was dead, and that he was living, and then bled out and died. All so that he could keep her family from getting his money. (In the end, as usually happens, the fight over the estate enriched the lawyers and nobody else…) I got to use this as an example of the “Slayer Rule,” which was kind of fun. (In California, this would be community property, so half would already be hers. When he killed her, the slayer rule meant that he was treated as if he had died first. So he would have ensured that her family got the estate in that case.) Things lawyers find fun. 

 

I was also struck by the sexual double standard that Cather describes. Perhaps it is most apparent in the case of the young man who is about to get married, who decides to kiss Antonia on her front porch without her consent. It is Antonia who is blamed, and she loses her job because she refuses to accept blame and stop going to dances. She is right, of course. She dances and has fun, but she made no promises and did not show affection - he just took advantage of her. We would now call that sexual assault, and cheer her for slapping him. Likewise, when Antonia is abandoned after she is impregnated by the older man who seduces her, she gets the bulk of the social disapproval (as well as all of the financial burden.) That she eventually wins the town’s good opinion back is besides the point. She was the victim, not the perpetrator. Finally, there is the case of Lena Lingard, the free spirited and flirtatious immigrant girl, who is constantly blamed for men drooling over her. Including married men. Again, she is “flirtatious” in the sense of being friendly and vivacious and...dare we say it? Desirable. My own wife was accused of being “flirtatious” as a teen, and some of the married older men did things that made her quite uncomfortable. And, because in that cultic group, women were seen as temptresses, she was blamed and shunned. So Lena gets the reputation as the town flirt because a married man decided to moon over her. 

 

Later in the story, Lena runs into Jim in Lincoln. She has started her own dressmaking business, and is doing really well. Jim is at college, so they decide to hang out regularly. The two of them enjoy plays and other events together, and Jim does develop feelings for her. Like Antonia, she doesn’t reciprocate, and they decide to remain friends. But even then, people talk about her as a shameless flirt and Jim as her victim, which is far from the truth. 

 

There is an interesting sequel to this in the book. Jim goes to Harvard, and they lose touch. Lena reconnects with Tiny Soderball, another of the group of immigrant girls that hung out together and with Jim. Tiny has turned out to have quite a life, making a small fortune in the Yukon, and set up shopkeeping in San Francisco. Lena joins her, expanding her business to the big city. The two of them have a relationship that is never entirely spelled out. It is not difficult to see in retrospect that this is probably a “Boston Marriage.” Lena had explained to Jim back in the day that she had zero interest in marrying. She liked boys as friends, but didn’t want to have a marriage with one. Hmm. Just saying, perhaps. 

 

There are so many other things to love. The rattlesnake scene, the dances, the gentle description of the generation gap, the portrayal of the hardworking immigrant girls who eventually made good, the everyday kindness and decency of Jim’s grandparents, the mild comeuppance to Antonia’s chauvinistic older brother Ambrosch, the give and take of life on the prairie, Jim’s deep love for nature and knowledge, and so much more. Cather’s writing is superb throughout. 

 

One final observation: Cather is brilliant in the way she ends the story of Antonia, in my opinion. On the one hand, she is now a woman in her 40s, showing the wear and tear of a lifetime of hardship (and 11 births), and there is something a bit bittersweet about such an intelligent woman never having the chance to leave the town she was dragged to as a teen. But there is also something fitting about her fate. Despite the early misstep and seduction, she found and married a thoroughly good and decent man who adores her and the children. She also hasn’t lost the spark, and is happy in her life. It is a life better than that she had as a child, in many ways - she isn’t poor, although she isn’t rich, her marriage is better than her parents’ and her children seem to care for each other. It is in that sense an ending that is entirely satisfying. It feels so much like life. While some of us reach middle age having accomplished what they hoped and caught the world by the tail or whatever, for most of us, what we have is an ordinary life. And finding one’s self married to a loving and devoted spouse for the last 20 years, with good children, a comfortable standard of living, and a job that doesn’t suck; well, that isn’t too bad, is it? 

 

On that point, Cather is clear that it is Antonia that makes all this happen. Cuzak is a plodder. He works, but he loves being with the children, and has no real ambition to be a big wheel. Antonia brings the fire and energy and dynamism that makes their family go, while he brings the nurturing and light-heartedness. I see some of that in my own marriage. Amanda is the dynamo, and I do not know how we would work without her. I am a plodder, but rather like being with the kids, and cooking and whatnot. We work well together, just like Antonia and Cuzak, in our ordinary little life. 

 

Cather has been accused of being “nostalgic,” but I think that is unfair. Her style just didn’t match the new writing of the Depression and her gentle outlook didn’t fit with the mood of the times. Not everyone can be a social crusader, and I believe that Cather’s empathy and loving treatment of those at the margins of rural society also did good. As with any great writer, we see ourselves and our emotional landscape in her characters, despite the very different settings of her books. If you haven’t discovered Cather, I think she is an underrated American author, well worth reading. 

 

***

 

We listened to the audiobook read by Jeff Cummings, who was quite excellent. He got the various regional and foreign accents right, and created a set of voices for the characters that were all distinct and interesting. 

 

***

 

 Apparently, Antonia the character is based on Anna Pavelka, a real person whose father also committed suicide, giving her an unwanted notoriety. She too eventually married and had a house full of kids. Cather used the house as a model for the book. You can visit the now-restored house in Nebraska. 

It is easy to picture the children exploding out of the cellar in a noisy blast. My kids would totally do that.

A Burning by Megha Majumdar

Source of book: Borrowed from the library.

 

This book was on my list, I believe from an NPR recommendation. It seemed promising, a novel about the rise of far right Hindu politics in India. I found I was a bit disappointed. It isn’t a bad book, but it just felt a bit thin. Let me explain a bit.

 

First of all, the book is short. Although careful design stretched it to 289 pages, there is a lot of white on the page, both in the margins and between lines. It is also a small format book, so in reality, it is more of a novella than a full novel. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but because it attempted to tell three separate although connected stories, it really felt like it sacrificed depth for breadth. In fact, it reminded me a good bit of a YA novel in that way - and in others. 

 

The biggest sacrifice to the length was the depth of characterization. We get to know the characters at a surface level, and we are told (rather than shown) their feelings and dreams. Dialogue is perfunctory as well, again, I suspect, because of length. The result is characters - types - who feel like they are inserted in the book to perform their roles in the plot, not full humans who end up taking the plot where it might not otherwise have gone. 

 

Also, like a YA novel, it feels heavy-handed and preachy. Bad things happen to good people, some people turn bad because of their circumstances. Things are mostly hopeless. 

 

I have a few theories about why I felt this way. First is that I recently read Behind the Beautiful Forevers, which, like this book, tells about the hard lives and tragedies of religious minorities in India’s slums. Not only did I read another book, albeit non-fiction, with some similar themes and characters, but I read the far better book first. Katherine Boo just writes with far more nuance than Majumdar, and the characters - who were real - felt more human. This isn’t so much a fiction versus non-fiction issue as whether the author has the ability (and practice) of seeing humanity in a deep way. 

 

Another reason that I was disappointed is that I have read some fiction lately with better nuance to the characters. The Vanishing Half, for example, or La Rose, or Transcendent Kingdom, or Everything I Never Told You. You get spoiled with so many examples of great writing. 

 

A third would be that I am having a difficult time right now with stories that seem to have no hope in them. If I want to read a straight-up polemic on how fascism destroys the innocent, I can find that in the non-fiction section. Same thing if I want something about how religious and ethnic minorities get brutalized when mobs get riled by demagogues. Or that criminal justice systems are anything but just. If I am going to read a story on the other hand, it can’t just be a “see how horrible it all is” tale. There has to be humanity, nuance, and, dare I say it? HOPE? 

 

The basic story centers on three characters, who, if given enough time to develop, might have been good. First is Jivan, a young muslim woman who is trying to rise above the slums, who is falsely accused of collaborating with terrorists who firebomb a train. Second is Lovely, a hijra (the closest analogy would be transgender or third sex, but it is more complicated than that) who is aspiring to be an actress. The third is PT Sir, a physical education teacher who accidentally find himself at a far-right rally with a chance to rise in the ranks, as long as he is willing to commit perjury for the party. 

 

Of the three stories, the only one that I did not find predictable was that of Lovely. Her character was the best of the three, with at least a little bit of human nuance. Also, the book did take time to give some of the color of the hijra subculture and place in society, which is probably not as familiar to those of us who grew up in Christendom, with its insistence on a rigid gender binary, with no room for anyone who isn’t one or the other. It is helpful to understand that many other cultures have found ways of accepting (at least to some degree) people who do not fit the rigid categories. (Native Americans seem to have the richest culture regarding LGBTQ people generally - we could learn a lot from them.) 

 

So yes, a bit disappointing. I wanted to like it more, but never could entirely get into it. Not a bad book, but not as deep as would have been nice.