Somebody just clicked on this post. this post. The cite in Blogger stats appears only as "I can't get over that photograph" and I didn't remember what photograph it was or what the post was about. So I clicked on it my ownself. I reprint the text sans photo (of Liu Shaoqi and granddaughter) below. Everything I wrote then I could write now, could have written on any day from 2004 on. It is true. I was surprised that that post was as recent as 2016. I had dropped the Cultural Revolution as a frequent writing topic years before. What that 2016 post means is that the pain of China writing stayed with me years after I stopped writing about it regularly. Yes, I mean that. Writing about China caused me pain.


And this is the thing with China. China does that. There is so much beauty, kindness, love, greatness, history but always admixed with the most exquisite pain. That photograph could be on a Hallmark card, right? "Ah," it just makes you want to go, "Ah." It is adorable. And yet...

It's always there. The pain is always there; you meet a Chinese person, (s)he seems perfectly normal-happy or well-adjusted or content. Intelligent, personable. Get to know them a little: there is pain inside there. Every Chinese has got pain inside. Pain of a kind you have never experienced. Pain of an intensity that, mercifully, few of us ever know. Just remember: no matter how normal they seem, there is pain inside.