![\"141222_r25931-320\"](\"http:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/files\/2014\/12\/141222_r25931-320.jpg\")
<\/a>CREDIT ILLUSTRATION BY JASON HOLLEY<\/p>\nBe content with what you have. Desire nothing and nothing will be lacking. By the time I entered high school, I could tell which of my classmates had been brought up, like me, on Tao Te Ching, the wisdom worn as an eggshell of pride. Privately, we desired all the things our other classmates, who had not been raised on defeatism, owned: Adidas sweatshirts, Sony Walkmen, cassette tapes of Karen Carpenter and Hong Kong pop singers, VCRs that played pirated movies from abroad. This was Beijing in 1988. Kentucky Fried Chicken had opened its first store in China, near Tiananmen Square, the previous year; a new classmate bragged about having tasted the famous Colonel\u2019s recipe.<\/p>\n
That fall, a group of well-connected girls got hold of a popular American miniseries, \u201cThe Thorn Birds.\u201d They would regularly gather at one girl\u2019s home and watch the saga, which was set in the Australian outback. Between classes, they discussed the lifelong love between Meggie and Father Ralph, the renegade priest she met when she was young, who later gave her a child but left her to pursue his ambition in the Vatican. The girls recited to one another the passage about the mythical bird that spends its life searching for the perfect thorn and then impales itself while singing the world\u2019s most beautiful song.
\nAround that time, my father bought me the least expensive tape recorder he could find, and \u201cModern American English,\u201d a textbook with four accompanying cassettes, designed for Chinese people planning to go to America. Every day, he woke me up at six and turned on the recorder. The taped conversations, between a man and a woman, became the soundtracks of my morning. From them, I learned that in a new place I should remember prominent landmarks (a McDonald\u2019s or a Burger King, for instance, or a church spire); not to ask a woman\u2019s age or a man\u2019s income; to arrive half an hour late when invited to dinner and to always bring chocolates for the hostess.<\/p>\n
The bits and pieces I picked up from the girls about \u201cThe Thorn Birds\u201d fascinated and pained me: Father Ralph\u2019s blue eyes and chiselled face; Meggie\u2019s innocence, the seductive kind, which made a man lose his head; the elderly aunt, beautiful despite her wickedness. I was a good eavesdropper and decoder, but neither skill gave me claim to \u201cThe Thorn Birds.\u201d What I\u2019d pieced together felt as if it were something stolen from others. It would be inappropriate if I said Meggie\u2019s name even to myself.<\/p>\n
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For detail please visit here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" DECEMBER 22, 2014 ISSUE BY YIYUN LI CRED … Continue reading