As predicted, I’ve been reading nearly constantly. If my crochet hook is not in my hand, my Kindle is. This is partially due to my continued inability to connect my computer to the internet in the apartment (resolved fully as of this morning), but it certainly helps that I have no job and 17 books currently on my Kindle. While we were on the bus back from Jiangxi, I finished reading Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, which I will get to in a minute. Instead of sighing and looking out the window for the remaining 20 hours of the ride, I went back to reading Atomic Lobster by Tim Dorsey (which I finished a couple of days later and moved on to Up in the Air by Walter Kirn…which I finished the morning I began writing this review). When I did something similar in the Philippines back in 2000, it resulted in a large pile of books that I didn’t have room to bring home with me. I’m diggin’ this Kindle thing. A lot.
Half the Sky Review
If you’re not familiar with Nick Kristof’s column in the NY Times, you should be. He writes about issues that are important but often not well-known, and I’m grateful for being introduced to these. Kristof is careful to not merely complain about things; he often highlights the work of a person or an organization which has been working on the highlighted issue with good results. His appeals also often lead to a flood of donations for whatever charity he mentions.
The book is no exception, for it contains a large appendix which lists all the charities he mentions in his narrative as well as others he knows of. They are sorted into the same categories as the sections of the book: sex trafficking, gender-based violence (including neglect), and maternal mortality. The narrative itself approaches each general topic from several angles, each telling the story of one or a few women and Nick or Sheryl’s experience with them. For someone brought up with plenty of opportunities, the stories are shocking. Each situation is impossible to imagine, starting with the opening story of a Cambodian girl who was sold into sex slavery and escaped, only to be jailed and have a crooked cop sell her again. There is no way for me to wonder what I would do in such a situation, because it’s so far beyond my experience.
Half the Sky will move you, hopefully to action. Because I’m lucky enough to be spending the majority of this calendar year volunteering, I intend to find a way to put a special focus on the girls and women. I won’t know specifically how I can do this until I get there, but I will try to highlight it here. Once I’m back in the US and earning money, you can bet that I’ll be contributing far more than I have in the past. Kristof mentions a few “price points” in the book:
- Tithing, which is traditionally giving 10% of one’s income to the church, need not be limited in such a way. The idea is to work a certain percentage into your budget and making giving a priority.
- The world spends $40 billion annually on pet food, but an increase of only $9 billion per year in aid money would “provide all effective interventions for maternal and newborn health to 95% of the world’s population”. What if we all donated, each month, to a charity focused on this problem, an amount equal to whatever we’ve spent on pet food?
Please, read this book, and start reading Kristof’s column in the New York Times.
Watching movies here is weird. We got strange looks in Nanchang when we asked a hotel clerk if there was a movie theater nearby, though the next day we saw a big “Cinema” sign about half a mile from there. Mostly you just buy an unauthorized DVD and plunk down at home to watch. My lovely husband has informed me that it is occasionally possible to see a movie in English here in Kunming.
Most big movies are available – you can buy Avatar, The Time Traveler’s Wife, 2012, etc. as well as Chinese movies. I just picked up a copy of The Lovely Bones, and I’m not sure if it’s even available on DVD in the U.S. yet. It’s obvious that it’s not an authorized release – just look at the proof of purchase:
Wait, what did I buy?
Even the Chinese movies have bizarre packaging. The hubs picked up two movies the other day, one of which stars Gong Li, a Chinese actress famous for melancholy historical fiction flicks where she dies at the end. In this one, Raise the Red Lanterns, she’s the 4th mistress/concubine of a rich man. When I was asked to pick which movie we would watch that night, I picked that one based on the English description that it was about a man who returned to his village for the funeral of his father. What?
But what’s interesting to see are the movies in English that we’ve never even heard of.
Our host has a binder full of movies that we flipped through on one of our first nights here, and we picked out a movie called Redacted. We had never heard of it. A quick search revealed that it was a total flop in the U.S. and critics generally hated it, but you can buy it in China! It turned out to be a graphic and disturbing war movie, and while I don’t think it was badly done, I wished I hadn’t watched it.
A more upbeat example is a movie that the hubs picked up in 2006 when we were last here together. I don’t recall if it was made in Australia or New Zealand, but it’s a cute romantic fable called The Price of Milk. If you can dig it up, I would recommend watching it with someone who will snuggle with you.
Depending on who you ask, there are anywhere from three to five stages of culture shock. Let’s look at the 3-stage process through the eyes of J. Maarten Troost, author of Lost on Planet China. This consists of the Honeymoon Phase, the Negotiation Phase, and the Adjustment Phase.
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