re: #159 zombie

Great job, Zombie!

A brief comment about Mao: as a young man, he taught at the Yale School in China, and spoke English fluently. In 1948, when Chinese communist soldiers started murdering American missionaries in the streets during the civil war, one of my cousins traveled through the lines to meet with Mao, and negotiate a cessation in the killings. In exchange for the “truce”, the missionaries pulled out of China.

I’ve met many young Chinese students here in NYC who tell me that their parents— scholars, teachers, and educated professionals— were banished to the countryside to work in the fields during the Cultural Revolution, and for ten years thereafter. They remember those years as lost time without education or hope, as gaps in their lives.