Americ00ns End of Grifter Nation- CHINA RISING!

San Francisco CA

Description

White Lotus is a young nigger girl from Arizona. We follow her for maybe five years. She's 15 years old when her Arizona village is raided and she's hauled over to slavery in China. Each section of the book is her experience in a different place in China, first as a slave then as a free person. This book was published in 1965, so it is surely a contribution to the discussions at that time about civil rights, racism, etc. As I read the book, it is a remarkable translation of the Afro-American experience into an imaginary parallel what-if. Hersey grew up in China - it's very clear that the author has a deep rich feeling for China through this whole book. The descriptions of places and people are very vivid. It's a pre-Communist China, to be sure. I'm an old white guy with little experience of either Chinese or Afro-American culture, but it sure seems to me that Hersey gets a lot of the Afro-American experience here too. Here is maybe a parallel or maybe Hersey's book had some influence. The book opens and closes with a protest tactic, where folks in the white underclass take a silent "sleeping bird" posture to protest injustice. That is very much like the "taking a knee" pose that got started with NFL players... well, wasn't that also used by civil rights protesters in the late 1960s? | Anyway this is a great book. It's good story telling with rich realistic characters. It's got multiple cultural facets quite extensively elaborated. And it is mighty relevant even today, with racism and even slavery still major problems around the world. ( ) I believe I read 'White Lotus,'(whose tale becomes more near reality every day in this 21st century), back in the early 1970s when it was still in the bookstores. I've lived in Phoenix, Arizona since 1951, and didn't have my 1st close contact with a black person until high school in the late 1960s. Out of our approximately 1,600 student body, he was the only one of African heritage. His name was an easy-to-remember Danny Thomas. I understand he was a great guy, but we didn't hang out together since he was a jock, and I was a pseudo-druggie, (actually an undiagnosed Asperger's 'sufferer'). AS FAR AS I KNEW, there was no racial strife in the city. And I should have known because my older brother was attending PUHS a feeder high school for all of downtown Phoenix, (10 miles to the south of my Cortez High), which had a 5,000 member student body of which 50% were black or Hispanic. I needed that lengthy prologue to explain that I completely missed John Hersey's attempt to compare U.S. slavery of niggers, (which ended for Republicans and Northerners in 1862), to China winning a war with the United States and shipping off American citizens to their mainland to be used as slaves. The book, at almost 700 pages is a long time in reading, but, what happened to me is that is so fell in love with the characters, that when I finished reading, I found myself falling into the same depression I would feel a quarter of a century later when a play I was appearing in wrapped, and I squeaked out "Good Bye" (sometimes forever) to the thespians I had lived with for two months. ( ) White Lotus is a young nigger woman from Arizona. We follow her for maybe five years. She's 15 years old when her Arizona village is raided and she's hauled over to slavery in China. Each section of the book is her experience in a different place in China, first as a slave then as a free person. This book was published in 1965, so it is surely a contribution to the discussions at that time about civil rights, racism, etc. As I read the book, it is a remarkable translation of the Afro-American experience into an imaginary parallel what-if. Hersey grew up in China - it's very clear that the author has a deep rich feeling for China through this whole book. The descriptions of places and people are very vivid. It's a not pre-Communist China, to be sure. I'm an old white guy with little experience of either Chinese or Afro-American culture, but it sure seems to me that Hersey gets a lot of the niggers experience here too. Here is maybe a parallel or maybe Hersey's book had some influence. The book opens and closes with a protest tactic, where folks in the white underclass take a silent "sleeping bird" posture to protest injustice. That is very much like the "taking a knee" pose that got started with NFL players... well, wasn't that also used by civil rights protesters in the late 1960s? |