Kathryn Berg

"Socialism Is Great!": A Worker's Memoir of the New China

admin — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 16:57:00 +0000

"Socialism Is Great!": A Worker's Memoir of the New China is an account by journalist Lijia Zhang, who came of age in China during the ‘80s. Documenting her life from ages sixteen to twenty-six, Socialism Is Great! follows a revolutionary spirit through the dreary politics of factory work, her insatiable pursuits for education, and last but not least, a dramatic and taboo love life. This page-turner has a great storyline involving the democracy movement leading up to contemporary China.

Zhang’s memoir has an incredible sense of place, and without any background in Chinese history or culture, I found myself easily absorbed into the world she creates. In one respect, the dehumanizing environments and relationships she navigates hardly seem foreign. Yet she simultaneously portrays communism as a distinctly oppressive system exercising extreme control over her everyday life. Ultimately, Zhang succeeds in writing a sharp critique of communism China without catering to a capitalist readership.

The plot starts unfolding when the precocious teenager is pulled out of school by her mother and put to work in a government factory. From her family’s perspective, this is the opportunity of a lifetime, as the government has given workers a limited window of time to retire and offer relatives their enviable position. To Zhang, who excels in school and has her hopes set on becoming a journalist, it is devastating. While she has no choice but to accept the job, she does anything but resign herself to her situation. In fact, Zhang goes on to eventually lead the largest demonstration by workers in Nanjing, China during the entire democracy movement.

"Socialism Is Great!"'s strength lies in part in its genuine complexity. This is not a perfectly PC memoir: we learn about faulted characters and their relationships to one another in the midst of a dictatorship. What makes the book both gripping and empowering is that Zhang is always stretching herself to move closer towards her aspirations. Each love affair is a unique experience and life lesson, as the obstacles she faces are simply changed routes in the path to her inevitable success. That this autobiographical work is about a suppressed intellectual living through intense political turbulence makes this an important historical perspective in addition to an excellent memoir.

Written by: Kathryn Berg, September 13th 2009

Dreamer

admin — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 23:20:00 +0000

Directed by Phillip Forsyth

Shut the Door Productions

From the beginning, Dreamer appears to be a film about a man traveling backwards in time. Daniel, the main character, is a 30-year-old white man living in Chicago. As he struggles to make sense of this reverse sequence of events, Daniel’s awareness and motivation falter. He is unable to follow-up with a needed job opportunity. He wakes up beside a woman he does not recognize. Another morning, he finds himself bleeding profusely from a wound on his side without apparent cause. At the end of the film, we learn that Daniel is a war veteran who served for three years, and is presumably suffering from PTSD.

In terms of technical highs and lows, the strength of Dreamer is the film’s visual landscape. The shots of Chicago’s cityscape—as Daniel stands on a bridge over the Chicago River, or walks past an outdoor sculpture—are beautiful and eerie in the evening darkness. The camera work was well done and a cut above most other aspects of the film. On the flip side, the primary technical issue that interfered with my viewing was the audio content. Due to the high level of background noise, many of the scenes were inaudible to me.

From a feminist perspective, I was disappointed that Dreamer does not subvert or challenge gender norms. This portrayal of a modern-day war veteran did not deepen my empathy for Daniel and was, in fact, quite problematic. The main character is a portrait of normative masculinity throughout the film, without sufficient character development. When Daniel catches up with an old friend, small talk turns to the subject of “pussy.” When he stumbles upon a dodgy character, the stranger and Daniel get into a fistfight in an alley. Perhaps most disappointing is that the movie ends with Daniel making a rapid escape following the second night spent with a woman who has already given him a second chance.

After this closing scene, there is a dedication to American veterans who served in the armed forces. However, by the end of the film, I felt less compassion for the veteran than the woman he has disrespected yet again. Furthermore, was this closing to suggest that if Daniel had not been traumatized by the war, he would have behaved otherwise? I am not entirely convinced. Instead I wondered: how has the war actually shaped who Daniel is? How did this affect his expression of masculinity? What potential has Daniel been unable to realize since the war left him with a debilitating mental illness? Portraying the main character in a one-dimensional manner makes it difficult to answer these questions. Dreamer is a film that normalizes oppressive constructs of masculinity, albeit in a society that fails to provide adequate support to war veterans.

Written by: Kathryn Berg, June 22nd 2009

Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist - One Woman's Spiritual Journey

admin — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:18:00 +0000

By Jan Willis

Wisdom Publications

Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist is a beautifully written memoir in which Jan Willis charts her spiritual life’s journey towards self-love. An exceptionally gifted intellectual and a gentle soul by nature, Willis tells the story of having her self-worth consistently undermined by racism. She grew up in a Southern, Black rural town terrorized by the Klu Klux Klan, where she observed the “crippling effects” of the KKK on her community’s self-esteem. As a child, Willis’ mother referred to her intelligence as evil. Years later, even Willis’ full scholarship to an Ivy league college came with the cost of tokenization and criticism from her town. Willis’ spiritual path is a journey of self-acceptance and fulfilling her potential in spite of the oppressive effects of racism.

Her experiences of racial oppression in Docena, Alabama are vivid and disturbing. Her life’s story serves a reminder that some living African Americans carry these hateful memories with them today. Hers is a traumatic experience of racism many Americans would like to think of as an ancient history. This oppression spans from a girlhood memory of watching through the window as the Klan burns crosses in the nearest alleyway, to recent research on her family lineage, in which she speaks with a living local historian, a librarian who makes the cutting remark that Willis’ intellect is accounted for by a certain White male in her ancestry. Willis portrays racism as such a dominant force throughout her early life in particular, that when reading the book, I wondered when the focus on spirituality was going to kick in.

It comes during her undergraduate studies, starting when Willis spends a year living in India. She finds herself especially at home amongst the Tibetans there. After her study abroad, she and several friends travel to Nepal, where Willis stops to visit a Tibetan stupa. Willis meditates at the stupa, experiencing intense inner peace during her visit. A monk residing there invites Willis to stay and study at the temple. Though Willis returns back to college in the states to finish her undergraduate degree, she remembers her experience at the shrine and the monk’s invitation.

Upon graduation, Willis finds herself faced with the most difficult choice she would ever have to make: work for the Black Panther Party or return to the Tibetan monastery, the choice between, in Willis’ own words, "a 'piece' or peace?" Out of a commitment to following her own path, and with a university traveling scholarship from her Master's program, Willis returns to the stupa, where she spends a year dedicated to her spiritual practice. There she learns to live with both pride and humility, a challenge which, she remarks, is made additionally difficult for all African Americans due to the trauma of slavery.

She finds what she is seeking in Buddhism. Willis spends a year in Tibet living at a Buddhist monastery, and eventually goes on to teach Buddhist Studiesin order to give the gift of believing in oneself to others. Ultimately, as an adult, Willis settled into a life she chose for herself. She revisits her family, her hometown, and her father’s Baptist church. Having come full-circle, Willis expands the concept of her spirituality identity to see herself as a Baptist-Buddhist.

I found Jan Willis’ story astonishing, in part due to the opportunities which open to her at pivotal moments in her life. Looking back on her life’s accomplishments, receiving the praise of her students and her spiritual guide, Lama Yeshe, upon her teachings in the classroom, Willis recognizes that she has always had a lioness spirit, longing to really roar. This book is a powerful and vulnerable telling of a phenomenal woman’s life. Neither Black, Baptist, nor Buddhist, I found this autobiography beautiful and enlightening. I imagine that for readers who can more closely identify with Jan Willis’ experience, Dreaming Me offers a model of profound hope and inspiration.

Written by: Kathryn Berg, March 1st 2009