Sometimes, it seems, we need to take a step out of our own liberal society to remind ourselves just how precious the classics are. During last year’s protests in Iran, I wrote a series of posts (starting with this one) on the potential for literature to be a force for liberation. Barbara Beliveau, a member of the St. Mary’s College of Maryland economics department, has just sent me a story about a former Chinese student of hers that testifies to literature’s power. The account reminds me Dai Sijie’s novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, which I’ll post on tomorrow. Here is Barbara’s story:
I’ve been thinking about the impact of literature on our lives, and your post on Miss Watson sparked a recollection of one of my MBA students who illustrates this vividly.
About 20 years ago, when she took my managerial economics class, she was about 28. Her employer (a Fortune 100 firm, as I recall) was paying her tuition and she was fast tracking. One evening after class she started talking about her childhood indoctrination in the Chinese Communist party and how she was taught to put Chairman Mao and the party above any loyalty to family.
“My poor parents!” she said. “They moved to the city so I could get an education, but that involved letting me be indoctrinated in (I think it was) “Young Pioneers,” and if they had even expressed doubt about something the government did, I would have denounced them and they would have gone to prison, or worse.”
We were shocked but I remember someone asking, “How did you end up here?”—meaning “getting an MBA and green card and embracing the U.S.”
She talked about, as a teenager, being in charge of “leading” younger students in her school. The leaders had meetings after hours and they learned that the former “decadent” library had been sealed up. One of the group knocked some bricks out of an adjacent supply closet. They reached in and pulled out … BOOKS! In English! Henry James, Twain, Dickens, Walt Whitman, Melville, Austen…
She had trouble describing the mechanism by which these books effected the change in her outlook, and her classmates were amazed that “just books” could matter so much. After all, they had read most of the books she mentioned and experienced no similarly profound effects.
Looking back now, I think it was related to the power of literature to give readers a glimpse of alternate realities. And that it’s this power that totalitarian regimes, rightly, find so threatening. After all, many of the characters in these books live their whole lives without any direct government intervention, and some, like Huck, prosper by circumventing government mandates.
My student mentioned that it took her quite a while to convince her parents that her change was sincere and not a trick to trap them. She also said that it was her “true believer” reputation that allowed her to spend so much time in the U.S. and to get a green card.
Sadly, this was pre-email and we lost touch. Maybe I’ll get lucky at one of the alumni events and reconnect.
