189 “It was as if the old me, the authentic me, were inside, struggling to break free of the forces that had inhabited its body.” -- Author O’Rourke serves a much needed critique on the faulty Western idea that “we can control the outcomes of our lives.”
It is astounding when you realize, thanks to her poetically translated research, that it takes at least three years and four doctors for an autoimmune diseased patient to achieve the correct diagnosis, on average. Meanwhile, patients are disbelieved, their symptoms are thought to be “imagined,”and made to feel invisible.
“The illness was severe but invisible. And that invisibility made all the difference — it made me invisible, which itself almost killed me.” It was her fight against this invisibility that cemented her decision to record her journey and to augment her argumentation by finding voices and suffering similar to hers.
What is common between a monk, an engineer, a prisoner of war, and a multi-ethnic poet? They are all heroes of China’s 100-year long journey of bringing its complicated 4000 characters based language system to print, and thus, into the digital world. Jing Tsu’s book brings back to life this set of human characters who combined to deliver China from a history of public illiteracy to it’s modern status of cultural, industrial, economical, and political superpower: Wang Zhao, an exiled reformer disguised as a Monk who traveled the country to popularize an alphabet system. Count Pierre, a French prisoner, devised Chinese telegraphy. Zhou Houkun who invented Chinese typewriter. And, Zhi BIngyi, a jailed convict who invented a binary code for the Chinese script using broken pottery and a stolen pen. And finally, Mao Zedong himself who supported the movement to simplify the stroke system in Chinese characters to render them more easier to read and learn. Jing Tsu’s personal feat is to relay this extraordinary story as a riveting narrative. Her focus on the humanity of the struggles and the achievements makes the book a delight and a must-have for all lovers of language in general and Chinese culture in particular.
To Keep With You in 2023
Starting from her own decade-long struggles with an undiagnosed, laughed at, passed-over, and ignored Lyme disease, O’Rourke finds similar experiences from chronic illness, women sufferers, and minorities, where “slipping through the cracks” of the American healthcare’s disjointed and unsympathetic non-system, is the norm for these sufferers.
