I thought this book would be all cute stories about how tech is ubiquitous in China, and therefore better than America. Propaganda but also voyeurism. Instead, it was sort of an elegy for the China that is almost gone ("my great-uncle reminisces abou the early days of the revolution...about how slow work was, how time moved differently then -- a filmy haze seemed to cover every moment, suspending life in the present". Xiaowei gives all the first person reasons that the Chinese have been doing things that Americans sniff at (like ignoring IP laws to which they say, "after all, intellectual property rights are not intrinsic. They were created in eighteenth-century England, and tied into the idea of ownership as defining existence -- the right to own as the right to be human").

There are ways that tech is helping the countryside. More than anything, this book showed how different it can be if a country 'modernizes' later in the global tech cycle. Some of the sustainable examples, like the "Rice Harmony Collective", are amazing in that I couldn't imagine them working in the US (mostly because in the US, how many smallhold farmers are there left?). The Rice Harmony Collective rotates fields between families, so that each family is incentivized to make choices that will benefit the collective. Would that we could implement a multipolar trap solution like this to more of our global problems...but I don't think the global powers will be rotating militaries anytime soon.

At the same time, China is attempting to widen the economic pie by creating more and more consumers. And here you really start to see the futility. Since Xiaowei is Chinese-American, you get to see them making connections between the lack of accountability of American Silicon Valley start ups, and facial recognition software developers who sell to militaries and police forces to build surveillance states. Though unspoken, the comparison to Nazi Germany comes through pretty loud and clear - "...I don't make the rules. I just enforce them. I'm just doing my job".

In the quest to really understand China, how different it is from the US and how similar, this was a helpful foray.

To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

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challenging dark sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot

3.5

I read Octavia Butler in class in high school for an English project and became repulsed. The author writes with main characters as thinly veiled versions of herself, except they are the survivors and spiritual leaders in a post apocalyptic world (ok, at least that's what I remember from reading them 15 years ago).

HY perhaps is doing a more sophisticated version of the same thing. While her characters are gay men instead of women, she's answering the question - if I were beautiful and yet had suffered unmeasurably, would I still be loved? Stealing this completely from a Vox review on the book. In A Little Life the relationships and characters themselves didn't feel exploitative. It felt like she knew them, and also was just exploring them throughout the book. The part that felt exploitative was

the end when you started to realize how in detail she was going to go into things like child sexual exploitation and child and adult self harm

. While it is more obfuscated, I find that idea about as repulsive as I did in Octavio Butler's work 15 years ago.

However. Her world-building (just slightly off from reality, with the exception of 2093 - although that really remains to be seen) is stunning, the writing flows easily, I read the thing in about 24 hours and was left with feelings. So while I can't quite recommend it, I can't say it wasn't worthwhile.

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picadillette's reviews 183 reviews

picadillette's reviews
183 reviews