Colors of the Mountain

...Mao, the dictator, was the friend of the devils...

...The editorial echoes the sentiments of many Americans, even beyond partisanship, yet speaks volumes about our resilient, but battered democratic system of government and the primacy of the vote...

...Yet he found himself brought up against a glass ceiling...

...In 1962, the year Da Chen was born, China was just beginning to recover from this catastrophe, and yet only four years later Mao and his colleagues engineered the disaster of the Cultural Revolution...

...Though the Cultural Revolution (its official dates of 1966-76 are as good as any) has obviously not come close to matching the Holocaust in America's collective consciousness, there's a sense in which it plays a similar role: as the Holocaust sometimes seems the defining experience of modern Jewish (or perhaps modern German, or even European) history for many Americans, so the Cultural Revolution has become the defining experience of modern Chinese history...

...Is the goal (agenda) of the church, while showing compassion to gays, to support research to eliminate this objective disorder through means acceptable to the church, for example, genetic surgery in utero with no adverse side effects...

...It is a courageous choice in which he sets himself two tasks...

...Such a thought sends tremors of fear and distrust into the minds and hearts of the gay community, who are already fighting an uphill battle for their legitimate place at the Lord's table...

...26 (Continued from page 4) it is a virtual certainty that, given the rapid advances in these fields, we will know with a high level of confidence its causes within the next several decades...

...they accepted Chen for what he was, inaugurating him into their fellowship in a way that comes right out of The Outlaws of the Marsh, one of the classic Chinese novels of outsiders banding together in a righteous cause against oppression...

...But I also agree with those who said Gore should have asked for the statewide recount first thing, so it wouldn't look like he hand-picked the counties where he expected the most support...

...Liang Heng's Son of the Revolution, Yue Daiyun's To the Storm, Nien Cheng's Shanghai Diary, and Jung Chang's Wild Swans are a few of the better-known ones...

...The famine was directly attributable to Mao's policies and probably cost somewhere around 30 million lives—a figure staggering even by the standards of other great twentieth-century atrocities...

...The same dust jacket has inscribed upon it the Chinese character zao, which means to make, to manufacture, to fabricate, but seems to bear no relationship to anything in the book—a reminder, perhaps, that the memoir is itself a kind of construction, fraught with problems for readers, no less than writers...

...Not only must he make yesterday's idiom into a language that makes sense to the present, he must also create a cultural and linguistic translation in which the Chinese idiom makes sense to his foreign audience in America...

...As readers, not only must we beware the elements of self-justification (among others) that may intrude (think of the memoirs of statesmen, generals, celebrities), we must also be aware of the chronological and cultural distance that often separates the writers of memoirs from the subjects whose lives they narrate...

...for they are no longer the younger men and women they seek to bring alive on their pages...

...Perhaps that's because the Cultural Revolution, like the Holocaust, has clear heroes, villains, and victims...

...Though today a New Yorker, Chen writes primarily in the voice of a boy growing up in a southern Chinese village some thirty or forty years ago...

...Yet in ways the real Chinese analogy to the Holocaust may not be so much the Cultural Revolution as the terrible famine that preceded it by a few years...

...The result is a lively writing style and, with it, an appreciation of the gutsiness of Chen and some of his friends...

...From his alienated peers Chen found the support denied him by the official exemplars of Mao's society...

...I will keep a copy of your editorial with my Boston Globe from the day after the election as a reminder of the preciousness of my vote and everyone else's...

...Though from the dust jacket we learn that, after his studies in Beijing, he went 25 on to law school at Columbia University in New York, Chen gives us only recollections of his boyhood in south China...

...They must thus choose between two possible voices: the first using the language and perceptions that come out of the past, thinking themselves back into their youth...

...Bullied by those who resented the former privileges of his family or who found him an easy target in an age when denunciation was encouraged, Chen fell in with an older gang of boys who had not only dropped out of school but were thoroughly alienated from society as a whole...

...Until such time as the church can move toward a more neutral stance on the interpretation of the orientation itself—at root, a difficult, but serious theological and philosophical question—most dialogue between the gay community and the church will remain one of defensive posturing ROBERT J. COMISKEY Springfield, Va The editors comment: We doubt that the official church is supporting research to eliminate gays through genetic surgery, or otherwise...

...Chen found himself back in school, reflecting on the irony of sitting under a slogan from the chairman, of all people, urging intellectual excellence...

...the second—like Henry Adams and Vladimir Nabokov, to name two of our greatest memoirists—presenting their former personas as almost fictionalized characters whom they now understand far better than they did when they were living through the experiences they describe...

...Yet they are portrayed here as a sympathetic lot...

...Cheered on by the gang members, Da Chen buckled down to work, and the book ends as he and his elder brother win places in universities at a time when doing so was "as rare as hitting all six numbers in the lottery...

...Voting rights Your stand against the bombastic activities of the Bush campaign was courageous, ("Votes Count," December 15, 2000...

...If Mao had known what his Little Red Guards were doing, he would have howled like a lonely wolf in his icy coffin and cried his smoke-ridden lungs out...

...After the Great Helmsman's death in 1976, the educational system which Mao had done so much to destroy began to pull itself together again...

...DIANE LAVOS Natick, Mass...

...not only was he mistreated in school, but he was also not permitted to continue his education beyond a certain point...

...Chen is younger than the other memoirists cited above, and though his family went through difficult times because of its "bad class background" (his father had been a landlord), the author thus did not have the same kind of experience in, say, the Red Guards that others have written about...

...He wanted China in perpetual turmoil so that he could rule forever...

...Though I do not find the style always convincing, that may simply be a matter of personal taste...