CHINA

READ

There were so many books I could have chosen for China, and making a decision about which one to read was difficult. In the end, I picked Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress because I loved the book’s cover and its title.

The narrator is a seventeen-year-old boy, whose name we are never told, who has been sent out of the city of Chengdu with his eighteen-year-old friend Luo for “re-education.” According to the narrator, this was a campaign begun in 1968 by Chairman Mao in which the “universities were closed and all the ‘young intellectuals,’ meaning boys and girls who had graduated from high school, were sent to the countryside to be ‘re-educated by the poor peasants.’” Neither the narrator nor Luo are high school graduates, since they had missed out on a few years of school while the Cultural Revolution was in full swing. However, their parents are among the intellectual elite and have been labeled enemies of the people, so the boys will be going through the “re-education” process for an indefinite period of time.

In between carrying manure to the fields and laboring in the copper mines, the boys’ talent for storytelling becomes known to the village headman, and he begins sending them to a nearby town to watch movies so they can come back and retell the stories to the villagers. They travel to a few small villages, meeting people along the way who will become important to them – Four-Eyes, who has a secret stash of forbidden western literature, the tailor, who travels from village to village to make new clothes for people, and most important of all, the tailor’s daughter, the Little Seamstress.

The Little Seamstress is beautiful, resourceful, and beloved by her father and every young man who crosses her path. The narrator and Luo fall completely under her spell and begin spending more and more time with her, telling her the stories they’ve read in Four-Eyes’ hidden volumes. Beginning with the works of French author Honoré de Balzac, and moving on to Dumas, Flaubert, Hugo, and others, the three young people discover a world previously unknown to them. The Little Seamstress, who has had no education, is not merely enthralled by these stories, she is empowered.

This charming little book serves as a reminder of the power of books to take us outside the drudgery of our daily lives, filling our imaginations with dreams that no longer seem impossible.

COOK

I had no problem finding a vegan Chinese recipe on the Internet. In fact, there are dozens. I chose a vegan version of the popular General Tso’s, which is usually made with chicken. The recipe I found on ohmyveggies.com is for General Tso’s (Not) Chicken Bowls. I’m not a big fan of seitan, so I substituted tofu, and I left off the green onions. It was so good that I expect to make it again one of these days.

GIVE

GlobalGiving.org listed many projects in China, including several providing education to children living in rural areas. Seeing how hungry the Little Seamstress was for education, I wanted to do my part to help give other young people opportunities to learn. According to the Overseas China Education Foundation (OCEF), millions of underprivileged children in rural areas drop out of elementary school, and millions more can’t afford to continue on to secondary school. OCEF is seeking to remedy this problem by offering “1) a financial aid program to help kids in elementary and secondary schools, 2) a scholarship program to support high school students and college freshmen, 3) a library program to ensure rural kids have books to read, and 4) a special quality-of-life enhancement program.” It is hoped that this will help to close the urban-rural educational divide in China.

More information about this program is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/ocef-edu-equity/.

NEXT STOP: COLOMBIA

CHILE

READ

I got about four-fifths of the way through the book I’d decided to read for Chile, Isabel Allende’s epic The House of the Spirits, before it occurred to me to take a look at Allende’s biography. Alas, Allende wasn’t born in Chile, but in Peru. Since my self-imposed rules for this project require that the author have been born in the country I’m reading, the book I’d chosen for Chile was suddenly disqualified.

That’s okay, though. I’m thrilled to have read Allende’s magnificent saga about the Trueba family, but I’m also happy to have discovered the book I ended up reading for Chile – Marcela Serrano’s Ten Women.

Nine women arrive by minivan at a meeting center in the suburbs of Santiago, Chile. Watching them as they walk up the path toward the building is their therapist, Natasha, who has decided to bring them all together for the day. The women gather in a room, but Natasha does not join them. Somehow, they know that they are there to share their stories, and in the next nine chapters, each woman talks about her life and the reasons for her sessions with Natasha.

Lost youth, alcoholism, rape, memories of being molested as a child, and dealing with a family member who suffers from depression are some of the reasons why her patients have sought out Natasha. The women come from a variety of different socioeconomic backgrounds because, as one woman says, “I’m here because half of us pay for Natasha’s services while the other half doesn’t. That’s the way she views her profession: the wealthiest pay for the poorest.”

For me, the most poignant story was from Luisa, one of the women whose treatment is subsidized. She is 67 years old, but still trying to come to terms with the disappearance of her husband at the hands of government forces following the military coup in the 1970s. She has stayed in the same place all these years in case he comes back. Luisa tells the other women: “You know the worst thing that can happen to a human being? To disappear. Dying is much better than disappearing.”

At the end of the book, we also learn Natasha’s story, and then the women return to their lives. Ten Women is not so much a novel as it is a collection of character studies held together by the slimmest of plots. Still, I loved getting to know all these women, and I hope other books by this author will be translated into English in the future.

COOK

If you’ve ever looked at labels in the produce department in your local grocery store, you probably already know that Chile has a very robust agricultural industry, and both The House of the Spirits and Ten Women are full of references to the fresh fruits and vegetables grown there – pears, oranges, apples, corn, peaches, and artichokes, to name a few. There aren’t too many mentions of actual Chilean dishes though, so I turned to the Internet once again. When I found this recipe at thespruce.com for pumpkin sopapillas, I knew I wasn’t going to look any further. This is the pumpkin spice time of year, after all! I cheated a little, using canned pumpkin instead of dealing with a fresh one, and I substituted Earth Balance spread for the butter. I consider deep-fat frying to be a total pain in the neck, but it was completely worth it for these amazing goodies. The brown sugar syrup was the perfect accompaniment.

GIVE

GlobalGiving.com is my go-to platform for making donations for this blog, and they had a few projects in Chile listed on their website. After reading about all the problems facing Natasha’s patients in Ten Women, I really wanted to donate to an organization providing services to Chilean women, but none of the GlobalGiving projects pertained to women. So I did the next best thing and chose a project organized by VE Global that helps at-risk children in Santiago. According to the project description, “Chile has one of the strongest economies in Latin America, yet it suffers from a drastic income inequality. This results in vital services for children being vastly unequal; the most at-risk children often served by underfunded and understaffed organizations with little hope of changing their situation.”

VE Global is helping to address this inequity by recruiting and training international volunteers to provide extra support to staff in children’s homes, community centers, and schools. They serve as positive role models for the children and implement our VE Global’s educational programs.

More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/ve-global-unite-act-engage-2010-for-chile-kids/.

NEXT STOP: CHINA

CHAD

READ

When I started this project, I wasn’t aware that there was a novel available in English written by an author from Chad. The only option I had heard of was a short memoir called Told by Starlight in Chad, by Joseph Brahim Seid. To the extent possible, though, I’m trying to read fiction from each country, so I was happy when two other women who are doing a global reading blog of their own came across a novel, The Plagues of Friendship, by Chadian author Sem Miantoloum Beasnael.

This book is written in the form of a journal kept by the protagonist, Njeleulem, a college-educated man who has worked in leadership positions in a couple of different organizations in both Chad and Ghana. He has come a long way in his professional life and he has a happy home life, with a loving wife and children. Unfortunately, since childhood, he has been bedeviled by his interactions with his friend Ngarbel, whose motives and loyalties are always suspect. The plot centers around Njeleulem’s increasing unhappiness with his treatment by Ngarbel.

I enjoyed reading about the customs of Chad, as well as the issues facing the African continent during the timeframe in which the book was set. At one point, Njeleulem works in Ghana for the fictional Organization for the Promotion of African Language and Culture (OPALC), which has been created in response to the Pan-African movement that came about after colonialism ended. He and Ngarbel discuss the vacuum that was created when the colonists left, and there are numerous references to Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister after the country gained its independence, who was a strong advocate for African unity. It appears that this was an exciting time for many newly-liberated African countries.

While the book’s plot was not particularly engaging, and the protagonist seemed almost absurdly overwrought about his problems with Ngarbel, it was interesting to read about Njeleulem’s travels in central and western Africa and to listen in on conversations he had with friends about various social and cultural topics. The Plagues of Friendship helped me develop a better understanding of a country about which I’d known very little before.

COOK

The most prominent food item mentioned in The Plagues of Friendship is the pangasso, a kind of donut made from millet. Early in the book, Ngarbel saves a fellow student who is choking from having crammed too many millet donuts in his mouth in order to not have to share them with his classmates. I looked for a good pangasso recipe, but couldn’t find one. Instead, I searched the Internet for vegetarian recipes from Chad and found several. Predictably, I chose one of the easier dishes, courgette with peanuts. “Courgette” is another word for zucchini, and this dish is basically just boiled zucchini mashed with margarine and topped with peanuts, which seem to be ubiquitous in central African cuisine. It turned out to be a tasty and unique side dish. The recipe came from the InternationalCuisine.com website.

GIVE

The GlobalGiving.com website lists four projects in Chad. Three of the projects assist refugees from Darfur who have had to flee their native Sudan. I wanted a project to help the people of Chad themselves, so I chose the fourth project, which offers life skills and peer education to Chadian youth. The project is administered by the International Blue Cross and seeks to give vulnerable youth “the skills and knowledge to make informed decisions about alcohol and drugs and associated risks, including the transmission of HIV/AIDs.” The hope is that [t]eaching the ability to make informed decisions empowers youth to be strong leaders and role models within their community.” More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/life-skills-peer-education-africa/.

NEXT STOP: CHILE