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CBC
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Madeleine Thien's new time-bending novel is haunted by her father's story
Madeleine Thien is one of Canada's most acclaimed storytellers. Her novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing received both the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award in 2016, telling the story of musicians during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Now, she returns with her latest novel, The Book of Records, which continues her exploration of history, memory and the political forces that shape individual lives. "As Madeleine has said herself, she doesn't see history as separate from the present moment," said Mattea Roach in the introduction to their interview on Bookends. "With this story, she questions the very nature of time, asking, 'How do we engage with great thinkers of the past, and what can they teach us about how to live now?'" Set 100 years in the future, The Book of Records follows Lina, a young girl from China, and her ailing father as they seek refuge in a place called "the Sea," where time has collapsed. In this world, voyagers and philosophers from centuries past coexist with migrants from around the globe. Lina grows up with only three books, each chronicling the lives of famous voyagers throughout history. Over time, these figures come to life as her eccentric neighbours, eventually becoming her friends. Thien joined Roach on Bookends to discuss the personal connection she feels to the fantastical world she has created, and what it means to exist in a place that blurs past and present. Mattea Roach: What would it mean for a building to be made of time, as Lina's father explains to her, because it's a very metaphysical concept? Lina's father describes it to her as a piece of string that keeps folding over itself, like a constellation knot. And really, what it is, is a crossroads of history. In some ways, it's the way that we hold history inside ourselves. It's the way that many centuries, many ideas, many philosophers, many words inhabit the space of our bodies. In a way, everyone has a kind of "Sea" within themselves. As a novelist, one tries to imagine what that would be like in a concrete sense. Escaping into literature, reading, writing, storytelling is something that Lina and a number of the other characters we meet in The Book of Records do. I understand that when you were growing up, books were somewhat scarce in your household, but you did have Encyclopedia Britannica at home. Were you an encyclopedia reader as a kid? Is your novel drawn from your own childhood reading? It's drawn from the intense longing to have books, definitely. I was just thinking about that this morning, actually — what was in the house? The Encyclopedia Britannica, condensed books and issues of Reader's Digest. I read everything that was lying around. I think, you know, my parents felt that given limited resources, what books could they put around that could kind of represent [an] abundance of reading material. I went to the library every weekend, and I'd just sit there looking at whatever I could find. The specific three encyclopedias that Lina reads over and over, are about the journeys of three historical figures — the 20th century political philosopher Hannah Arendt, the 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the eighth century Chinese poet Du Fu. Why these three people in particular? In the book itself, the father says it's random. They're the three books he plucked off the shelf in a chaotic moment and threw into a bag and then they had to leave. For me, The Sea housed many different people at many different times. It took me nine years to write the book and people kind of moved in and moved out. But I wanted to be true to a question that had been disturbing me for a long time, which was, 'How had I come to believe the things I believed? What things were so deeply instilled in me that I didn't see them?' So on that level, I stayed with writers and philosophers and poets who had meant a lot to me for decades. Lina's father is a complex man [and] cares a lot for his daughter. You've described your own father as being a complicated man in his own way. Did you find yourself drawing on your relationship with your father at all? Maybe only in the sense that there was an exceptional person in which something was unfulfilled, and a loving person. My father had to grow up in the shadow of a father who was executed during the Second World War — who was forced to collaborate during wartime occupation, and then was killed when the occupation ended by the occupiers, because he just knew too much. The complexity and the tragedy of my father's childhood is probably woven into all my work in some way or another. Those difficult choices and the long shadow of them haunts the work. What was [your father's] life trajectory? He was born in what was British North Borneo, and then became part of Malaysia. He was the youngest child, and eventually he was sent to college in Melbourne, Australia, and there he met my mother, who was born in China and then brought to Hong Kong as a baby, also during the war. They also were refugees. My parents came to Canada in 1974, and I think it was extremely difficult. My mother was pregnant with me, they had two other children. [It's] a story we know — that uprootedness, that profound desire to make a new home, to make a better life for their kids. It's a story that we know well in Canada. I think my father was the most loving man who tried to find a footing in this continuous uprootedness. In the novel, there are these series of books and there's this epigraph that opens all the books. It's Seneca and it says, "I leave you my one greatest possession, which is the pattern of my life." And I do feel that my parents left me this pattern of their lives that I'm kind of in awe of. I feel as a writer, and just as a person, an obligation to this remembrance and love, and maybe to not being silent in the face of things when I feel something should be said. I want to ask about the dedication to The Book of Records because I know it was dedicated to your best friend, Y-Dang Troeung, who passed away in 2022. Can you tell me a bit about her? Y-Dang was an extraordinary person. She was a professor, she taught Canadian literature. She and her family were named as the last refugees when they came to Canada in the early 1980s and were welcomed by Pierre Trudeau as one of the last of the 60,000 refugees to arrive from Southeast Asia. She's definitely one of those people who gives me courage. She was just a light, I wish she was here.
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The Independent
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
In Shanghai Dolls, Madame Mao's life story of art, revolution and resentment is undone by clichés
Set in 1930s Shanghai, in a theatre that doubles as a secret socialist safe house, we meet Jiang Qing – the future wife of Mao Zedong – rehearsing Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House. Here, she meets Sun Weishi, who will go on to become the first female theatre director of China. But for now, they are just two penniless actors standing at the edge of upheaval, both personal and political. Based on the real lives of two women who helped define the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Shanghai Dolls explores the desire and consequences of artistic freedom. 'An obedient revolutionary, the perfect oxymoron' is how Jiang Qing is described. An actor who sees art as the path to selfhood and escape, she desires recognition – a desire so white-hot that it will lead her to become the ornamental, vengeful wife of one of the most tyrannical leaders in history. Sun, meanwhile, is already connected to the political elite. She has access to education, influence, and artistic training, all the things Jiang craves for herself. The play maps how the roles are gradually reversed, the powers shifting between them until one becomes the oppressor, and the other the oppressed. The source material here is undeniably compelling – a cautionary tale of resentment and repression. But this production falters in its execution, opting for a melodramatic, borderline cheesy tone that undercuts its own message. Gabby Wong (Jiang) and Millicent Wong (Sun) deliver highly stylised, sometimes hammy performances, which initially charm with their energy and chemistry. As the political backdrop darkens and the story demands more emotional heft, however, their exaggerated delivery jars. Stark mentions of famine and cannibalism are followed by interpretive dance torture scenes and renditions of Oklahoma! that veer into pantomime. The tonal whiplash leaves little room for emotional impact. Likewise, the play's relentless repetition of its 'women as dolls' metaphor gradually drains it of any power. Despite tonal missteps, there is impressive work behind the scenes. Delivered by an all-female creative team, led by director Kate Posner, the show's design is where the play truly succeeds. Its opening image – a minimalist stage, so thick with smoke that, when lit, it resembles a dusty page turned from a history book – is striking. Visually, the world feels both intimate and unstable. Clever shadow play and news clippings that burn across projected paper keep audiences anchored in the play's timeline, while military soundscapes nod to the building political unrest. The audience never has to question where we are in this story – or how near these characters are to their downfall. Structurally, Amg Ng's play visits these women at key points in their lives as we witness Jiang's transformation into Madame Mao. How she evolves from spunky actor to decorative wife and finally to resentful bulldog, quick to bite those who dare express the artistic freedom she was denied. Rage bleeds through Shanghai Dolls, embodied brilliantly and brutally by both actors. It is too bad that these moments are few and far between, quickly subsumed by the overacting and misplaced humour that defines most of this production. Shanghai Dolls is a play with flashes of brilliance and a solid foundation with its rich historical backdrop, fascinating characters, and urgent themes. If only it could find the nuance and restraint to let that story speak for itself.
Washington Post
08-04-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
MAGA Maoism is spreading through the populist right
Rotimi Adeoye is a political writer and former congressional speechwriter to then-Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Michigan). On 'Liberation Day' this past week, President Donald Trump announced a 10 percent universal tariff on all imported goods and far greater ones on individual countries. His administration framed it as a course correction to make America 'competitive' again. But if you listened closely, especially to his supporters, this wasn't just about trade. It was about work and the kinds of work that still count. Recently, a viral meme in MAGA circles captured the moment, featuring a cartoon Trump addressing a faceless American: 'Your great grandfather worked the mines, your grandfather worked in a steel plant, and you thought you could be a 'product manager' ???' It's a joke, but it's also a worldview — one where white-collar ambition is seen not as a step forward, but as a fall into decadence. The meme doesn't just mock digital work; it exalts physical labor as the only authentic form of contribution. What we're seeing is a kind of MAGA Maoism, remixed for the algorithm age. Like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, it glorifies physical labor as moral purification, only now the purification is from the supposed 'wokeness' of desk work, filtered through TikTok, X and Twitch. It's not about creating jobs. It's about creating vibes: strong men doing hard things, reshared until they become ideology. As one MAGA influencer put it, 'Men in America don't need therapy. Men in America need tariffs and DOGE. The fake email jobs will disappear.' This style, what some might call online pastoralism, is no longer fringe. It is a governing strategy. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently hinted to Tucker Carlson that the administration plans to restock America's factories with recently fired federal workers. It's a sharp evolution of the old MAGA line, which claimed elites abandoned the working class by offshoring jobs and hoarding the degrees that powered the new economy. Now, those same college-educated liberals once seen as the future of work are being recast as its obstacle. This new turn is also punitive: It challenges the idea drilled into millennial and Gen Z brains — especially immigrant families, like my own — that education and meritocracy are the path to the American Dream. It says not only that you were left behind, but that you were wrong to try to get ahead. Populists used to share memes about miners who were condescendingly told to 'learn to code' while their towns struggled. The coders, in this updated version, need to be thrown back in the mines. What makes this iteration feel uniquely American is how aestheticized it has become. Online, there's an industry of memes and male micro-celebrities fetishizing rural life, manual labor, and a kind of fake rugged masculinity that is less about economic reality and more about identity performance. Trump doesn't need to build a single factory for that performance to succeed. He only needs to sell the image of one. There's political danger to this approach. I expect it to land with a thud in places like Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. It's the kind of suburb that didn't promise luxury, but offered enough: tree-lined streets, solid schools, and the belief that hard work and good behavior would lead to a decent life. For the children of immigrants — and for Pennsylvanians whose parents worked with their hands in factories or kitchens or on construction sites — the promise of white-collar stability carried real meaning. We were taught to reach for security, not power: get the degree, land the job, and trade our families' physical strain for something quieter, safer and more lucrative. Now, those aspirations are being rebranded as betrayal. The very things that once defined responsibility and success are recast by the new right as signs of softness and elitism. In communities like mine, where the American Dream was treated with reverence, the ground beneath it is starting to feel less like foundation and more like fiction. The American Dream is not a hammer. It never was. But Trump understands something vital about the moment: People are tired of markets and tired of waiting for politicians to fix the affordability crisis. In many parts of the country — especially in Pennsylvania — communities were hollowed out by deindustrialization, abandoned by a bipartisan consensus that viewed globalization as destiny. Wages stagnated. Towns emptied. The labor that once brought pride became precarious, then obsolete. Voters want to believe in something real — even if it's made of smoke. That is what his tariff strategy offers: not renewal, but revenge. And revenge sells. But nostalgia is not a plan. It's a mirror turned backward. Trump is not bringing back the dignity of work — he's marketing the image of it. His tariffs won't rebuild Bethlehem Steel. They won't revive the coal towns. But they will make life more expensive for working people, while feeding the fantasy that somewhere out there, the old America still waits if you can just hurt the right people to get there.
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Bipartisan contingent of Texas senators advance bill to teach 'horrors of communism'
A bipartisan contingent of Texas senators advanced a measure championed by the father of Texas U.S. Senator Ted Cruz that would require public school teachers to highlight the "horrors of communism" as part of the state's social studies curriculum. Senate Bill 24 by Sen. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels, passed the upper chamber 28-3 on Wednesday, but critics of the legislation said it doesn't go far enough in educating students about other harmful ideologies. The bill would direct the State Board of Education — the 15-member elected body responsible for writing Texas public school curriculum — to mandate teaching on "historical events and atrocities" committed by communist regimes as part of the 12th grade social studies curriculum. It lists the Soviet-era Great Terror, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian genocide under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge and the Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian famine. It also requires students learn about the policies of the Communist Party of Cuba and other movements in Latin America. The bill seeks to help students understand "the oppression and suffering experienced by people living under communist regimes, including mass murder, violent land seizures, show trials, concentration camps, forced labor, poverty, and general economic deterioration." "The best way to protect freedom, members, is to have a good understanding of what threatens it," Campbell said while laying out the bill on the Senate floor. "This is about teaching and preserving the principles of democracy for all Texans." More: Texas state senators seeking to put 'horrors of communism' in public school curriculum Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, D-Austin, ultimately voted against the bill, "not because I'm a communist," but because it wouldn't go far enough in educating against authoritarian regimes, she argued. Eckhardt offered an amendment that would have altered the bill to include teaching about fascism, "which is commonly described as dictatorial power, extreme nationalism, militarism, racism and suppression of political opposition through official means," she said. "I completely agree with how important it is to teach about the historic horrors of communism, but I also believe that it is important to arm our children with an understanding of the modern equivalence and the threats that democracy faces today," Eckhardt said. "Another ideology that threatens our current modern-day democracies is fascism," she said. "Understanding fascism is imperative for understanding communism and how we defend against such extremism that threatens a civil society." Campbell did not approve of Eckhardt's proposal, arguing she'd rather keep the bill narrow for now and potentially add other ideologies later after evaluating the measure's effectiveness. Eckhardt's amendment failed. "I prefer to see what comes out in SBOE and make sure we get the communism down, and then next session, let's work together, and we can put in some fascism," Campbell said. The bill was identified as a top priority by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who presides over the Senate, and received support from conservative evangelical pastor Rafael Cruz, the father of Texas' junior U.S. senator. The elder Cruz fled Cuba to the U.S. during the Fidel Castro regime and recounted his story to the Senate Education Committee earlier this month in support of the bill. He told the committee that Texas kids are being "brainwashed" by teachers and professors with communist ideologies. "Young kids have been brainwashed on the virtues of socialism where 'everybody's equal,'" he said. "That is a lie." Under communism, he said, government elites have power over "the people." "There is equality among the people: they all equally starve," he said. This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Texas Senate advances bill to teach 'horrors of communism'
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion - Chairman Musk and his young acolytes bring a Mao-like cultural revolution to Washington
One detail about Elon Musk's radical assault on the federal government that has struck a chord with many is the age of Musk's associates. Some are in the early 20s. One is 19, and goes by the name 'Big Balls' on Twitter. Others have been reposting content from white nationalists. A 25-year old named Marko Elez apparently went too far by bragging on social media about being a racist who would never marry outside his ethnicity, and was forced to resign. (Vice President JD Vance wants the young man back on the job.) They have been compared to the 'whiz kids' of the Pentagon in the 1960s, the 'best and the brightest' who brought us Vietnam. That's not the right analogy. The whiz kids had degrees from the finest schools, and were mostly in their 30s and 40s. They were only young compared to the gray bureaucrats who typically presided over the Department of Defense. What is happening now is best understood as an outburst of homegrown Maoism in America. The Cultural Revolution, announced by Chairman Mao in 1966, was led by cadres of enraged young people. They marched into universities and government offices and dragged out anyone suspected of bourgeois values or anti-revolutionary sentiments. They didn't care that removing those in charge of large institutions led to great suffering, even to the point of starvation. The chaos was the point. The old guard was so vile, such traitors to Mao and China, that extreme measures needed to be taken. Sound familiar? They used dehumanizing language, exactly like Musk and Trump do when they describe USAID employees as 'radical lunatics' working at a 'criminal organization.' The young people of China's Cultural Revolution had what Musk's shock troops have: the crystalline pure certainty of the young and ignorant. Speaking as someone who was a passionate libertarian at age 20, I'm familiar with the intoxicating power of knowing that you have figured out what so many older people don't get. In my case, it was exactly the same revelation as the Tech Bros shutting down USAID and terrorizing the Treasury: that government was almost entirely incompetent and borderline evil. When you get to the ripe old age of 30 or 35, most of the time you have seen enough of the complexity of the world that you lose that revolutionary fire. You still believe things, but you know the truth is nuanced, and that most humans, institutions and ideologies are an imperfect mix of good and bad. You usually don't have the misplaced confidence to walk into a government office you may not have known existed a week prior, and start rudely interrogating people as old as your parents who have spent their careers working at that agency. You might not endorse plans to fire hundreds of them, furlough the rest and stop all the agency's projects. In the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 18-year olds did all that. They savagely beat their targets until they confessed to imaginary thought crimes. We're not there yet, but the desire to humiliate those older, with their expertise and degrees, is the same. The arrogance of the Tech Bros is the same as the young Maoists of 60 years ago. In the language of Silicon Valley, their youth and inexperience isn't a bug, it's a feature. It makes them more powerful and loyal, not subject to the doubts and constraints that older, more experienced people would be. Those shaking our constitutional order may have never studied James Madison, the Constitution, checks and balances or how our government is supposed to work. So when pundits warn that this could break the system of the Founders, to them, that sounds like success. Like their leader, Musk, they imagine that expertise in one or two areas gives them universal competence in all areas. The young in China leading the violent purges in the 1960s knew they were purer than the people they were persecuting because they had been raised entirely under Communism. They knew Maoist philosophy, like the Tech Bros know coding and venture capital. And they have one more unbeatable Muskian-Trumpian argument against the aged bureaucrats they are abusing: money. If these folks are actually competent, why aren't they rich? The poorest member of Musk's as-yet unvetted and largely unknown team probably made more at SpaceX or Tesla last year than the most senior bureaucrat. There's a word for someone who makes $110,000 a year out in Silicon Valley: loser. As Musk assails our government with a new target seemingly every day, remember that the young cadre around him are not worrying about destroying institutions. No one does in a cultural revolution. Jeremy D. Mayer is an associate professor of policy and government at George Mason University, and coauthor of 'The Changing Political South.' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
