The worst... was what the Pakistani soldiers did to the Bengali women after their failed rebellion.
I have to finish this book tour of almost 30 cities.
There isn't much in the way of pure communist spirit, because the whole nation seems to be engaged in capitalistic enterprises. Much of the country still operates under government control.
There is also an epidemic of infertility in this country. There are more women who have put off child-bearing in favor of their professional lives. For them, the only way they are going to have a family is to adopt from China.
It's a wonderful thing to see a segment of our population that is open and eager to learn more about Chinese culture. It has filtered into the mainstream. You see credit-card ads on TV with white couples and Chinese babies.
When you take something extremely broad, then it is not a work of expansion or work of compression. It's hard because you have to decide what to throw out.
There are now hundreds of thousands of new engineers that are being trained in China. If people start finding themselves losing their jobs, not to the Chinese here but because China has become such a dominant force - then there could very well be a backlash.
Often, what you see in the media is driven by economic forces.
It is very difficult to hang onto the relics of history.
There isn't much discussion of ruling class in America even in Boston, probably one of the most class-conscious cities in the country?
Racism is always there underneath, but usually it is exploited in these times of economic crisis, and it's hard to find out when one slides into another.
It was clear that the special interest groups in California really wanted the Chinese to be shut out of the country, because that was where the racial tension was the greatest.
After working as a journalist I went to a writing program at Johns Hopkins. It was interesting because it was neither journalistic nor historical, but it emphasized writing style, and afterwards I was asked to write my first book.
