Literature of the Wounded
on March 5, 1992
In Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic, Bette Bao Lord’s memoir of her three years in Peking as the American ambassador’s wife, she recalled that “all Chinese were in pain, and taking their pulse, reading their temperature, charting every change and finding the cure took all the effort they could muster.” I believe this illness was largely fear, so intense that it frightened some Chinese out of their wits; others simply stopped thinking.