Wow. I wasn't all that far into The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices when I started thinking that: "Wow." The author of the book, Xinran, hosted a Chinese radio program, "Words on the Night Wind," for several years, focusing on what it was like to be a woman in China. Life is likely difficult enough for any journalist in China, with the extreme care necessary not to cross Chinese Communist Party doctrime; Xinran says it is one of the professions with the lowest life expectancy in China up there with police officer and chemical engineer. But despite being hemmed around by rules, she was able to collect amazing stories of women in situations no one else wanted to talk about. Women watching their children die in buildings collapsed in an earthquake. Women who scavenge junk and live in shanties constructed of these found materials. Lesbians in a country where homosexuality is "a forbidden subject under media regulations." Women driven to madness by interrogations and mistreatment based on who their parents or grandparents were, and women who survived similar mistreatment with no external change. Parents separated from children and lovers from one another because of Communist Party decrees. University students and fashionable businesswomen who live near-Westernized lives but still deal with men who apply old-fashioned standards in sizing up a woman. Arranged marriages, child sexual abuse, religion, poverty -- it's astounding how many issues are touched on in fifteen chapters, each telling one woman's story except for the final one which focuses on women's conditions in the tiny rural village of Shouting Hill, where people live in caves in the side of the hill and women use (and re-use) leaves for sanitary napkins.

Xinran moved to England in 1997 with "the idea that I might find a way of describing the lives of Chinese women to people in the West." She and translator Esther Tyldesley have done an impressive job of that, showing both the samenesses and differences, and I think as many people as possible should hear these stories.

I was a little concerned about whether my stomach could take reading Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. In fact, I probably wouldn't have checked it out on my own, despite my general love of detailed histories of things you don't normally think about. It was my boyfriend who borrowed it from the library (once the waiting list got down to him) and read aloud a few amusing bits (particularly the footnotes -- we both love authors who go off on tangents in footnotes). So once he'd finished the whole book, I picked it up, and found that it was a fascinating, fairly easy read, with only a few slightly stomach-turning passages. (Though I did abandon it temporarily when it was time to have lunch, preferring The Life and Death of Peter Sellers by Roger Lewis as companionship for my meal.) As a devoted reader of social histories of locations and medical fields, much of the historical material in Stiff was somewhat familiar; it was the current information on the many research and teaching, as well as life-saving, uses for donated bodies and the increasing number of modern ways to return the elements of a body to the environment that were new to me -- and quite interesting. I never much liked the idea of burial anyway. And the book does contain very funny remarks that somehow never seem disrespectful to the dead whose bodies are being made use of by the living. You might want to take breaks between chapters to avoid becoming a little overwhelmed, but it is definitely a book worth reading.

Scary Things About Human Nature and Views On Gender

Well, I've been scanning the the Social Sciences shelves of the library again (the Dewey 300s) and picked up a couple of not-particularly related books that all made me think "People are messed up." Now those are just about the only things these books have in common: that they make you see the worst of everday humanity.

The first book was Trisha Meili's I Am The Central Park Jogger: A Story of Hope and Possibility. I was 16 in 1989 when the story of the Central Park Jogger was splashed all over the news: a twenty-eight-year-old woman jogging after dark in the famous New York park was beaten, raped, and left for dead. She was found with a body temperature of 85 degrees and blood pressure so low the hospital people couldn't get a reading for it; this may be what made her stand out from the other twenty-eight other rapes reported in the same city that week. She was not named in most of the reporting on her case because of most media outlets' policies -- women who have been raped are not named to avoid contributing to the "stigma" traditionally associated with being raped. (Frankly, I think anyone who would look down on a rape victim needs help themselves, and perhaps having real names to associate with people who have been raped would make it seem more like human beings being hurt than stereotypes identified only as "jogger" or some other single characteristic.) The book is interesting because Meili does not remember the events of that evening; such traumatic amnesia is common after such extreme violence and physical brain trauma. She talks about her everyday life before April 1989, when she was an investment banker, an anorexic (though to a milder degree than one normally hears about, never needing hospitalization for her self-starvation), and a dedicated runner -- and then about coming out of a coma in a hospital to relearn the use of her body. The medical care needed to bring down her swollen brain to its normal size, to fix one eye back into its proper place, and much more, before Meili had any likelihood of coming back to normality, and after she regained consciousness, there were months of therapy before she could walk, button her shirt, or remember what was on the previous page of a book after turning to the next. Some damage was permanent, such as her loss of the sense of smell. But Meili continued to push on, relearning or rediscovering as much as possible and eventually returning to a near-normal life (and indeed, better than before the attack in one way -- the urge to starve herself was gone). She testified at the trials of the five accused attackers, a group of minority teenagers who were said to have just gone out to have some fun "wilding" -- but with no memory of the evening of the attack, her testimony was largely about the extent of her injuries and the amount of work needed to recover, plus a few details to knock down a wild theory that her then-boyfriend had been the attacker. (In 2002, Matias Reyes, a man serving 33 years to life for murder and other rapes, made a confession that he was the only attacker, and the other convictions were vacated. If true, and there's no way to prove that it is or isn't, this changes the disgusting creepiness of a group of guys going out to attack a woman for fun into the differently disgusting sickness of a single man who would do attack many women. I don't know if one is any better than the other really, but it's a little less disturbing to think that a few messed-up perpetrators exist than that there are enough of them in any location to band together.)

But at least in Meili's case, there was a huge outpouring of support from strangers near and far, definitely enough to counteract the very small number who felt that the issue of a white woman being attacked by black or Hispanic men was a witch-hunt of minorities, and called her a slut or said she must have been in the park to meet a drug dealer. She talks a great deal about everyone from the nurse who cared for her daily to one man out of the many who wrote to her and how all these people's support and prayer helped in recovery and adjustment. And she was eventually able to pass on that support to people in need of physical rehabilitation after injury or emotional support after rapes by working with various organizations -- and by publishing this book to show what kind of recovery is possible.

In Gender Shock: Exploding the Myths of Male and Female by Phyllis Burke, the stories are of children without support, children whose families send them to therapy and sometimes to mental institutions for being too much like the opposite sex is supposed to be. A boy who doesn't like sports? He could have coordination problems that make him bad at sports -- but no, he must want to be a girl. He'll grow up gay if we don't do something! A girl who doesn't want to wear dresses! She needs to be fixed! OK, I identify with this a bit because I was not a girly-girl; I was a bookworm rather than a tomboy, so I guess I lucked into a stereotype that isn't associated with a particular gender, but I climbed trees to have a place to read and dresses certainly would have been a handicap. Not all of these cases were back in the 1950s , either; some of the attempts chronicled here to fix children who weren't broken took place in the late 1970s and '80s, right when I was growing up. The idea that a tomboy might be "at risk for transsexualism, adult homosexuality, neuroticism, personality disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, an unstable work record, depression, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts and schizophrenia" seems particularly ridiculous when you read Sharon Lamb's The Secret Lives of Girls: What Good Girls Really Do -- Sex Play, Agression, and Their Guilt and find that "almost half of adult women remember themselves as tomboys." Society is even harsher on boys who might come across as "girly," and yet we wonder why so many of them turn to violence, still seen as a manly pursuit. The truth is that on any scale of supposedly masculine versus supposedly feminine characteristics, the sexes overlap a great deal, and some of the distinctions listed on some checklists seem pretty random.

"If the distance between the buttocks and the back of the chair was four inches or more, 'away from the back of the chair' (keyed as masculine) was scored. Otherwise, 'close to the back of the chair' (keyed as feminine) was scored."
-- Dr. David Barlow, Barlow Gender-Specific Motor Behavior Form

For that matter, what's the big deal if a few of these kids do grow up to be gay? Homosexuality is no longer in the psychologist's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Very few gay people are transsexual (meaning that they actually want to have the body of the opposite sex from what they were born into). But many of those diagnosed with "Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood" are neither gay nor transsexual as adults, and they are often given that diagnosis as children not because they say they want to have the body of the opposite gender but because someone else thinks they don't act the right way. Truly scary to know this happens anywhere, but particularly in the Land of the Free. Other stories in the book, such as the surgeries performed on children with intersexed genitals, are equally disturbing, but there are a few things discussed that allow (at least for adults) some freedom from gender roles defined by stone walls with a no-man's-(or woman's) land in between; I hope that someday more children will have an easier time if they want to inhabit the zone in the middle.

Colette Dowling's The Frailty Myth: Redefining the Physical Potential of Women and Girls is much more optimistic than Gender Shock; the completely ridiculous ideas are largely from the past (the Victorian idea that a girl should not attend a school taller than two stories as she would not be able to manage the stairs during her period, for example). However, this examination of the reality of women's bodies and the capabilities they share with men's bodies (just about all capabilities, really) does point out how many beliefs are still current about female frailty, even after such advances as the Title IX amendment to the Civil Rights Act. This landmark said that no organization receiving Federal financial assistance can discriminate on the basis of sex, and it has led to great changes -- particularly in education, including physical education. Women's athletics are supposed to be funded equally with men's at American public schools, colleges, and universities. (They aren't yet, but there has been great improvement since 1972 when Title IX became law.) And coming back to the beginning of this review, Dowling discusses how the myth of women's physical frailty supports their fear of rape and assault, the tendency to hold oneself back rather than go into a risky situation, and even condemn others for taking those risks, as some people did in the case of Trisha Meili jogging at night in Central Park.

The thing is, women shouldn't have to fear. It is not right that anyone thinks that it's OK to commit rape, and one of the things that creates rapists is the fixed gender role idea that men are violent. It is not right that women don't think they could escape or fight back, and I hope that the idea that women are the weaker sex is dying. Women are just as capable of toughness as men; men are just as capable of tenderness as women. All it takes in either case is permission and practice, and these books give examples of the good that happens when people have the opportunity to be both sides of themselves as well as the bad that happens when one side is choked off.

I finally got around to reading David Brin's 1985 novel The Postman. It won the Locus & John W. Campbell Awards and was a nominee for both a Hugo & Nebula award, and Kevin Costner thought highly enough of it to make a movie out of it. However, I wasn't much impressed (with the book -- I've never seen the movie). For one thing, this nearly-20-year-old book has not aged well. Some SF stories do and some don't. It's odd, really, how some science ficiton that was clearly written several decades ago, because of the technology uses, assumptions made about people, and overall atmosphere, can still feel like a realistic possibility (even if its existance would require an alternate universe). But some other SF of comparatively recent authorship can seem so outdated, and this is an example. The Postman does so first by referring to things that happened in the 1990s -- quite futuristic when it was written but so very quick to pass. And though the real 1990s did see survivalists hiding out in the woods, they also brought so much new computer technology that the book's idea of a lone room-size supercomputer, or the astoundingly simple video games, both seem at least an extra decade out of date.

And, frankly, the book struck me as a bit sexist. This is odd considering that a) I rarely consider books widely derided as sexist, such as Robert Heinlein's later works, to be sexist, and b) one of the Amazon reviews of The Postman seems to feel that the portrayal of women in the book is meant to appeal to feminists: "Brin's version of feminism seems designed to win bonus points with female fans, but its heavy-handedness and condescension are no less alienating than outright sexism." To me, though, so much in the book's plot hinges on the plans and actions of women, but all female characters are so briefly introduced and then fade offstage, their accomplishments heard of only second-hand. Not that protagonist Gordon, the man who falls into being a U.S. mail delivery man when the U.S. is 16 years collapsed, isn't important, but he's only half the story.

As I said, I haven't seen the movie Costner directed and starred in, but I really can't see the story from the book working as a film for a a related reason -- there's just so much happening "off-screen" and spread out across an entire state worth of land. What reviews I've read of the film indicate that its plot is somewhat rewritten, but perhaps that problem was part of the film's failure at the box office.

Science fiction? Detective novel? Metaphysical musings? David Brin's Kiln People covers a lot of bases, but does them all well. It certainly is a detective novel, but this private eye, Albert Morris, lives in a world where anyone can take mannequins made of a certain type of clay and with the right machinery, animate them to act as living beings with some or all of the psyche of the human who animated them. This is an obvious convenience for a detective, as he can make a gray "ditto" to go meet with clients, a green one to take care of the housekeeping, and an ebony one with a special talent for online research, while his organic body catches up on sleep. But the availability of dittos has shaped society in many other ways, from entertainment (thrill seekers can do all kinds of things via a ditto and then "inload" its memories back into their own minds) to transportation (dittos don't have to be made in human shape; life-size dinosaur bodies are imprinted with human minds and used as buses and trucks). But dittos run out of energy and die in about a day, and a ditto can only be animated if a person is physically present to impress a mind onto it -- ditto-to-ditto copies generally don't work out well.

In this fascinating settting, Albert Morris and several of his dittos (all of whom narrate at one point or another) deal with the ongoing hunt for Beta, a criminal who makes illegal dittos of people (the results of making a ditto from a ditto are good enough to be animated sex-toys and such), and also a new case of a missing researcher for the main manufacturer of ditto bodies. Multiple narrators in a story often become a bit confusing for the reader (from Robert Heinlein's The Number of the Beast to Toni Morrison's Beloved) but in this novel the technique yields complete clarity, whether it's because each chapter starts with a sentence or two stating who is speaking, or because in a way, it's always Albert talking, even when there are three or four Alberts who have lived completely different experiences during the last day.

Particularly interesting is the green ditto who "goes Frankenstein" -- abandons the chores he was created to do and goes off on his own. His story brings up the question of whether he is less or more like the original Albert than those dittos who quietly go about their assigned tasks. Other people's dittos also go Frankenstein, and the reader sees the many ways a psyche can seem to act against itself, but in their case it's only from an outside view. "Frankie" carries the burden of showing these variations to the reader from inside and he accomplishes that while leading into the climax of the book, which is both a solution to both mysteries and a further example of what the latest ditto research might say about the human mind and soul. The setting is fiction, but while reading you never think that the persons aren't completely real.

I am a feminist agnostic only child of divorced parents who grew up in the '80s -- you might not think I'd have much in common with a patriarchal Mormon-offshoot polygamous family of the '40s and '50s. But when I read Dorothy Allred Solomon's Predators, Prey, and Other Kinfolk: Growing Up In Polygamy, I found some unexpected similarities.

I believe in polyamory, myself, so my main objections to the groups who splintered off the LDS church so they could continue to practice polygamy is that only men are allowed to have multiple spouses (and women are supposed to marry for the purpose of being mothers) and that they seem to require plural marriage, instead of just allowing it as a choice. The author grew up in a family of one husband and seven wives, but herself chose a monogamous marriage despite opposition from some of her extended family members. She says that in her earlier biographical writings, she wrote that "persecution came from outsiders, not from members of the family. But now I had discovered another story to tell." Nonetheless, the lives of Rulon Allred and his many wives and children did seem as if they could have been nearly idyllic if it weren't for the outside world's hostility. (This, of course, is ignoring the first, sole wife who left Allred when he announced his new belief in plural marriage, and considering only those women who married him knowing what they were getting into.) Allred spent six months in prison of a five-year sentence for polygamy before Dorothy's birth, and both before and after that, Rulon and his wives fled to Mexico or scattered across several states when "polygamous roundups" threatened. While the father hid out from the authorities, he could not work, and his families scraped by in extreme poverty. Having to keep the structure of the family a secret meant no birth certificates for most of the children, no insurance or hospital visits for routine health care, and an atmosphere of secrecy that made real wrongs difficult to divulge. For example, in the household of one wife who was on her own with her children during the scattered years, there was a son who sexually abused his younger sister. Might it have been more likely that this sister could have told someone who could have stopped the abuse if they had been with the rest of their family, or at least if secrecy about things happening at home had not been so deeply ingrained into the kids? (Indeed, would the abuse have happened at all if that wife and children hadn't been packed off to an isolated house seventy miles from their nearest family member? One can never tell what makes a person develop into an abuser.)

But during these scattered years, the children's experiences seem to have been very much like mine, growing up with first separated, then divorced parents. Dorothy's feelings now about telling the family's bad times as well as good -- "silence is the death within death that none of us deserves" -- echoes my own feelings in speaking out about having been sexually abused.

Given some of the tragic things that happend either due from monogamists tearing themselves out of the family , or because of Dorothy's family's acquaintance with people whose polygamy was the least of their religious oddities, the author would probably have trouble seeing how I could see positives in the polygamy shown here. Indeed, things might not have worked even this well for some people in this situation. But it seems to me that the loving extended family whose bonds survived all the events they went through is an example of how responsible non-monogamy really does work for those who truly believe in it.

A land of people living where their ancestors had been for thousands of years, until foreign conquerors moved in and, with the implied permission of other foreign powers, take over. There are many places to which this description might apply, but to most of the Western world, Israel is far from the first location that comes to mind. Ghada Karmi's In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story could change that for its readers, for the Palestinians certainly feel their land has been taken over by foreign conquerors. This is an autobiography by a woman born in what was then Palestine. Her early childhood took place in Jerusalem in the 1940s when the area was ruled by British mandate after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. At this time the fighting that was going on was essentially recently-arrived Jewish people versus British government, with the Arabs regarding both as foreigners.

But then came a big change. "The UN had decided to accord the proposed Jewish state 55 per cent of the land and the Arab one the remaining 45 per cent, though Jews made up only one third of the population," Karmi explains. Or as her father put it, "How could anyone imagine that they would want to give half our country to immigrants?" Is it any wonder Palestinian Arabs fought for their homeland and continue to do so fifty-five years later? After all, in what is now the United States, the Native Americans reacted exactly the same way to the colonist and pioneers who came to take over their homelands, once they realized where things were going. Karmi points out that Christians, at least in the British Isles where her family fled in 1949, tended to be steeped in the Old Testament enough to also see Palestine/Israel as the land of the Jews. This view combined with horror at the Holocaust to make the creation of a state for Jewish people in their ancient place of origin seem fair. However, just because Jewish people had been treated abominably and unforgivably does not mean that there was any reason that Palestinian Arabs should be mistreated either. The Karmi family's story gives a view less often shown in the U.S.

Karmi's years in England are also interesting to read about -- when is she "a dark-skinned English girl," having lived there since the age of eight, and when is she a Palestinian in a world that views Arabs as incomprehensible and just other? Her parents and particularly her mother always seem to have considered themselves Palestinian foremost, creating a circle of friends of the same origin, and in her mother's case, refusing to learn English. Things were very different for the children, a situation familiar to any reader of American immigrant stories but complicated by the fact that the parents did not really want to leave their home country, and also by the relatively few immigrants to England in the 1950s and 1960s.

However, events such as the Six-Day War of 1967 and the generally pro-Israeli feeling in Britain led Karmi to embrace her heritage. I dare say any Palestinian hearing Golda Meir of Israel say in 1969, "It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist," would have felt the same way. Even the United States did not come up with such ridiculous statements about the existence of Indians being displaced.

Karmi seems to have mixed feelings about the use of violence by Palestinians for political aims: "The hijackings were indefensible; yet watching events in Jordan, I and many other Palestinians could not help but feel impressed." However, her frustration with Westerners who blame her personally for all violence by Palestinians is evident. She nonetheless manages not to stereotype all her opponents, keeping separate in her mind those who have wronged Palestinians and those who have not, and even mentions the small groups of Jewish people who have supported her views and pro-Palestinian activism.

The book ends with Karmi's visit to Israel, a place she has previously avoided since her childhood flight. Her description of the separate lives of most Arabs and Jews in the country now as essentially "apartheid" was shocking, but really hit home, given my upbringing in the U.S. in the 1980s where South African apartheid was universally considered wrong (the controversy was between people who believed it was America's business to work against it and those who felt we shouldn't police the rest of the world's internal affairs).

I don't approve of violence on anyone's part; an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. But after this book, I feel I understand more deeply the source of the violence over Israel. Most of all, I pity the nearly hopeless task of those actively working for peace there. However, I also admire them sincerely for taking on so thankless and difficult, yet needed, of a project.