Zambia, 1997
Thank you for downloading this Scribner eBook.
Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Scribner and Simon & Schuster.
or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com
Contents
Epigraph
Dispatches from Everywhere
USSR The Winter Palettes
USSR Three Days in August
RUSSIA Young Russia’s Defiant Decadence
CHINA Their Irony, Humor (and Art) Can Save China
SOUTH AFRICA The Artists of South Africa: Separate, and Equal
USA Vlady’s Conquests
TAIWAN “Don’t Mess with Our Cultural Patrimony!”
TAIWAN On Each Palette, a Choice of Political Colors
TURKEY Sailing to Byzantium
ZAMBIA Enchanting Zambia
CAMBODIA Phaly Nuon’s Three Steps
MONGOLIA The Open Spaces of Mongolia
GREENLAND Inventing the Conversation
SENEGAL Naked, Covered in Ram’s Blood, Drinking a Coke, and Feeling Pretty Good
AFGHANISTAN An Awakening after the Taliban
JAPAN Museum without Walls
SOLOMON ISLANDS Song of Solomons
RWANDA Children of Bad Memories
LIBYA Circle of Fire: Letter from Libya
CHINA All the Food in China
CHINA Outward Opulence for Inner Peace: The Qianlong Garden of Retirement
ANTARCTICA Adventures in Antarctica
INDONESIA When Everyone Signs
BRAZIL Rio, City of Hope
GHANA In Bed with the President of Ghana?
ROMANIA Gay, Jewish, Mentally Ill, and a Sponsor of Gypsies in Romania
MYANMAR Myanmar’s Moment
AUSTRALIA Lost at the Surface
Acknowledgments
About Andrew Solomon
Notes
Bibliography
Index
for Oliver, Lucy, Blaine, and George, who have given me a reason to stay home
Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
. . .
Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?
—Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel”
Dispatches from Everywhere
When I was about seven, my father told me about the Holocaust. We were in the yellow Buick on New York State route 9A, and I had been asking him whether Pleasantville was actually pleasant. I cannot remember why the Nazis came up a mile or two later, but I do remember that he thought I already knew about the Final Solution, and so didn’t have any rehearsed way to present the camps. He said that this had happened to people because they were Jewish. I knew that we were Jewish, and I gathered that if we’d been there at the time, it would have happened to us, too. I insisted that my father explain it at least four times, because I kept thinking I must be missing some piece of the story that would make it make sense. He finally told me, with an emphasis that nearly ended the conversation, that it was “pure evil.” But I had one more question: “Why didn’t those Jews just leave when things got bad?”
“They had nowhere to go,” he said.
At that instant, I decided that I would always have somewhere to go. I would not be helpless, dependent, or credulous; I would never suppose that just because things had always been fine, they would continue to be fine. My notion of absolute safety at home crumbled then and there. I would leave before the walls closed around the ghetto, before the train tracks were completed, before the borders were sealed. If genocide ever threatened midtown Manhattan, I would be all set to gather up my passport and head for some place where they’d be glad to have me. My father had said that some Jews were helped by non-Jewish friends, and I concluded that I would always have friends who were different from me, the kind who could take me in or get me out. That first talk with my father was mostly about horror, of course, but it was also in this regard a conversation about love, and over time, I came to understand that you could save yourself by broad affections. People had died because their paradigms were too local. I was not going to have that problem.
