Thursday, May 8, 2014

Don't Know Jack

For the students of Rendafuzhong, especially Knight

When professors asked me what James Joyce and Franz Kafka had been trying to say, I could not answer.
When my students asked me to proofread their entrance essays for Harvard and Yale, what could I say? And when they told me they wanted to go to America to solve the problem of their terrible lives, I was speechless.

When an earthquake struck Sichuan Province and my classroom wept because it was students just like them who had died and on the chalkboard they drew pictures of blood coming from the earth, what did a 23-year-old have to offer them?

1 comment:

  1. This is powerful. There's a sense of 'smallness' to the voice that really comes through.

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