In the summer of 1996, I left China for America to pursue graduate study. I have now lived in America for 30 years, longer than I lived in China. Yet, the more I know America, the more I am convinced that the country manifests itself as a perfect candidate for one of Chairman Mao’s beliefs. The quote — at least it was credited to him when we grew up — roughly translated into English and cleared of some troublesome double negatives means: “Human efforts will always trump nature. What can be imagined can be achieved, so long as you dare to imagine.”
One can be a little blasé or cynical about America, especially the country in its current 250th-year edition. However, one cannot help but feel a little awed by the American confidence in imagining the unimaginable. What was imagined and pursued by the first emperor of China — to live to 150 years, to be forever young, to be immortal — is the same urge that has led to a thriving business of longevity clinics in the US. To dictate the terms of global politics, to police other countries with a grand vocabulary of democracy, human rights and justice, while American students have monthly drills to prepare them for frighteningly regular school shootings — it takes a special kind of American imagination to celebrate the greatness, nay, the greatest-ness, of the country. Self-doubt is not a national sport here, nor is self-reflection.
Recently, in my creative writing class at Princeton, I taught Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary, a novel in which two middle-aged Londoners, beset by loneliness and rudderlessness, nevertheless make a deep connection when they conspire to liberate some turtles from the zoo. I must confess that, when putting the book on the reading list, I forgot that Turtle Diary might not easily speak to my brilliant and ambitious undergraduates. I was particularly struck by one student’s comment. He said he did not necessarily love the book, but it made him think of the life choices he would make so as not to become either of the two protagonists. In other words, he thought, literature about people’s pains and sufferings could serve well as cautionary tales. This strikes me as an American phenomenon. History, full of cautionary tales, is easily dismissed or forgotten in this country, which seems to me, paradoxically, to be another American phenomenon. When I talk about tuberculosis with my students, for example, they often think it was a medieval disease. I have to explain to them that George Orwell, whom they like to quote all the time, died in 1950, at the age of 46, from TB.