Short Takes #3

The two essays I read were:
"Book War" by Wang Ping
and
"Contributor's Note" by Michael Martone

In her essay "Book War", Wang Ping describes her first encounter with fairy tales, leading to a life long love of them. She goes outside and finds her neighbor sitting outside in the freezing cold reading what appears to be a Maoist book. Upon further investigation, she discovers that the girl is actually reading The Little Mermaid. Occurring during a time when books where seen as "poisonous weeds", being burned and banned right and left, the young girl becomes incredibly defensive, knowing that if she were to be turned in, her family would suffer the consequences. When they discover their shared love of books, they start an "underground book exchange network", sharing such tales as Grimm's Fairy Tales, and Romeo and Juliet. When Ping's mother discovered that she had dug up these books from their safe hiding place, she orders Ping to burn the books in the stove, in fear of the government. Ping calls her mother her "enemy", despite the fact that she's just trying to look out for Ping and their whole family. Angry with her mother, and sad that her books had been destroyed, Ping goes to the chicken coop to sulk. Ping comes to the realization that the stories she has read and absorbed are now alive inside her, "As tears flowed, the stories became alive from inside. They flapped their wings and flew out of my mouth like mourning doves." She realizes that even if she may not be allowed to have the books, the government cannot stop her from spreading the magic of the tales she's read to her loved ones. She creates an oral tradition of telling these stories, compensating for the fact that she cannot have the books, and comes to the conclusion that, in this way, she has "won the war".