The Book of the Day

I’ve a friend with whom I discuss books.  When he recommends something I usually take note.  He’s steered me to a few fine reads over the years and I believe I’ve done the same by him.  Up on the shelf for the past few months has been “Quartered Safely Out Here” by George McDonald Fraser.  “A Harrowing Tale of World War II”.   I’d left the book I was in the middle of out in a hotel in Jinan.  They were sending it my way.  So Fraser, for no good reason, became the book of the day.

It was here in Beijing one summer, long, long ago that I first encountered his name.  The summer of 1996 was twenty-two years ago now, and I was here that summer studying Chinese in the middle of grad school.  I did some work with a small business that had me going around and updating information for a foreign company directory they had.  And the gentleman who ran the company was a big fan of the Fraser’s “Flashman” series.  I was intrigued by the idea of historical novels set fighting the Great Game in Afghanistan or avoiding a scalping with the ‘Redskins” in Little Big Horn but I was put off by the bawdy side of the tales that this business owner fan of Flashman always dwelled upon: “He has to leave home after making love to his father’s mistress . . .”

Nothing bawdy happens, certainly in “Quartered Safely Out Here.”  (The title as we learn in the opening page is from Kipling’s “Gunga Din.”)  Here we fight the “primitive Jap” in the jungles of Burma.  Looking back from 1992, McDonald was still comfortably clothed in his hate for the Japanese enemy.  “I still won’t sit next to them.”  “I still won’t buy their cars.”  And I think it was useful for me to ponder his vitriol, even if it was bile-like-bitter. He reminded me, I think, of nearly every Beijing cab driver I’ve ever broached the topic of Japan with.  No forgiveness.  No resolution.  Hatred forever.  It was helpful to remember that this wasn’t a Chinese problem.  It was a problem for nearly anyone who was intimately affected, one suspects.  Most of Fraser’s countrymen weren’t affected.  Anyone over a certain age in China was.  And those who were not, were often raised by those who were. 

Is the hatred then, only carried by those who were primarily affected?  The ability to pass loathing on to the next generation is dissipated when only the veterans like Fraser himself, hold on to the immediate hatred.  In 1940s China hundreds of millions of people experienced the brutal occupation and the fermentation of bile could gestate for longer and in a more concentrated fashion.  And so, one hopes that with more distance from that time, even here, even Korea will one day be able to reconsider their rarefied hatred for a time that will before long, be beyond anyone’s living memory.

Sunday 8/16/18