Emma, friend of mine, graduated with a master degree after years of education in England. Like most Chinese oversea students, she returned to China and started her career in Shanghai. Every now and then she quarrels with her parents: they are different, yet similar. Of course, she spent half of her life in a town, conservative and exclusionary, and the rest of her life in another (yes I count England as one town, no offense), international and slightly more inclusionary.
The tear and desperation erodes my extra strength for sharing and supporting. I don’t know what to do. Then I bought this book because one of my colleagues recommended it to me when I had great trouble comforting Emma (“comforting” because she doesn’t need a solution). My colleague just told me to recommend this book to her. But I knew that she would never read such books, so I decided to read it myself.
“It must be a book for people like Emma.” I thought, not having a passion for it. So I started to read it slowly, one chapter after another. “Just another story about crazy parents and a childhood with no school…” I regreted my decision of wasting money on such a boring book before I started to be interested.
Tara Westover lived a life full of adventures, and her memories thrill me. I could not have imagined a simple childhood without going to school being so colourful and full of excitement, though most of the time my heart beat raise only because something bad happened.
But long stories like this is more about building a charactor instead of just telling me a thing: Dad, Mother, Tyler, Shawn, Grandma-over-in-town, Charles… sofe, deep and vivid: I love them all. “He had defined me to myself” is what Tara wrote about Shawn [page 199]. I also feel Shawn is such a powerful charactor that I don’t want to continue reading everytime I see the name showing up on the pages.
I am very Shawn in many ways. He reminds me of myself, the evil part of myself, ignorant, stubborn yet volatile. It reminds me how I get furious so easily, how I have no will to control my anger and let it go wild towards everyone. Once I had a girlfriend who got her ears pierced, I yelled at her, in the same way Shawn would yell (or bully) Tara when she were not behaving “modest”. I know, it’s insane. In fact, I am also from a conservative and exclusionary town, just like everyone. Before a person freely roam around the world, or library, and embrace the difference between everyone, one could be just as extreme, because there is no one telling you that your culture is not universal and your belief is not correct in all aspects.
Tara also make my inner self resonate: She fancy herself as an untouchable and unbreakable woman, but she isn’t. When Charles sees the real her, the sometimes-could-be-frail her, she went mad. She “surrendered to rages, venting all my savage anger, every fearful resentment I’d ever felt toward Dad and Shawn, at him, this bewildered bystander who’d only ever helped me”. This is so accurate, this is me venting my anger at my parents, this is my ex-girlfriend venting hers at me, this is so sad: sometimes you are having a bad time, you are aware of it but all you care about is whether others notice it or not, so you are hidden in a brittle shell.
28 Mar 2021 on Chapter 23
Unaware of the background knowledge of the Weavers, Dad’s tale finally made sense when I watches the Ruby Ridge Documentary on YouTube. I always thought that the US had too much freedom: there is freedom of speech, there is freedom of gun, etc., and that is bad. But today the documentary shocked me: it’s worse than I thought – every nation makes the same mistake in history. Thanks to the Internet we have easier access to history and facts, but also opinions that are not justified. I just hope people will learn from all the wars throughout human history and keep calm.
Tara managed to figure out that “white supremacy is at the heart of this story”, and now I figure that Emma’s parents are also making unjustified distinctions between human beings based on where they are from too.
28 Mar 2021 on Chapter 24