wild swans jung changChina is an enigma to me. The closest I’ve ever been is Hong Kong and Macau. The more I know about China’s history, however, the more incredible it all seems. Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng and The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang (and Chang’s subsequent suicide) shocked and saddened me. And today I read this in Wild Swans by Jung Chang:

One day in 1960, the three-year-old daughter of my aunt Jun-ying’s next-door neighbor in Yibin went missing. A few weeks later the neighbor saw a young girl playing in the street wearing a dress that looked like her daughter’s. She went up and examined it: it had a mark which identified it as her daughter’s. She reported this to the police. It turned out that the parents of the young girl were selling wind-dried meat. They had abducted and murdered a number of babies and sold them as rabbit meat at exorbitant prices. The couple were executed and the case was hushed up, but it was widely known that baby killing did go on at the time.

For every day that I’m alive, I should be grateful to be who I am, where I am, and when I am.