A friend recently asked me "what's with all the book reviews? They used to be just a side endeavor but they've become the meat and potatoes of your blog."
In my original "introduce yourself" entry back in 2018, I described my blog as "nothing more and nothing less than one man's all-out assault on Xi Jinpeng, and on the monster he has transformed China into." I didn't bother hiding the fact that my purpose in writing was commentary on China.
And when I spoke of China, I have never tried to tapdance around by saying "it's only the Party. The People are not evil." I have been quite open about stating (with citations from throughout China's own literature) the opposite: the Communist Party is the symptom, not the cause, of China's aggressive and barbaric nature. Book reviews (mainly of the books I read as source material) came about as a side-feature. And to be frank, I made a bit of a name for myself as a China-critic.
And yet, in 2020, with the exception of a handful of articles early on the coronavirus outbreak, I haven't written much about China. I was asked the other day, "why not?"
Well, for one thing, now that I am back in the States with unrestricted internet access I've found out that there are plenty of people already making every point I used to make. Frankly, Joshua Philipp and Winston Sterzel crank out videos explaining it faster than I can crank out research articles (I might be able to keep pace if I didn't force myself to put an MLA-style works cited page in every article but call it a personal quirk), and their videos are as well-researched as anything I can produce and, in the latter's case, backed up by fluency in Mandarin (wo mei xuezi Putonghua; dui bu qi). Besides, with the world having seemingly woken up to the reality that China cannot be trusted (funny how a global pandemic that they caused and then tried to deny, will do that), it seemed I could give the Paul Revere routine a rest. The job I set out to do is largely done.
But more to the point...
...well, I am absolutely, flat-out, sick to death of China. Not just as a place to live, but as a concept; as a topic of conversation. I'm tired of hearing about it, especially from my own mouth. After 8 months being free of that place, I still find that it pervades every single bit of my life. Every job I apply for says "we'd love to hire you but your time in China makes you a security risk." Every thought that goes through my head seems to pass through a lens that has been tainted by five piss-yellow stars on a blood-red background. I even realized, ex posto facto, that I'd shoehorned two mentions of China into a review of a book about the Alamo the other day. The bloody Alamo! Which has bugger-all to do with China!
So, as I mentioned in a recent article, I have been trying to take 2020 as a sort of "China detox."
...Of course, "detoxing from China" is not easy in a year when the world is a mess because of a virus from China, or when the love of my life is still stuck in Beijing, or when I'm working as a freelance online teacher and every one of my clients is still in China and still pays me in RMB, or when the Chinese, as a whole, are snakes who pay so late (or not at all) that despite teaching 23 classes a week I end up working for free about 80% of the time and have to create a Gofundme page just to feed my kids...
(give me a second to calm down)
...but I digress.
My point, frankly, is this. I said at the beginning of 2020 That I would likely be redefining this blog. Well, I guess that "redefinition" is I used to write to sound an alarm to the world, and now, at least for the moment, I'm writing for myself. To be perfectly blunt, some of the only peace I find in a world battered by China's plague is when I have my nose in a book, and reviewing them is a lot less infuriating than trying to convey what I see when I look at China.