Book Review: Gone with the Wind, Wild Swans, & the Chinese Revolution

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When I was fourteen, I told Mom that I admired Scarlett O'Hara because as an anti-belle, she rejected conformity and succeeded by being selfish, opportunistic, and trigger-happy. Driving like a banshee, my red-haired mother slammed on her brakes and fiercely condemned Scarlett O'Hara for her lack of morals.

Mom also questioned my taste in literature and suggested I read about the Chinese revolution. My sister who was reading Wild Swans, a book about three generations of Chinese women, took the opportunity to ridicule my ignorance regarding Deng Xiaoping. I replied, "I'm a 4.0 student. If that guy is so important, why didn't I learn about him in school?" 

As a teenager, the lesson I gleamed from Gone with the Wind was -- you can live in the past and romanticize a time now "gone with the wind," or you can live in the present, collaborate with your enemies, and move on. I frequently applied this analogy to Asia where southerners frequently expressed anxiety about the north. 

Now that I'm older, I think --  the American civil war didn't need to happen. The south could have freed its slaves if the Union had subsidized southern plantation owners who were often close to bankruptcy.


#GoneWithTheWind #WildSwans #Revolution #CivilWar #Libertarianism #Satire #South #North #UnitedStates #America #Slavery #Cotton #Restoration #Romanticism #Realism #Individualism #Libertarianism #RonPaul #RandPaul #OldSouth #Romanticism 





  






Location: Mountain View, CA, USA

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