Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Zambia, 1997 (Photograph by Luca Trovato)

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Contents

Epigraph

Dispatches from Everywhere

USSR  The Winter Palettes

USSR  Three Days in August

RUSSIA  Young Russia’s Defiant Decadence

CHINA  Their Irony, Humor (and Art) Can Save China

SOUTH AFRICA  The Artists of South Africa: Separate, and Equal

USA  Vlady’s Conquests

TAIWAN  “Don’t Mess with Our Cultural Patrimony!”

TAIWAN  On Each Palette, a Choice of Political Colors

TURKEY  Sailing to Byzantium

ZAMBIA  Enchanting Zambia

CAMBODIA  Phaly Nuon’s Three Steps

MONGOLIA  The Open Spaces of Mongolia

GREENLAND  Inventing the Conversation

SENEGAL  Naked, Covered in Ram’s Blood, Drinking a Coke, and Feeling Pretty Good

AFGHANISTAN  An Awakening after the Taliban

JAPAN  Museum without Walls

SOLOMON ISLANDS  Song of Solomons

RWANDA  Children of Bad Memories

LIBYA  Circle of Fire: Letter from Libya

CHINA  All the Food in China

CHINA  Outward Opulence for Inner Peace: The Qianlong Garden of Retirement

ANTARCTICA  Adventures in Antarctica

INDONESIA  When Everyone Signs

BRAZIL  Rio, City of Hope

GHANA  In Bed with the President of Ghana?

ROMANIA  Gay, Jewish, Mentally Ill, and a Sponsor of Gypsies in Romania

MYANMAR  Myanmar’s Moment

AUSTRALIA  Lost at the Surface

Acknowledgments

About Andrew Solomon

Notes

Bibliography

Index

for Oliver, Lucy, Blaine, and George, who have given me a reason to stay home

Think of the long trip home.

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

Where should we be today?

. . .

Continent, city, country, society:

the choice is never wide and never free.

And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,

wherever that may be?

—Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel”

Dispatches from Everywhere

When I was about seven, my father told me about the Holocaust. We were in the yellow Buick on New York State route 9A, and I had been asking him whether Pleasantville was actually pleasant. I cannot remember why the Nazis came up a mile or two later, but I do remember that he thought I already knew about the Final Solution, and so didn’t have any rehearsed way to present the camps. He said that this had happened to people because they were Jewish. I knew that we were Jewish, and I gathered that if we’d been there at the time, it would have happened to us, too. I insisted that my father explain it at least four times, because I kept thinking I must be missing some piece of the story that would make it make sense. He finally told me, with an emphasis that nearly ended the conversation, that it was “pure evil.” But I had one more question: “Why didn’t those Jews just leave when things got bad?”

“They had nowhere to go,” he said.

At that instant, I decided that I would always have somewhere to go. I would not be helpless, dependent, or credulous; I would never suppose that just because things had always been fine, they would continue to be fine. My notion of absolute safety at home crumbled then and there. I would leave before the walls closed around the ghetto, before the train tracks were completed, before the borders were sealed. If genocide ever threatened midtown Manhattan, I would be all set to gather up my passport and head for some place where they’d be glad to have me. My father had said that some Jews were helped by non-Jewish friends, and I concluded that I would always have friends who were different from me, the kind who could take me in or get me out. That first talk with my father was mostly about horror, of course, but it was also in this regard a conversation about love, and over time, I came to understand that you could save yourself by broad affections. People had died because their paradigms were too local. I was not going to have that problem.