Jade Snow Wong

Interesting article:

Rwanda: Why Does the UK Give Aid to Country?

The United Kingdom will provide $80 million in development aid to Rwanda this year. Will it do any good? The simple answer is to look at the difference our support is making to the lives of Rwandan people.

Also finished reading a couple of books on my holidays. Finally got to the end of Midwives by Chris Bohjalian which I've been reading for months and months and months, picking up and putting down. Was a good story though, very well written.

Even more interesting was Fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong, which I think was first published in 1945. Wikipedia says 1950, but the inside of my edition said 1945.

Anyway. It was rather enjoyable and I was quite sad at the end to Google her and find out she died in 2006. You feel like you knew her from reading her autobiography.

There was a hugely interesting excerpt that made me smile. She was talking about the culture shock in college when her group took an outing to her father's modest clothes manufacturing premises in Chinatown and then contrasted it with a visit to a huge corporate American producer.

The way she describes the contrast in the early 1900s really struck a chord with me in the early 2000s, the contrast between a Chinese/African way of working and an American/British way. That in the smaller factory there were children and babies wandering around, that the pace allowed for colleagues to show each other how to do things correctly, that there was chatter and talk and a feeling of 'family'. Whereas the corporate Western way of doing things was sanitised and anti-social, people hardly spoke, people had little time for each other and their problems and everything was focused on the work, not the people. It was interesting to note that those same two styles seem to have continued largely unchanged. It's one of the first big adjustments we make as volunteers - changing our working ethos. Slowing down and coming at things from a human angle rather than a Western business angle.

Hmm.

Dad sent me back with DVDs so I watched one the other night, continuing the trend of extremely depressing but extremely good dramas. It was a French film called Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I've Loved You So Long) featuring Kristin Scott Thomas who I think is fantastic and disgustingly talented, being as brilliant in English (Bitter Moon) as she is in French (Arsène Lupin). This was no exception.