Word: child
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Yuan has a husband who is studying for his master's at Princeton. She has a two-and-a-half year old son and must pay for a babysitter because she has no family members to look after the child-the custom in China. She cannot afford to come visit her husband in the United States, and does not have a phone with which to call...
Culled from the column for The New Oxford Review that he has filled for several years now, these essays resemble closely the letters that his father used to meticulously prepare as he tried to make sense of a world whose meaning otherwise might escape him. As a young child, Coles recalls, he was perplexed by the obstinancy of his father's letter writing habit, but in this volume he seems to have grasped fully its purpose and its potential as a means of reflecting on grand themes in short spaces...
...have lived before us. Time and again, Coles uses his three or four pages to stop and marvel at the courage or faith or humanity of those he has come into contact with, be it Dorothy Day, a sharecropper, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or a six-year old Black child who went to class despite racist taunts as the New Orleans public schools were being integrated...
...illegal, he loses his way. His usual sympathy for the underdog gives way to the kind of careless (one is tempted to say, heartless) cynicism so regrettably familiar to all of us. In his brief chapter on school prayer, he makes light of the "emotions" of the lone dissenting child who, because of his doubts about God deprives others of the right to pray for theirs...
Near the end of his diary, Coles reflects that he is very much his parent's child, and one of the characteristics of his parents was that they were not particularly political. Coles' forum invites him to be political, or at least to comment on particular questions of public policy. But there are thinkers aplenty willing to bear that burden, and Coles would do better to leave that work for them, as he generally seems content...