Because Wednesday night I stayed up till 4:30am putting the finishing touches on a paper for my History of China since 1949 class, something I've never had to do before. Stay up all night finishing a paper, that is. Though, they might be fooled, a bit. I actually wrote 80% of the body of the paper the weekend before, and spent most of Wednesday revising and adding text. Wednesday I didn't wake up till almost noon, and had a meeting with my advisor at 1:30. Then I had a couple of hours in the library before class, and then I had to go to work till midnight.
I actually spent about 90 minutes Wednesday night on the phone with a dispatch tech out in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico. He was waiting for the local guy to come let him in so we could test their data line. The local guy took almost half an hour to arrive, and I spent the time working on my paper and bullshitting with the tech. It got to the point where I was bouncing titles off the guy! Some random redneck! Ha, it was great. I eventually decided on: "'Inevitable and Necessary to a Great Revolution:' Violence, Contradiction, and Idealism in China’s Cultural Revolution." The first half is a quote from the author in the book, the second half are the points I make in the paper. I love the quote though, it fit right in and saved me from having to come up with something to use.
When I first started the paper I felt like I was pulling teeth trying to get it to the page, but eventually I think it turned into a pretty good peice of work:
Early in Spider Eaters, Rae Yang introduces four women: a young girl in Switzerland, a courageous Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, a peasant working on a pig farm, and a literature professor who teaches at an American university. The story of these four women and Rae Yang’s attempts to reconcile them into the one woman that she has become is a fascinating one, but even more so are the contradictions of the Cultural Revolution as told through the words of a young Chinese girl. She must set aside her morality in the name of Revolution to justify the destruction of property and later, the taking of a human life. Then she must work through the horror of a member of her family being labeled a “rightist”, only to almost suffer the same fate herself. She must also learn to reconcile the ideals of the Party with the actually of the Communist Party at all levels, and yet she also shows how Chairman Mao was able to separate himself from the bad policy and squabbling within the party while rallying the Red Guard to his cause. Within these contradictions, this suffering, this confusion, and this idealism lies the story of the Cultural Revolution and the Maoist period of China’s socialist revolution, as told by those who lived it.
Oh shit. I just re-read that paragraph and caught a gramattical mistake. HA! So much for attempting perfection. I'm sure the prof will catch it, but the intention is still fairly clear. The original wording was: "through the horror
of as a member of her family
is labeled". I guess the real lesson here is though staying up till 4:30am might get something finished, you *still* need to proof read one last time before turning it in. I'm not going to read the rest of the paper now though, no use worring about it all weekend.
