Lucky

Once again, appreciating how lucky I am to have been born in the USA. I read Shahriar Mandanipur's Censoring An Iranian Love Story. The initial conceit of an author writing a love story & dealing with the Islamic censors is catchy, but the book zeros in on a lot more. Mandanipur gives graphic examples of life under the Islamic Cultural Police, & the consequences of crossing them. It's horrific. The pernicious spying by neighbors & family reminded me of stories of life under the Stasi, and with similiar results: prison, torture, public hangings. Also, routinely used for political ends. He keeps coming back to the underlying love story, so it does have some hope.

I quite randomly followed this with Water Touching Stone, the second in a series by Eliot Pattison set in and near Tibet. These are mystery stories but are famous for telling the story of the on-going genocide of the Tibetans at the hands of the Chinese. This one expands to the plight of the nomadic Uighurs & Kazachs, with the same mistreatment: forced relocation, the nationalization of property, resources, factories (handed over to ex-Chinese military, now "entrepeneurs"), brutal oppression: torture, slave labor prisons, the forbidding of teaching or conducting business in indiginous languages. It seems endless, as does our country's tacit endorsement of these policies. How's your microwave? Inspector Shan, a Chinese escapee from a slave labor camp, is an endearing character, especially his relationship with some elderly Tibetan monks.