Nine Days
Page 16
Like Ethan, I’ve been fascinated by China for a long time, though I’ve never lived there and I don’t speak Chinese. I first visited China in 1977, when the country was just beginning to recover from the Cultural Revolution.
I remember the Beijing of 1977 as a poor, freezing city, wreathed in smoke and soot from coal fires. Everyone wore padded blue or gray jackets and walked or rode bicycles; only a few Party functionaries got to ride in cars.
For a visitor, it was magical, otherworldly, almost silent but for the bicycle bells. For residents, to an extent I couldn’t appreciate at the time, it was a place of privation and fear. People dared not talk about how much they had suffered under the rule of Chairman Mao Zedong, who had died the year before.
By 2000, when I returned to interview President Jiang Zemin and see “the new China,” Beijing was transformed. The city was still choking, but this time on automobile exhaust. There were gleaming new buildings. The Party was still in control, but it didn’t try to run people’s personal lives. People felt freer to talk—within limits.
As Ethan and the fictional Ti-Anna and their angry classmates in world history class could tell you, it’s a complex story, and there’s no single right way to view it. But what Ethan and Ti-Anna experience is certainly part of the story of modern China. According to Amnesty International, half a million people in China are in punitive detention, though they’ve never been charged with a crime or had a trial. The number of prisoners of conscience, like Wang Bingzhang, has been going up.
Modern-day slavery is not a product of my imagination either. Thousands of girls are tricked or taken from their homes and sold into prostitution, like the ones Ethan and Ti-Anna rescued from the truck. It happens everywhere, including in America, but it happens a lot more often in poor countries like Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
The good news is how many people, here in the United States and in those countries, are working to make things better. For readers who want to get involved, there’s no need to head to faraway countries without telling your parents. There’s a lot you can do.
There is an organization called International Justice Mission, which works with local police to promote the rule of law and help keep girls from being exploited. There are other groups that fight trafficking as well, including Free the Slaves, an organization dedicated to ending slavery worldwide, and Catholic Relief Services, the official humanitarian agency of the Catholic community in the United States. There is also MTV Exit, a campaign about freedom—our rights as human beings to choose where we live, where we work, who our friends are and who we love.
And there are organizations trying to promote, in a peaceful way, freedom and civil liberties in China, Vietnam and elsewhere: Human Rights Watch, China Human Rights Defenders, Human Rights in China and Amnesty International.
Acknowledgments
Thanks are owed to my discerning early readers, Pooh Shapiro and Joe Hiatt; my always supportive agent, Rafe Sagalyn; my wise and talented editor, Beverly Horowitz; and above all my loving and encouraging family: Pooh, Joe, Alex Hiatt and Nate Hiatt. I also am grateful to Ti-Anna Wang for what she taught me, and to the many dissidents and freedom fighters around the world who have been willing to share their stories.
About the Author
Fred Hiatt is the editorial page editor and a columnist for the Washington Post, where he began working in 1981. He and his wife served as co–bureau chiefs of the Post’s Northeast Asia Bureau in Tokyo, reporting on Korea and Japan. They then served as correspondents and co–bureau chiefs in Moscow. Before joining the Post’s foreign staff, Hiatt covered U.S. military and national security affairs. He also worked as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal and the Washington Star in Washington, D.C., and wrote for the Harvard Crimson. He is the author of two books for young readers, If I Were Queen of the World and Baby Talk, and the adult novel The Secret Sun. Fred Hiatt and his wife have three children and live in Maryland.