[INAUDIBLE] Oh, yeah, at some point,
I actually remembered that I actually
had interviewed my mother a long time ago.
And there was a recording somewhere,
and I had forgotten about it, but eventually, I found it.
And then I had to figure out how to fit it into this book
after I had written that I didn't know anything.
So that was kind of complicated.
I ended up just transcribing the interview,
and it was really interesting.
She gave me a lot of facts, and so this is a letter
that she received from a cousin in China,
and I just translated it or transcribed her translation
of it, and it pretty much mirrors what
I learned in Asian history.
You know, she just found her cousin.
She's two years younger than me, and the cousin,
the letter was just really simple and clean,
all facts, no feeling.
You know, 1950: cousin and family moved to Huabei
and had to learn new thoughts.
1950 to '59, every two to three days,
they had to participate in new movements
to suppress the revolution and to fight against the Americans.
They had to take all of their pots and metal doors
and burn them to make steel.
But moving away from farming led to starvation and famine,
so that I think is a great leap forward.
Then there's the Cultural Revolution.
All the things that I learned about in school,
the natural disasters that happened that led to famine.
And then '66 to '71, the Red Guard period.
You know, Mao's Little Red Book kind of thing,
was really fascinating to read the letters.
The government doubted everything and everyone.
They came to our house and took away
all of our jewelry and money.
And so she-- just you know, I heard her voice,
and I just kind of transcribed these and put these in here
in collages, and that's just one of them,
and there are more throughout the book.
And that's another one that I think somewhere in here,
I didn't write down the page number,
but it talks about eventually how the father died in his 50s,
had a brain hemorrhage, and no one
was able to go to college or anything.
They were all sent to the hinterlands to do farming.
So it was just interesting to kind of match our family
history with history history, which
was both interesting and tragic, and how
when one side of the family leaves a country,
it completely bifurcates, and one side's experience is
so different than the other side,
and that happens to a lot of people.