Hal O'Brien

From Hannah Draper, a US Foreign Service blogger I follow who's in Istanbul:

"Iftars can be a political statement here: anyone who's someone hosts one, which leads to novelties such as the Jewish community's iftar (biggest social/political event in town, I swear)."

So I've been gathering together the titles on the US State Dept's suggested reading list for Foreign Service Officer candidates (N.B.: Link is to an Acrobat .PDF file). It's a field that's always interested me, and what the heck.

I just finished Chinese Lessons by John Pomfret (who also has a blog here).

I enjoyed this a lot. Part of it is, Pomfret is only a few years older than myself, and his story starts in college -- just in the years I was at Midland. He was one of the few Americans to go to a Chinese university -- Nanjing University class of 1982, as a history major. He then ended up as a journalist, first for the AP, and later for the Washington Post.

This means the book follows the story of Pomfret himself and many of his classmates over the tumultuous quarter-century from their college days to 2005. Some become professors, some Party bosses, some entrepreneurs, one emigrates to New Jersey and becomes an evangelical, etc.

My copy is very dogeared and marked up in what Anne Fadiman would call a dionysian fit. There are so many references and illuminations that Pomfret makes that when I recognize the bit of context, I want to hold on to it. Take for example the color white. I knew the Chinese use it as a color for mourning. But I didn't know this:

"The Chinese wear white at funerals because it symbolizes mother's milk and therefore hope. White is also considered an intermediary between the two central colors in Chinese culture: red, for happiness, wealth, and fame, and black, which the Chinese associate with feces, backwardness and bad luck."

Or this moment when he's walking with a girlfriend:

"As we entered the woods, she slowed her pace and I caught up. It was a gorgeous day, and a cool breeze wafted through the trees. For the first time since I had been in China I heard birds chirping. In the 1960s and '70s, the government had ordered its people to kill birds in all cities as part of a muddleheaded policy to be more modern. Their mass extermination prompted an insect population boom--flies and mosquitoes, mostly. So next, the party assigned each family a quota of insects to kill."

Or when he accompanies a classmate who is now writing for a Chinese sports newspaper to a football (soccer) match in Italy, they find Pomfret's seat, as a Post correspondent, is reserved, but his classmate's is not :

"Westerners still look down on China," he said. "Millions of people in China care about this match and no one knows it's happening in the United States. But the Italians don't realize that. They are looking to America when they should be looking to us."

It's the kaleidoscopic mosaic of detail, combined with the great sweep of both Pomfret's individual journey to adulthood, and China's collective journey to more prosperity, that makes this book a treat.

From Foreign Affairs:

"Many people both inside and outside the military have begun to wonder why the U.S. government continues to burden the armed forces with nondefense responsibilities and ask, "Where are the civilians?" The answer is: they do not exist.

The number of lawyers at the Defense Department is larger than the entire U.S. diplomatic corps, there are more musicians in the military bands than there are U.S. diplomats, and the Defense Department's 2008 budget was over 24 times as large as the combined budgets of the State Department and USAID ($750 billion compared with $31 billion). A mere $7.5 billion went to the State Department's diplomatic and consular programs, including its large operations in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the 265 other diplomatic posts around the world. In fact, the Pentagon spends more on health care for military personnel than the U.S. government allocates to diplomacy and foreign assistance." (emphasis added)

{hat tip to Diplopundit.}