This week on q a our guest is journalist and author who discusses his new book, age of ambition chasing fortune, truth, and faith in the new chin china. Host evan osnos in your new book, under the acknowledgments, you start out by saying none of my grand parents lived to see the book but they are responsible for its conception. Tell us more. Well, my grandparents on my fathers side came from poland and my mothers father was a diplomat sent to hungary and kicked out accused of being a spy but he wasnt. But the experience of being ejected from poland and hungry founded a backdrop for the life under authority. It wasnt explicit parts of the conversation but i was interested in what it felt like to live in a country in which there were constraints on what you could care about and what your values were like and when there was a moment in my life where you could do that china fascinated me. Host when you went there in there in 1996 could you speak chinese . Guest i was starting to speak it.
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Book but they are responsible for its inception. My grandparents on my fathers side came from poland. They were polish jews. They left at the beginning of world war ii. On my mothers side, my mothers father was an american diplomat sent to hungary who was kicked out. He was accused of being a spy which he wasnt. In some ways, these stories, the experience of being ejected from poland or hungary, formed a backdrop in our familys story about life under authoritarianism. I think it always i was always interested in what it felt like to live in a country where there were fundamental constraints on how you live and what you could care about and what your values were. When there was a moment in my life where i could go to a place to dig into that, china was the place that fascinated me. That family story is very present in my interpretation. When you first went there in 1996, could you speak chinese . I was learning chinese. I started the previous year. If anybody told you how hard chinese w
They left at the beginning of world war ii. My motherss side, father was an american diplomat sent to hungary who was kicked out. He was accused of being a spy which he wasnt. In some ways, these stories, the experience of being ejected from poland or hungary, formed a backdrop in our familys story about life under authoritarianism. I wast always always interested in what it felt like to live in a country where there were fundamental constraints on how you live and what you could care about and what your values were. When there was a moment in my life where i could go to a place to dig into that, china was the place that fascinated me. Story is very present in my interpretation. Inwhen you first went there 1996, could you speak chinese . I was learning chinese. I started the previous year. Told you how hard chinese was going to be, you would never undertake the process. I ended up taking about four years of College Chinese before i moved to china. I was just starting when i went for th
[speaking chinese] what i mean is that this book is about ambition. Literally in chinese, it is about the wild heart. That is the term people use in chinese to describe ambition. Wild heart, for a long time in chinese was an unimaginable idea. If you are accused of being ambitious, you are accused of being wild hearted. That was a death sentence. What it meant was that you put the group before anything else. Im sorry, you put yourself before the group. For chinese history, that was unimaginable under the confucian period or the socialist period. When i got there, things were beginning to change in some deep way. What i began to hear around me was people talking about themselves, not in a self glamorizing or selfpromotional way, but just in a self protective way. They would say that it matters what i want in this world. Even the term in chinese for myself was transforming. People were getting comfortable using it. In the United States, we talk about the me generation. In china, it was a