A Bit to Read

Well. Yes. Friday. Early this morning on Spoutible, I shared what I thought was an interesting fact about Ho Feng Shan, a Chinese diplomat in Salzburg who saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust in response to a post that the Holocaust was “irrelevant and immaterial” to China.

And if you’re wondering, a response from someone who is not Chinese informing you that no one cares about 20,000 lives like yours saved is a heck of a kick in the teeth for a morning. Mr. Ho was a brave, courageous man and Shanghai provided a refuge. I think it’s a cool story not many people know about. I know have some readers in China, I don’t know if you know about him, either.

So my entire morning was spent in an endless circle with someone who pretended to apologize and then blamed Taiwanese people (no, I don’t know how we went from Chinese people to Taiwanese people either, yet still she accused me of being Eurocentric), and then it all boiled down to one elderly in-law.

And I’m even talking about it now because it has taken up too much brain space and maybe that was her real goal. You never know people’s actual motives.

We live in a time with so much open hatred. I watch my international shows and see people living lives, fictional ones, sure, but the trappings are all the same while the details, like foods and furnishings and types of housing, are all gloriously different.

Maybe I’m naive to imagine so many other people out there in the world like me, on every continent, enjoying imagining the lives others lead in far flung places. So many people who understand that we may be varied in millions of ways but we are all still human and that’s what makes the diversity beautiful.

A single color is not a rainbow. A single flavor, bland. One note is not a song.

Perhaps it’s wishful for me to believe that someone in China is glad to know people were saved from an atrocity, even while Chinese people suffered through atrocities of their own. To me it underscores the humanity in all of us, that simple, single thread that connects us all, wherever in the world we may be.

Because right now, that thread feels more fragile than it has in my lifetime.

I wish you a lovely Friday and and a wonderful weekend.