“The Story of the Stone Vol. III- The Warning Voice (The Dream of the Red Chamber)” by Cao Xueqin (translated by David Hawkes)

This volume continues Cao Xueqin’s epic fictional history of the Jia clan. It weaves plot lines effortlessly between the multiple strands and generations of both the Ning-Guo and Rong-Guo Houses, while primarily focusing on Grandmother Jia and her two favorite grandchildren, Bao-Yu and Lin Dai-yu. Her granddaughter in-law, Xi-Feng, as manager of the expenses for Rong-Guo House, also plays a critical role throughout the novel. “Because of all the economies I’ve introduced during these last few years there’s hardly anyone in this household who doesn’t secretly hate me. But it’s like riding a tiger: I daren’t relax my grip for a single moment for fear of being eaten. In any case, our expenditure is still far above our income. The trouble is, everything in this household from the largest down to the smallest item has to be done on a scale and according to rules that were laid down by our ancestors; but unfortunately the income from our property is not what it was in those days. If we do economize, the family looks ridiculous, Their Ladyships feel uncomfortable, and the servants complain of our harshness.”

When Xi-Feng is stricken with a strange illness, two of Grandmother Jia’s younger granddaughters, Li Wan and Tan-chun, take to the fore and step up to shoulder the administration of the household. Borrowing into their capital, shuffling around servants, and minimizing the expenses of entertaining family, friends, and retainers all become constant worries. While Grandmother Jia is shielded from money worries, the younger generations of Jias begin to hold onto their silver and account for their expenditures a tad more responsibly. “There would be no point in saving an extra two or three hundred taels if it meant resorting to undignified methods in order to do so…. Whereas if we went all out to economize with no other consideration but making money in mind, no doubt we should have little difficulty in squeezing more out.”

As the grandchildren grow up, gender distinctions also begin to play a bigger role in the novel. One granddaughter opines, “If I’d been a boy I should have left home long ago and done something to show myself worthy of her kindness; but as I am a girl, I have to stay at home and never say a word out of turn.” The Jia boys are alternately treated with more leeway to explore their natures and beaten mercilessly for indiscretions to protocol. “Children brought up in families like ours, no matter how odd or eccentric they may be, will always conduct themselves in a courteous, well-bred manner in the presence of strangers. Otherwise their eccentricity would not be tolerated…. Although our Bao-yu is so odd and mischievous, he can at times, when he is with visitors, behave himself better than a grown-up, so that it’s a pleasure to watch him. No one who meets him can help liking him…. If it were just his willfulness, which is fairly normal in a child, it could be cured in time; so could his extravagance, which is normal in the sons of well-to-do people; and so could his hatred of study, which again is fairly normal in a young person. But this weird perverseness of his seems to be inbred: there seems to be no cure for it.”

The other division that is further exposed in this volume is the difference between first wives, concubines, and chamber wives. The constant scheming and fight for relative status often makes for a disharmonious household. This pecking order is most apparent in the treatment of the wives’ children by other family members, the servants, and outsiders alike. “I know being a wife’s or a concubine’s child is not supposed to make any difference, and in a boy’s case perhaps it doesn’t; but I’m afraid with girls, when the time comes to start finding husbands for them, it often does. Nowadays you get a very shallow class of person who will ask about that before anything else and often, if they hear that a girl is a concubine’s child, will have nothing further to do with her. It’s silly, really, because if they did but know it, even the maids in a household like ours are better than the wife’s daughters in many another household, let alone the daughters of concubines.”

No matter the Jia clan-members vast differences in temperament and wealth, as well as their sprawling alliances in marriage and business, in the end, they all know that they are foremost bonded by their family ties. “In life we shall live together; in death we shall mingle our dust.” Nonetheless, even Grandmother Jia senses that the times are changing for both China, at large, and her family in particular, “I never felt in the past on these occasions that we were a small family. Looking at us today, though, I must say we do make a very miserable turnout. I can remember Mid-Autumns when there were thirty or forty of us sitting down together. Ah, what times we had then! We shan’t ever have numbers like that again. Let’s have the girls sit with us. See if we can’t fill up that gap!”

“The Story of the Stone Vol. II- The Crab-Flower Club (The Dream of the Red Chamber)” by Cao Xueqin (translated by David Hawkes)

Cao Xueqin continues his epic tale of the fortunes of the Houses of Ning-Guo and Rong-Guo, descended from two brother Dukes of the Jia clan, both favorites of the Emperor. His second volume largely follows the hectic lives of Grandmother Jia’s grandchildren, all living within the Garden. “‘We’re all cousins,’ said Bao-yu. ‘What one of us does concerns all the others. If they have done you an injury, it’s up to me to apologize.’” The teenagers hang out with each other everyday, while also developing jealousies, rivalries, and cliques among each other, as well as between the larger household, their elders, and the staff. “None of the others present had understood what the four of them were talking about and treated these exchanges as a joke.” In this volume, the kids have just established a poetry club, where they spend their time eating, drinking, and making jokes, just as much as composing verse. “Why should the founding of poetry clubs be the sole prerogative of the whiskered male, and female versificators allowed a voice in the tunable concert of the muses only when some enlightened patriarch sees fit to invite them? Will you come, then, and rhyme with us?”

As well as the youngsters, this novel also details the day to day work of Xi-Feng, one of the youngest of the married Jia in-laws, who is tasked with accounting for the expenses of their sprawling household. As such, much of this novel involves the household help, especially the divisions that arise between the senior maids and the petty staff. “It was customary in the Jia household to treat the older generation of servants—those who had served the parents of the present masters—with even greater respect than the younger generation of masters.” The servants, also, would treat their young masters with almost matronly devotion and care. “Even we servants that have been with him for a few years get worried about him. The most that we can ever hope for is to do our duty and get by without too much trouble—but even that won’t be possible if he goes on the way he’s been doing. I’m always telling him to change his ways. Every day—every hour—I tell him. But it’s no use; he won’t listen.” Romantic jealousies between senior wives, chamber wives, concubines, mistresses, and favored maids also lead to household rivalries and maneuverings. “The ancients used to say that for one smile of a beautiful woman a thousand taels are well spent. For a few old fans it’s cheap at the price!” One gets the sense that, in these elaborate Manchu mansions, the servants are the ones who actually wield much of the power and know all the secrets going on. “I just dread talking to servants nowadays. They take such an interminable time to tell you anything—so long-winded! And the airs and graces they give themselves! and the simpering! and the um-ing and ah-ing! If they only knew how it makes me fume!”

Finally, the extended clan kinsmen from the countryside make appearances on the Jia households, begging for and expecting money, jobs, or favors, which cannot so easily be refused. “I was born for a hard life, d’ye see, just as Your Ladyship was born for a soft one. We couldn’t all be like Your Ladyship, or there’d be no one to do the farming.” Of course, the entire clan is eventually taken care of, to varying degrees, by Grandmother Jia and her abundant largesse. “Although Grandmother Jia had sent invitations by word of mouth to every clansman and clanswoman residing in the city, some of them were too elderly to stand up to the noise and excitement of the party, some were unable to come because they had no one to look after the house for them while they were away, some had intended to come but were prevented from doing so by illness, some stayed away from envy of their richer clansmen or because they were ashamed of their own poverty, others because they could not stand Xi-Feng, and yet others because they were so unused to company and incapacitated by shyness that they dared not come.” The members of the House of Rong-Guo, old and young alike, do not, as yet, have to concern themselves with the sordid business of making money, just on how to spend it. “‘Which of these is the one tael mark?’ she said. ‘That’s rich,’ said Bao-Yu, ‘your asking me! Anyone would think you were new here.’ Musk laughed. She was about to go outside and ask, but Bao-Yu stopped her. ‘Just pick out one of the larger pieces and give her that. There’s no need to bother with the exact amount. We aren’t shopkeepers.’”

“Rock, Paper, Scissors and other Stories” by Maxim Osipov (translated by Boris Dralyuk, Alex Fleming, and Anne Marie Jackson)

This is a collection of short stories written by a Russian cardiologist who moved from Moscow to the provincial town of Tarusa. His grandfather lived in political exile in Tarusa, forbidden to live closer than ninety miles from the Russian capital. The younger Osipov spent childhood summers there, hanging out with Solzhenitsyn’s son, among other children of internal exiles. Osipov has been compared to Chekhov because of his background practicing medicine in small town Russia, but his prose reminds more of Shalamov in its deceptive simplicity and biting truths.

Osipov’s stories shed light on the modern mindset of Russia in a wry, yet hopeful manner. Most of his stories deal with life in the countryside. He writes of the outer provinces, “You can fall for this place just as easily as a woman can fall for a loser.” Comparing life in the country to the capital, he opines, “But where Moscow doesn’t believe in tears, as they say, around here tears are the only things we do believe in. When the need is great, we make an exception.” Despite nothing much changing, Osipov’s provincial characters often exhibit a nostalgia for the good old days. “Ksenia tries to guess how old he is, whether he would have known life in the Soviet Union. If so, he shouldn’t have skipped school; he’d at least know some Russian. What a country they had all shared!” In another story, a character reveals the widening gap between the urban dacha owners and the full-time provincials, “When it’s hot, the less sophisticated among them walk around half-naked. They wouldn’t do that in Moscow. And the more cultured ones don’t mean to offend us, yet somehow they still do. The Petersburgers are a bit different: they at least introduce themselves by their name and patronymic, whereas the Muscovites seem only to have first names nowadays. Somewhere out in the big cities dissertations are being defended, books are being published; something real is happening, with intellectuals slapping one another in the face, but here—how could anyone take our homely, warm, slightly mud-flecked life seriously?”

“Exhalation” by Ted Chiang

Chiang is a master of hard science fiction. He weaves amazing tales in the most realistic of manners. The first story, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” embeds multiple stories about time travel within each other. Chiang was inspired by physicist Kip Thorne. He writes of the initial idea, “you could—in theory—create a time machine that obeyed Einstein’s theory of relativity…. Thorne had performed some mathematical analysis indicating that you couldn’t change the past with this time machine, and that only a single, self-consistent timeline was possible.” A character in the story sums it up, “Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise.”

In the title story, “Exhalation,” Chiang plays with the idea of entropy. In his notes, he explains, “The conservation of energy means that it is neither created nor destroyed; we are radiating energy constantly, at pretty much the same rate that we absorb it. The difference is that the heat energy we radiate is a high-entropy form of energy, meaning it’s disordered. The chemical energy we absorb is a low-entropy form of energy, meaning it’s ordered. In effect, we are consuming order and generating disorder.”  In the story, the narrator leaves a note to the future, “I wish you well, explorer, but I wonder: Does the same fate that befell me await you? I can only imagine that it must, that the tendency toward equilibrium is not a trait peculiar to our universe but inherent in all universes.”

In “Omphalos” Chiang plays with an alternate reality in which a kind of creationism is still commonly believed. Chiang writes, “Much of modern astronomy is premised on the Copernican principle, the idea that we are not at the center of the universe and are not observing it from a privileged position; this is pretty much the opposite of young-earth creationism.” The narrator is an archaeologist who has been able to reconcile her science with her religion holistically. She relates, “Free will is a kind of miracle; when we make a genuine choice, we bring about a result that cannot be reduced to the workings of physical law. Every act of volition is, like the creation of the universe, a first cause.”

“Blueprint- The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society” by Nicholas A. Christakis

This is a big book that seeks to reveal the underpinnings of human society across time and space. Christakis is a practicing physician, as well as a Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale. His goal, in this book, is to explicate commonalities between all human societies. He terms this the social suite of eight characteristics- “1) The capacity to have and recognize individual identity 2) Love for partners and offspring 3) Friendship 4) Social networks 5) Cooperation 6) Preference for one’s own group (that is, “in group bias”) 7) Mild hierarchy (that is, egalitarianism) 8) Social learning and teaching” Christakis’ claim is not that every single human has always exhibited these characteristics, but, rather that these are generally universal traits, which humans naturally exhibit. More importantly, these traits are what has allowed humanity, as a species, to evolve into social beings with accumulated cultural advancements.

Christakis begins historically, by detailing small-scale human societies begun ex-novo. He recounts tribal foragers and hunter gatherers, 19th century shipped-wreck sailors, 20th century egalitarian communes, and scientists isolated on Antartica. His case is that, despite vast cultural differences, the general outlines of a successful social structure are remarkably the same. “Given the chance, isolated small-scale communities do not invent wholly new sorts of effective social order.” This structure, for Christakis, has biological underpinnings. “Humans have evolved to be social in a particular way precisely because they have been social in the past. The social systems our ancestors created became a force of natural selection. And once our species started down the path of living socially, humans set into motion a feedback loop that continues to shape how we live with one another today.”

Christakis stresses the importance of leadership in setting the parameters of society. “Groups have both instrumental leaders, those focused on practical objectives or tasks, and expressive leaders, people who work to build solidarity in the group…. Effective leaders have to help minimize group conflict, deal with troublesome individuals before they compromise group harmony, keep work on schedule, make rational decisions in emergencies, deal fairly with conflict, and facilitate communication.” Perhaps more importantly, however, Christakis reveals that, even given the same population of individuals, the form of the social structure can be conducive to success or failure as a society. Christakis has tested various social forms extensively, as part of his lab experiments at Yale. “The tendency to be altruistic or exploitative may depend heavily on how the social world is organized. So if we look at the same population of people and assigned them to one social world, we could make them really generous to one another, and if we put them in another sort of world, we could make them really mean or indifferent to one another…. Cooperation depends on the rules governing the formation of friendship ties…. The biggest threat to humans, more than predators or any environmental exigencies, is other humans.”

Christakis makes the case that monogamy evolved eventually amongst most successful human societies. “Cultural monogamy spread in part because it offered an advantage in competition between groups. Men lacking spouses resorted to violence within their own group or went on raids of other groups, provoking conflict. Political entities, nations, and religions that adopted monogamy had a reduced rate of this sort of violence and could deploy their resources more productively, internally and externally…. Providing an opportunity for every man to have a spouse meant that low-status males could become more risk-averse and future-oriented, less violent within their group, and more focused on providing for their children. High-status males, instead of seeking additional wives, could make long-term investments directed at acquiring wealth and caring for their offspring.” Pair bonding of mates also led to more equal care of their offspring between the sexes. “Evolutionarily speaking, that means that women provide men with paternity certainty in order to receive food and support. In the evolutionary tool kit, pair-bonded monogamy and female love may have served as authentic signals to increase confidence of males that offspring were their own, thus fostering parental investment in children.”

After sexual love, Christakis tackles friendship ties. He paraphrases anthropologist Daniel Hruschka, that friendship “may have evolved as a system of social relationships that encouraged cooperation and mutual aid even in situations fraught with uncertainty and in environments characterized by variability. In the relative absence of formal institutions, friendship is a kind of insurance against unexpected setbacks.” Christakis continues, “The ability of friendship to be useful during times of reversals, when an even exchange is not possible, is precisely what makes friendship so valuable as an adaption to our species…. The fact that you are irreplaceable to your friends even though you are unremarkable to strangers suggests there is a deep connection between individuality—another key part of the social suite—and friendship.” Friends serve as an alternative to kin, who can be more direct competitors for resources and might possess too similar genes and, therefore, too similar a skillset to be useful as insurance. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides add, “A person who values the same things you do will continually be acting to transform the local world into a form that benefits you, as a by-product of their acting to make the world suitable for themselves.” A related notion is in-group bias. “Our ancestors lived in environments in which occasional competition for scarce resources favored groups that had brave and self-sacrificing members. It was useful to have in-group altruism in the service of out-group conflict…. In order to be kind to others, it seems, we must make distinctions between us and them.”

Christakis briefly notes the other characteristics of the social suite that have made humans uniquely social creatures. “The ability to have an individual identity and recognize the identity of other individuals (especially beyond one’s mate or offspring) is uncommon in the animal world…. Facial recognition is a key part of human social and sexual interactions.” The ability of large groups of humans to cooperate successfully evolved through the notion of reciprocity. “Direct reciprocity…. has to do with repeated interactions across time…. The best strategy is to start out cooperating with someone and thereafter copy whatever that person responds with…. Indirect reciprocity assumes that interactions are observed by some people in the group who then inform other members of the group. In other words, people gossip.” Gossip serves as a form of reward and punishment that spreads throughout society, not just amongst those an individual comes into direct contact with. At its extreme, it can lead to banishment from the society entirely. Another aspect of the social suite is learning and teaching. “Social learning is likely to be more effective than solitary learning when the costs of acquiring information are high and when peers are sources of reliable information.” This leads to cumulative knowledge. “There is a clustering of behaviors within the communities whereby techniques are uniform within given communities but vary between communities.”

Finally, Christakis takes on how genes have affected human’s social structures. He begins with the idea of exophenotypes, “the nonincidental, genetically guided changes that an organism makes to its surroundings in order to improve its prospects for reproduction and survival.” He considers the dams beavers make and the escape tunnels in mouse burrows as prime examples. Christakis then explains social epistasis, the idea that “the impact of genes in one individual may be affected by the genes of another individual.” Network effects may also be important in gene survival. “Genes may even require the presence of particular genes in other organisms in order to be useful and in order for natural selection to favor them.” He suggests that the genes that modified the human larynx to make speech easier were not as useful until there were others to communicate reciprocally with.

Christakis posits a dual-inheritance theory- “a reference to our capacity to inherit both genetic and cultural information from our ancestors…. Our capacity to create culture is itself an adaptation shaped by natural selection…. We are a long-lived, group-living organism that has generational overlap…. Culture itself can evolve over time…. Superior ideas can outperform weaker ones—and be selected for…. Lateral transmission (of ideas or practices) between individuals within the same generation [speeds up cultural evolution]…. Cultural evolution can be explicitly directed…. This cultural system of inheritance itself becomes a feature of our species’ evolutionary landscape.” Humans have adapted a unique psychology prone to absorb culture, “including a tendency to conform to what others are doing, to develop and obey local norms, to privilege high-status or older people who could be potential teachers, and to pay attention to the people whom others are paying attention to.” In fact, today, prestige more than dominance confers status in human societies. “Subordinates in prestige hierarchies are attracted to their superiors and try to get near them—to befriend, observe, copy, and otherwise benefit from them.” Population size and specialization have also facilitated the ever-greater pace of cultural evolution and accumulated knowledge. In fact, Christakis notes that cultural evolution might be retarding genetic evolution, uniquely within humans. “The power of culture may mean that our species retains genetic problems that might otherwise have disappeared.”

The interplay between culture and genes has a ratcheting effect on human behavior. Christakis makes the case that it is antiquated to think in binary terms such as nature versus nurture. Humans have been shaped by both in a manner that is impossible to untangle. “As humans came increasingly to rely on the knowledge of others, they became even friendlier and kinder so that they could interact reasonably peacefully within groups and so that they could take full advantage of culture in order to survive…. Culture is an emergent property of human groups, a new property of the whole not manifested in the parts themselves…. Human culture also cumulates.” Humans are social beings. We have evolved over time so that we could not survive absent our societal underpinnings. “Like snails carrying their physical environment with them on their backs, we carry our social environment of friends and groups with us wherever we go. And surrounded by this protective social shell, we can survive an incredibly broad range of circumstances.”

“The Parisian” by Isabella Hammad

Hammad’s novel tells the life story of a Palestinian man, Midhat Kamal, who lives through the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the First World War, and the British Mandate. After his mother died and his father remarried, he was sent away to school in Constantinople and then on to France to study medicine. After the war, he eventually, reluctantly, returns to Nablus to continue the life his father has charted out for him. “He was indebted to his father, and for that alone he must marry. This debt was arranged before he was born. His father’s care was always based on this future sense, that Midhat would mature like a bond and yield to him. So although one might be convinced momentarily that family ties were petty, in the end, as Jamil said, they were everything.” Back in Nablus, Midhat dresses as a dandy, speaks Arabic with flourishes of French, reads foreign newspapers, and drinks whiskey on nights out in Jerusalem. He eventually settles into the family business, selling garments to the fellahin at the tailor shop in the khan. “Midhat was learning to dissemble and pass between spheres and to accommodate, morally, that dissemblance through an understanding of his own impermanence in each.”

This is a sprawling epic about cultural determinacy, family obligations, the nature of self, the power of memory, the fight for freedom, and one’s place in the world. Hammad’s novel uses the lens of Midhat’s life to detail the larger Palestinian battle for independence against British rule. “There lay Sahar, pregnant and exhausted, wrapped in the veil she had been fighting against. This forced rebel lore, the songs the shoeshine boys sang about the whores who wore Western clothes, all of it has some quality of revenge, disguised as ardour. Was that such a heavy price to pay, though, for their freedom?” But, at its heart, this novel is about a single man’s struggles within himself, as he grapples with his own identity. “Perhaps men had an ability to forget the strictures of past law. The past appeared eternal: what had happened was inviolable; one did not keep forever the contingencies; what did not happen was forgotten. But in the present moment, one was made more aware of what would be possible if only.” Midhat is forced to come to grips with how he will define himself in the world and what it means to have a family. “He had obeyed—and he had defied. He was one of them, and he was his own.”