A Little Pink Awakening from the Perspective of "When You Fly Like a Bird to Your Mountain"

"When You Fly Like a Bird to Your Mountain", the English original title "Educated: A Memoir", is Tara Westover (Tara Westover) about her never receiving formal education until she was 17 years old, until she obtained it at Cambridge University. Personal growth experience for a Ph.D.

Tara was born into a Mormon survivalist family in Idaho, USA. Growing up in the mountains, I have 7 children in my family. My parents don’t trust any public institutions, they don’t give their children birth certificates, they don’t send them to school, they never go to the hospital, and they only use herbal medicine at home even if they have a car accident or severe burns. heal. Before the age of 17, almost all of Tara's knowledge of the world came from her father.

An American legend that seems far away and unfamiliar, when entering the author's emotions, the father's brainwashing, the tear with the family, the thirst for the outside world, the familiar struggles and compromises come to the face, this is not exactly like a CCP The whole process of Little Pink's awakening?

Beginning of doubt

Before the age of 16, Tara had been living on the remote Buck's Peak. His father instilled in his children the idea that the federal government would persecute them. He did not receive public education, did not communicate with other families, and lived a life of escapism. This possibility of cutting off communication with the outside world is like the "wall" that the CCP has built for ideological control. The demonized federal government is also like the excuse the CCP has made for years to shut down the country - "foreign forces".

In order to support such a theory, an exact case must be found to prove it, so Tara's father processed and rewrote the "Ruby Mountain Incident", and packaged the far-right racist Randy Weaver as an unwilling child to accept it. Victims of public education while being sniped by the federal government. Reminiscent of Hong Kong's "anti-extradition movement", the CCP also used the same method to denounce the demonstrators as thugs in order to maintain the justice of the police's violent repression.

Growing up in such an environment, Tara and the other children never questioned their father's authority. Until Tara's third brother, Tyler, decides to leave the family to go to college, Tara feels betrayed for the first time and doubts the world she lives in. After Taylor left, her father's scrap yard was understaffed, and her father, who had always believed in the Mormon dogma that "women shouldn't work," pushed ten-year-old Tara to a dangerous construction site. His father was only concerned about efficiency, and threw the scrap metal at Tara at will, causing Tara to be accidentally injured and a big hole in his leg. The father who never trusted the hospital only let the mother, who is a herbalist, use pseudo-scientific homeopathy. therapy to treat. Tara first had the idea of going to school under the double backlog of her father's double standard and her brother's runaway incident that she couldn't understand.

Just as China has written "over the wall" into the law as an illegal act, Tara's desire for education is seen as surrendering to the devil, violating the sacred teachings, and for devout believers, it is tantamount to being sentenced to death.

Maybe school wasn't as wicked as Dad thought because Tyler was the kindest person I knew and he loved school - he seemed to love it more than he loved his family. The seeds of curiosity have been sown, and it only takes time and boredom to grow.

Knowing that the smart people around her have opened the door to a new world by overturning the wall, Little Pink also became curious. This is the beginning of all stories similar.

the truth of the matter

Under the constant pressure and intervention of her father, Tara passed the ACT exam with hard work and successfully entered Brigham Young University founded by the Mormon Church. Tara, who stepped into the school for the first time, thought that Europe was a country. As if a barbarian broke into modern civilization, the first impression of little pink people outside the wall is arrogance and ignorance.

Although she walked towards the crowd with curiosity, Tara was frightened by the different voices around her, and she started a self-protection mode to hide in the safe area surrounded by her father's conservatism.

My loyalty to my father is directly proportional to the distance between us. On the mountain, I can resist. But here, in this bright and noisy place, surrounded by pagans disguised as saints, I cling to every truth, every doctrine he taught me. Doctors are sons of the fallen. Home education is God's will.

Like Little Pink's first experience over the wall, she still can't get rid of the influence of the old world. Of course, after years of brainwashing, it is difficult to change their thinking logic at one time. But Tara begins to realize that some of her past perceptions are wrong, and that there are holes in her father's knowledge system.

The real rupture probably begins with uncovering the truth about the "Ruby Hill Incident", and Tara marvels at how ridiculous the lies that her father had crafted, the foundation that trapped them in their home no longer exists, the mountain that her father built with conspiracy theories Start to collapse. When she learned that the nickname "nigger" her brother Sean used to make fun of her turned out to be a cruel historical symbol, Tara said, "I can no longer allow myself to bear the brunt of a conflict that I don't understand."

When Tara kept chasing the truth, avoiding her father's arrogance, another hidden danger appeared. The second brother, Sean, started domestic violence for the first time when Tara was fifteen years old. After going to college, the change of mind caused Sean to intensify physical and mental torture on her, and constantly used insults such as "prostitutes". Words demean Tara's personality. If his father constructed a set of extreme worldviews, Sean perfectly inherited this set of concepts, as a prop for the trial, and spontaneously acted as a maintainer of order. The CCP’s little pinks also digest themselves in a similar context, proudly acting as the spokesperson of hegemonism, backing up the powerful mountains, and reporting and other methods have been tried and tested, and they have an overwhelming advantage in the right to speak.

At this time, Tara did not need the support of her parents financially for a long time, but she still needed to live in her parents' house during the winter and summer vacations and was in a state of semi-independence, so she could not completely get rid of the control of the family. Just like the trick that Little Pink is best at, "There is a kind of don't make money from the Chinese", if the current interest relationship exists, it will always be threatened. It wasn't until she got the Gates Cambridge Scholarship that it was a real escape for Tara. Facing the falling wall, the father began to panic and fear, but still did not stop the shame of kidnapping Tara in the name of love.

"If you're in America," he whispered, "we can find you wherever you are. I've buried a thousand gallons of gasoline in the ground. I can pick you up and take you home when the world ends. , let you be at peace. But if you go to the other side of the ocean..."

This passage makes many readers think that Tara's father's love is sincere, and even if it is a paranoid concept, there is room for error. Perhaps this is the reason why Tara is deeply entangled in the conflict between family and education, and it is also the predicament that every rebel in China cannot escape from the chaotic logic.

real break

Tara, who left the United States and went to Cambridge, was in a similar situation to Chinese students. People can't choose the family they were born in, and they can't choose their nationality. Tara, who grew up in a garbage dump, is at a loss in front of her classmates with prominent family backgrounds. Her identity as a Chinese makes the rebels suspect that nationality may be the original sin. Wandering in a country where history and civilization are intertwined, knowledge and reason have penetrated Tara's thoughts, and the sense of shame in memory is getting thinner and thinner. The limited freedom exudes a psychedelic color, once eliminating the difference in personality. But an email from Tara's sister Audrey dragged her back to reality.

It turned out that Tara was not the only one who suffered from Sean's violence. Audrey was determined to expose Sean's sinful behavior to her parents, hoping that Tara could help her. The mother, who has always been swinging between her father and Tara, also showed signs of awakening feminist consciousness at this time, expressing her willingness to support their sisters. So Tara mustered up the courage and decided to go home to face the war, only to be betrayed by her sister and mother. Tara has become known to everyone, everyone believes that Tara's memory is wrong, and let his fear bow to Satan, intending to destroy the integrity of the family. Once again, she fell into self-doubt and scrutiny, and the tenderness she had finally learned no longer worked.

This monster kid followed me for a month before I found the logic to expel her: I might be crazy. If I'm crazy, everything makes sense. If I was sane, nothing would make sense. The logic seems awful, and it's a relief at the same time. I'm not evil, I'm just sick.

The split of the mother may seem unreasonable, but in the anti-extradition incident, I believe that many people have a similar experience. They will jump over the wall, know the reason for the movement, and understand the "five demands". They criticize the system and praise the value of freedom of speech in chat. However, they turn around and start reposting articles that support and denounce Huang. Eleven turns into a flag bearer as an avatar. Light up the flag. The ultimate reason is that the idea of unification has been deeply rooted in their blood, and there is no possibility of escaping this land in this life. The suppressed emotions need to be exported, but it is useless to stand on the opposite side, so they are forcing themselves to be logical and self-consistent. The ideological system finally collapsed under the circumstances.

The same is true of the mother, who willingly accepts the tyranny of her father's ideology, and at the same time hopes that she can have a parental status equivalent to the title of "mother".

The power of science lies in the fact that once human beings acquire the ability to think independently, it is difficult to return to their original state. The betrayal and separation did not make Tara compromise. She still found her worth through fact-checking, and rejected her father's blessing, officially breaking with the family and never returning to Buck's Peak.

All my struggles, my years of study, have been to give myself the privilege of witnessing and experiencing more truths than what my father gave me, and using those truths to frame my own mind. I came to believe that the ability to evaluate multiple ideas, multiple histories, and multiple perspectives is at the heart of self-creation. If I back down now, I will lose more than an argument. I would lose control of my thoughts.

She finally found the most reliable witness and ally of her life, herself.

When Tara first heard about the symptoms of bipolar disorder—depression, mania, paranoia, euphoria, grandiose delusions, persecution delusions—in a class, she immediately thought of her father. It turned out that her father was sick and her brother Sean was also sick. If she proposed such an idea to them, the family would definitely think that Tara was the sick person.

Just like this country and its people have never admitted that they are sick, when the pneumonia swept the world and the whole world was committed to fighting the epidemic, they were committed to smearing and blaming. When Tara's family experienced car accidents, burns, and concussions, they were not allowed to go to the hospital. They insisted that their mother use herbal medicine for treatment, just like China insists on using traditional Chinese medicine to treat pneumonia. If this isn't a true story, I'd even think the author is insinuating it on purpose.

The core of many book reviews revolves around how to get rid of the influence of the family of origin, and it seems to have the same structure and context as how the sober Chinese should behave themselves. Judging from the results of Tara's treatment, it is probably impossible to have both. It is useless to persuade each other. After trying to understand each other to no avail, we can only physically isolate each other, cut off the tentacles of each other's influence, and use knowledge and independent thinking to build our own value system.

The purpose of sorting out such a comparison is to show that the growing environment of Little Pink is equally bad. Behind every rebel is a sad growth history. We could have become Sean, but we were fortunate enough to become Tara ( degraded form). And that comes at the price of irreparable ruptures and lengthy periods of self-healing. We chose to be miserable people, not happy pigs.

I end with one of my favorite lines from the book, "Who wrote history? I think, it's me."