Of Holland and the Hmong

I've been back in the reading groove since Christmas, it's a good groove to have but it certainly does eat up time. In my life, there is just enough extra time each day to read, or write, but almost never both. I'm stealing this particular moment as I just finished a book last night, the kids are upstairs playing, and today is a holiday.

The groove started with Wicked, not exactly holiday-fare, but an engrossing story nonetheless. If I had to boil the theme down to one word, it would be 'perception'. I came to the book with my perceptions of the story and its characters long ingrained, and yet as I learned 'more' about the "witch" and her background, my perception became vague. Are the evil ones really evil? If we knew more, would we hate as much? How real are our perceptions of "reality"?

Next up was The Speed of Dark, set in the very near future, an autistic man must make the choice of is life. Like the best science fiction, the author takes threads of current reality and weaves them into a vibrant, new world, instantly believable and horrifying. With much of the story written in 1st person by an autistic man, I was constantly drawn into the world of my own son. If only he could read this and share his thoughts about it with me!
Again, the theme of 'perception' runs through this novel - what do the NT adults really think about the autistic community? what does it really mean to 'remove' autism from the mind? who is the 'real' person?

Lastly, and the one I finished at about 1:30 am this morning, was The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. Talk about perception! The true story of a Hmong family and their severely epileptic daughter, it is not so much about her illness or even the quest to save her, it is about humanity and how we see each other. Although captivating from beginning to end, I often found myself drifting off, wondering about my perceptions of people with different colors, different eyes, different clothes, and certainly of different cultures. Much like the other two books, this book brings to the light the struggle for those who are "different". In their "difference", I found so many similarities between the Hmong and my own son. The way they see the world, what they hear, what they see, how they react to the world - it is almost entirely different from my own reality. All the answers are different, yet the questions are all the same. Does it really matter that we see the world differently and react to things differently? Can we have a common ground? Does it even matter if we have common ground? Can we move forward together when we see different paths? Who needs to "change"?

Next up, A Thousand Splendid Suns... along with 3 more from Christmas right behind it. The writing will be slow, but just writing these words today has reminded me of so many things I've wanted to write about in the past month. We'll see which groove wins out...