Evan Osnos on street cleaner poet

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2013/07/a-billion-stories.html

When I moved to Beijing, in 2005, to write, I was accustomed to hearing the story of China’s transformation told in vast, sweeping strokes—involving one fifth of humanity, and great pivots of politics and economics. But, over the next eight years, some of the deepest changes in the lives around me have been intimate and perceptual, buried in daily rhythms that are easy to overlook. ..... in my years in China, I have been seized most of all by the sense that the national narrative, once an ensemble performance, is splintering into a billion stories.

Comments

# 1.   

I thoroughly enjoy Osnos' writing and often read his "blog."

But I feel that what he's really saying here is that he has begun to see the society he covers as one comprised of individuals. It's not China that has changed, so much as his experience of it.

Bruce, July 7, 2013, 3:54p.m.

# 2.   

I dunno -- while that gradually-increasing awareness definitely happens to most journalists here, and likely also to Osnos, there's something to the idea that society itself really is broadening out and diversifying. The variety of experience now possible in China is so much greater than what it was thirty years ago...

Eric Abrahamsen, July 8, 2013, 1:41a.m.

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