This time period — the Gold Rush and its aftermath — and Chinese-Americans’ role in it is ripe for re-examination. Until recently, the roughly 15,000 Chinese-American laborers who worked on the first Transcontinental Railroad, built in the 1860s, were all but erased from the historical record and later barred from obtaining citizenship by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
A well-known photograph from the inauguration of the Transcontinental Railroad inspired a moment in Zhang’s book. Lucy, one of the main characters, “hears the cheer that goes through the city the day the last railroad tile is hammered. A golden spike holds track to earth,” Zhang writes. “A picture is drawn for the history books, a picture that shows none of the people who look like her, who built it.”
I take it with me because it helps me track the uncharted territory of the present moment. In this act of gathering—scrawls about things noticed on the way to a store, the playbill for my son’s brief acting career, glue-sticked to the page—I’m forced to slow down and tend to the parts that evoke a whole. Sometimes they plant the seed for an idea that I might write about later on. But mostly, I relish in the quiet engagement of pen on paper, my hand working with my brain to create something concrete and real, something that can’t be deleted in an instant after it is read.
“I would suggest people could draw at this time,” he said from the house in Normandy where he has been sequestered since France practically closed down last month. “Question everything and do not think about photography.”
Instead, he recommends everyone drawing with open eyes. “I would suggest they really look hard at something and think about what they are really seeing.” The materials don’t matter: a pencil or an iPad app such as Brushes, which is what he used to create his latest picture of the Normandy landscape, exclusive to the Guardian.
During a shutdown, the things that mark our days—commuting to work, sending our kids to school, having a drink with friends—vanish and time takes on a flat, seamless quality. Without some self-imposed structure, it’s easy to feel a little untethered. A friend recently posted on Facebook: “For those who have lost track, today is Blursday the fortyteenth of Maprilay.”
As someone who works as an editor and writer from my attic office, on my own schedule, I’m accustomed to this kind of set-up—but also the isolation that come with it. When I’m not on deadline and my days aren’t that busy, time can drag and ennui can set in. Any writer or editor knows that one of the challenges of working from home and spending nearly all of one’s waking and sleeping moments there, is punctuating one’s time, differentiating moments so that they don’t all bleed together.
Like globalist, cosmopolitan has become a freighted term, not least for its anti-Semitic undertones. On the right, it is an epithet for bleeding-heart liberals who support looser immigration policies, foreign aid, and multilateral efforts to confront climate change. On the left (and the nativist right), it is used to describe the Davos crowd and footloose capitalists. But as the philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum reminds us in The Cosmopolitan Tradition, cosmopolitanism has a rich history as a mode of political and ethical thought, one that “urges us to recognize the equal, and unconditional, worth of all human beings.”
In Fiebre Tropical, Delgado Lopera renders a complex, nuanced portrayal of the migration story of a family of three generations of Colombian women. Without looking away at the real and at times oppressive hierarchies that exist between immigrants and in Latinx families and communities, Delgado Lopera gives us an intimate look at the main character’s struggle to come to terms with her gender identity amid the displacement of immigration, and the rigidly drawn gender roles of a born-again Christian household.