The Red Thread | Asian American Bookview

The Red Thread
by Nicholas Jose
Chronicle Books, 2000, 254 pp, $24.95
A young Chinese art scholar finds that his love affair with an Australian artist has been detailed in a two-century-old novel.
EXCERPT

y English was already good when I graduated from Fudan University in Shanghai. After my time at college I spoke like a native, only with greater consciousness of changes in register. My father, Professor Shen, was on the committee for academic exchanges between China and the United States. He is a distinguished historian of modern China and a leading Communist Party intellectual. As a dialectical materialist, he knew that global capitalism would triumph over all other ideologies and systems in the late twentieth century and that by harnessing those energies China would grow rich and preeminent once again. In that way he is still a revolutionary. He planned for me, his firstborn son, to become an economist and an American green card holder, an analyst of money flow for the transnational corporations that were extending their operations into China. It was his string-pulling that got me into the turbocharged economic programs at Georgetown University, along with all those jocks and nerds and genuises, the sons and daughters of Washington lawyers and Wall Street traders.
That was when I became addicted to television, French fries, the Colonel, chocolate chip ice cream, pad Thai noodles. I worked out at the gym and developed muscle. I wore my campus sweatshirt with pride. But underneath I always remained a studious young gentleman from Shanghai.
On weekends I educated myself by visiting the city museum. It had a rich collection of Classical sculpture, medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European painting, and American art from early folk craft through to the most contemporary installations. It rewarded me in ways that my economics studies failed to do. The museum also had an important oriental collection that included a traditional Chinese house plundered by a Yankee adventurer and removed to the States when China was on her knees in the late Qing dynasty. Inside that house a scholar's studio was set up replete with the finest old brush holder, ink-mixing bowl, and calligraphic scrolls. The objects were impossibly distanced from the life of their own culture, but respected there in that foreign environment to a degree I had never seen before.

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