"The best way to get this country faithful to the American dream of tolerance and equality is to start small." true or fause

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serve the people! ,” smoothly translated by julia lovell, offers an initial sample of yan lianke’s writing to an english-speaking audience. a bluntly drawn, mildly erotic fable, it teases mao zedong by poking fun at a true believer who obeys the chairman’s precepts too literally. to a western sensibility, the broad strokes of yan lianke’s humor would seem to pose little risk of inciting rebellion, whether of the flesh or of the body politic. but then, part of the book’s attraction is that it doesn’t have a western sensibility. it lets the reader see — or rather, intuit — what jokes chinese officials don’t consider funny, and how very little it takes for a writer to be branded an incendiary in 21st-century china, more than three decades after the death of mao, a decade after the death of deng xiaoping and seven years since china entered the world trade organization, a move that would seem to signal a willingness (however wary) to mingle with the rest of the world.

the narrator is a first person, participant one, who describes in the simple past tense important and difficult events in his earlier life. he also provides temporal markers as the month (january) and the time (12: 30 pm). finally the account of his experience is very detailed, to the extent that a participant narrator would talk the same way about his experiences. a good example of such detail is the mention of the “bovril ration” which historically was a native american food adopted by european explorers in arctic and antarctic regions due to its high level of calories.