S2 Book Club - Last Boat Out of Shanghai

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground today we're going to be taking a look at our latest entry into our book club last boat out of Shang High the Epic story of the Chinese who fled Ma's Revolution so this one's going to be a little bit shorter uh than I had planned because uh even though this book was fairly long uh I personally did not enjoy it so much uh so I did not take as many notes as I was planning to take and um well we'll get we'll get into it as we uh go along here uh format wise I'm going with the ebook version again usually I prefer a hard copy of the book but with this one it doesn't really matter you're not going to be flipping back and forth uh too much with this it's just kind of like a a steady read through the whole thing so uh like I mentioned I don't have too many notes here but I'm going to glance off to the side here and read some of the notes that I wrote for patreon already uh simply because usually I like to uh kind of give my thoughts on things and then see what you guys think so that I can incorporate it into the video because I may have missed something and I just wanted to make sure that I'm getting a good well-rounded look at the book uh with this one though this one was an exceptionally challenging read so let's start with the author uh one of the reasons why this is at least to me a challenging read is because I don't I don't really personally like the author's writing style the author is Helen Zia or Z however you want to say it who is uh self-described as a journalist and an activist note she is not a historian so when it comes to the writing style it's it it reads a lot like a newspaper uh newspaper article so uh it tends to have extremely overly uh descriptive language when it comes to emotional things but when it comes to the historical Parts like the parts that I was looking forward to reading about like the history of how you know uh communism got started in China that is all like reading from Wikipedia so it's not entirely an easy read because it switches back and forth you'll have like a paragraph and 75% of that paragraph will be just emotional language and then the last like sentence of that paragraph will be like the factual statement so again I don't I don't wish to uh uh lay too much criticism on this book but I have a feeling that that's probably the way this is going to come across today unfortunately so uh again the overview for this book is fairly simple it is a biography of four different people who are roughly from the same geographic region Shanghai and the goal of the book is to cover their lives as they grew up in Shanghai or wherever they were from and follows them throughout their history of leaving China in some form or fashion all of these people had very very winding paths for sure so they didn't all just get on the same boat out of Shanghai and just leave ironically all of them ended up leaving in some form or fashion but the the road to get there was very very long like I mentioned it's kind of a challenging read Because as you might have expected from kind of picking up the book and as you kind of read the book you get the impression that these four separate people are related in some way or they're going to meet each other at some way along the book and that's not true all four of these people are different and they never meet uh and even so some of the historical events that uh causes us to jump from character to character AR are kind of disjointed so this is basically like four different books in one uh we we we slice uh we slice up history into four different stories jam it together in one book and it's a little challenging to read so I think this book would have been best served by doing short stories or like exposes or something like that on each four of these people rather than just one book uh I would also mention that because of this it's really hard to follow each of the characters at one point in time I even forgot that one of the main characters existed I was literally reading and thought wait a minute who who is this again that happens frequently when reading this book so please forgive me again if my thoughts are a little bit uh disorganized on this one so jumping right into the book let's talk about our four characters I'm not going to go chapter by chapter I'm going to kind of summarize briefly here each of our four characters so starting off with Benny uh Benny is the character which I personally was most interested in at the end of the book he was the affluent son of a quote unquote traitor a very um questionable individual uh his father was very much well we get the impression that um he was a very corrupt man again a common theme throughout this book is is uh mystery like a lot of the things are very very unclear in this book and we never really find out if Benny's father was in fact a traitor we never find out if he you know what his deal was but the bottom line is that we kind of get the the idea that you know Benny was exceptionally wealthy uh during a time you know during uh World War II and before World War II where he was uh taking private chauffers to school right whereas a time in times where people had you know trouble getting food right so we follow his story as he is basically put in charge of his family after his father's arrest after the Communists take over uh the the Reds come in and arrest his father on like anti-revolutionary uh charges right so we again never really get the idea of whether or not he is guilty of this or or not but we do get the idea that there was some shady stuff going on as Benny recounted that throughout his childhood people would show up and his father being a policeman would uh just tuck uh envelopes full of cash into his shirt pocket and then move on we start learning about his hardships again when he is put in charge of his family because on basically the same day as his father is arrested his mother decides to run off with his father's bodyguard uh because for the most trivial reasons uh his mother leaves his entire family and leaves him in charge of his siblings because she could not take the shame of listening to gossip about her husband's arrest from her maang Partners so literally she's talking about she literally left her entire family and very small children uh because she couldn't handle gossip so um Benny had a hard time uh Benny was uh had a hard time with with his life after that so that's where we meet Benny uh the next one is ho he is the character that I honestly forgot about and his story gets lost completely in the other uh three people um most of his story that I found to be interesting was told in telegrams and letters back to his family in China there's a good portion in the middle of the book where a lot of telegrams and letters are are transcribed into English and we learn a lot about some of the concerns that him and his family had had because he was able to leave China very early on and was able to set up shop in the United States under a study abroad program right so um that's basically his story that's how he got out of Shanghai and um unfortunately his character is just there's very few details we don't learn a whole lot about him throughout this entire book uh so moving on to the next character ano um I'm not sure if that's how we pronounce her name either way her story is kind of lost as well uh she was the daughter of a very high ranking nationalist leader uh who was defending uh China from the Reds right uh she and her family ended up fleeing to Taiwan and that's where we spend most of her time the time with her uh is in Taiwan as they start to learn uh how to fit in with the culture there at the time uh Taiwan had a very strong Japanese influence interestingly enough so uh a lot of the book from her perspective is told about how they don't have uh running water and um toilets so they just have the simple like squat toilets so that's the thing I remember about her uh sections the most is her trying to blend in with you know sitting on the floor instead of using chairs you know Japanese style and sleeping on tatami mats instead of like an actual bed you know uh that seems to be some of the most uh substantial difficulties she went through uh and her family went through now wrapping up up our main characters with Bing uh this poor child uh went through some serious stuff and this is uh without dispute the the main character of the whole book her stories are I don't know what the percentage is but it feels like the book was 80% about Bing uh even though I'm sure the wording was actually like more equal Bing is the one that we have the most details for and I'll get to that in a moment because this matters a lot um beinging unfortunately as a very young child she doesn't know her actual name because as she was a very small child I think she was 6 years old when her original family her birth family gave her away and as if that wasn't bad enough uh she was given away at second time so uh Bing is the name that her second family gave her and that is the name that she remembered because she was old enough to remember uh her actual family name uh she can't remember throughout the book uh she can't remember her original um birth name or her surname so that's unfortunate but um that's kind of how we learn about her uh most of the time in the book is spent with the characters known as Ma and elder sister these are her adopted family uh presumably her adopted mother and her adopted elder sister uh these are the two characters which we learn about a lot throughout the book and we don't uh NE neily get a super great impression of them the last sort of I would guess maybe 30% to to 50% of Bing's story is where she's in the United States she has immigrated to the United States and dealing with some issues there now uh that's where I have uh substantial problems with this book but again we'll get to that in due time so like I mentioned I don't really have succinct nice uh well-rounded thoughts on this one um all I have is really random thoughts so let's go over those now uh I think that if you are interested in learning more about Chinese culture in the early parts of the 20th century and some of the hardships that uh families had to go through in in uh the wake of the Communist Revolution this is your book uh however if you're looking to learn about the Communist Revolution itself this is not your book there is very very little history in this book at all we learn a lot about atrocities uh we've got a lot of atrocities that I can't even talk about because they're so horrible uh and um this content would not be good for you know um a mixed audience right so we we learn about what the Japanese did to the Chinese and Nan King we learn about the the crimes the Japanese soldiers uh committed with basically any any Chinese uh civilian at the time uh horrible horrible horri horrible things and uh we also learned about some of the stuff that the Reds were doing but by and large it's told as if it's a far off thing like it's a far away land this this mystery called communism and we don't actually learn about any uh communist revolutionaries we just learn we just have like this forboding feeling throughout the first I don't know 20% of the book or so where you know we get the feeling that oh the reds are coming or the Japanese are coming we have to leave and um that's present through all four people but we don't ever like understand you know like okay well why it's always like it's a far away enemy that's that's coming towards us and we either must leave or we must hide or must get fake papers and go stay with this relative on the other side of the country and you know flee the country itself or no we're not going to flee the country we're just going to flee to this other City to escape what's going on but we never learn what's going on right there are very few details of of uh why the the this mystery this mysterious thing called communism is such a bad thing and this matters uh because like I mentioned in the in the back like in the last 50% of the book or so we have an awful lot of complaints about this great land called America so again the the kind of mystery behind why this this the backdrop of Communism communism and the Communist Revolution uh you know M's Revolution is a footnote in this book it is like a distant reference it's not like front and center like you were uh led to believe you know kind of on from the professional reviews of this book and from like you know the the description right and this taints a lot of what happens in the book at the at the end of the book so uh we'll get to that in a moment though I did want to mention though the common theme in this book the common theme in this book is cruelty uh cruelty and if I had to say uh greed cruelty and greed are exceptionally common themes throughout this book and it's not from the Communists uh we don't necessarily hear again like I mentioned we don't hear hardly of any of the communist crimes we just hear it as a distant far off thing when I say cruelty is a theme in this book I mean cruelty among the characters in this book family members neighbors friends some of the secondary characters we meet in this book uh cruelty is absolutely just Paramount like it is it is the number one theme uh people being cruel to each other especially from the characters Ma and elder sister now again I think and being very careful here in my description I think that a lot of the problems that I noticed with this book are more cultural at the time than uh we might want to think so so for instance um when I see you know Ma or elder sister doing something cruel to Bing I think well how horrible you know this is there is no way you can justify you know this level of abuse and you know the author kind of dances around it a little bit especially with Bing uh for a very specific reason but it's like you know I just get the feeling that this is this is a cultural thing rather than um The Human Condition which we'll uh we'll get to at the end I don't necessarily think that this book would make a good historical reference if that's what you're trying to do uh if you are trying to use this in say a report or as some kind of uh firsthand account I don't know if you can actually use this like we mentioned on the first book we talked about biographies tend to be secondary sources and because of that you're not actually hearing it from the horse's mouth so to speak we're not hearing from Benny we're hearing from Helen who's telling us about Benny and because of that it's a little bit biased especially when it comes to Bing I would almost I would say that if I was writing a thesis about Bing and I used this book as a reference I would get torn to shreds uh from an academic perspective and from you know an an analytical perspective because of the author's relationship with Bing this is not mentioned the book anywhere it is a small tiny footnote in the epilogue and this should have been advertised right up front I think in the spirit of disclosure uh because it taints the whole book before reading the epilogue where this uh secret was revealed uh I frequently found myself thinking wait just a minute this does not sound accurate we learn about Benny for instance and out of all the stuff that happened to him you know he he had a hard time and there's a a few uh lines and a few uh chapters where we learned about him adopting the Christian faith um because he he used to like work or live near um a Catholic Church who was in his area and he just found himself you know sitting in the Pew one day and I can't remember if it was actually the priest or one of the volunteers there came down and sat with him and asked him like you know what's going on you seem you know upset and uh that's when he basically converts uh and we learn you know this is how he dealt with the adversarial uh things that were going on in his life this is how he dealt with tough times and this is how he dealt with adversity we don't learn about any kind of coping mechanisms from any of the other characters especially Bing Bing's character despite the fact I you know she without a doubt suffered greatly but we don't learn about it's almost like it didn't matter to her um the author tries to paint it as look she was abandoned as a child twice so because of that she learned to be extremely tough and okay fine uh but I don't believe that I I you know it's almost like something happens to Bing that's absolutely devastating and the the author like it reads like a propaganda novel like like a Marvel character where Bing just like magically get it's over something and there's no like emotion whatsoever except for her her heroic rise out of the ashes right you know it's like wait a minute you know I feel like every every chapter with being it's like ends with something like and she picked herself up and dusted herself off and charged forward um you know I get the kid as tough you know the kid all of these characters without a shadow of a doubt are tougher than I would have been certainly but they're not you know Superman and I feel like Bing's character is Superman and the reason that this matters is because the grand secret that we are kept from this entire book is that Bing is the author's mother so that kind of taints the whole thing Bing is perfect in every way because the author is writing about her mother and I get it that's fine but this also matters uh when it comes to the content of this book Because as I did some research after reading the book book uh this author already wrote a biography of her mother so this book is literally recycled notes from that first book coupled with a few other random stories and the author is trying to paint this out to be like this is you know completely original work and it's not um I've read reviews of the original book that she wrote about her mother and apparently it's very very similar to what what was told in this book so it's like I feel like because of that the author is trying to squeeze an extra book out of something that it could have been just an expose or it could have been just like a magazine article this book could have been at least 90% shorter and we got the same uh the same experience so again I don't wish to be exceptionally harsh on this book uh but this book was 500 pages uh and I feel like it could have been much much shorter so anyway on on that um one of the hardest things that I had to kind of kind of reconcile and and this and this um this effects what I'm about to say at the end when it comes to like the Lessons Learned one of the things that was really really hard for me to write about and really hard for me to kind of reconcile in my own mind is the hardship itself because I get kind of the the impression that there's there's always an element okay like going into this book the reason that I put put this book on the list to choose from is because I thought you know what like there's always going to be some element of well we did what we had to do to survive and we know this from other historical events right like read any book about Leningrad and tell me that people didn't do desperate things just to survive uh and I was kind of expecting that from this book because we know from other historical books what happened in Shanghai we know what happened uh in the days of the Communist Revolution um taking over the country and I was expecting to read a lot about like people doing what they had to do to survive and that is definitely a theme from this book but I do Wonder a lot of the time how much of this is that situation and how much of this is just people not being very nice to begin with people just being garbage human beings no matter what and you know adversity and hardship coming not necessarily because of you know the hardship sake but because these people were kind of self-imposing to a little to a little bit of a degree now again I want to be very very careful in describing this because you know all of these people again I feel kind of bad you know talking about because all of these people went through more hardship than me for sure however I I just get a really bad taste in my mouth from the from the end of Bing story I get like a really bad uh impression of Bing which kind of colors this whole book and now that I you know know that the author is uh the child of beinging it's like well is any of this true and is any of this like the the real story like or is this all just you know slightly melling of of the story I get the feeling and the reason that I I I sort of followed Benny more than any of the other characters is because Benny's story it's like the author neglected the propaganda angle so we get a really close view of Benny uh ho and anuel are ignored uh I think in the book Bing is a Marvel character and uh again Benny is the one where it's like in that sweet spot of the author not really taking that propaganda angle but also we have a really good documented story here which is again why I kind of focused on Benny quite a lot but again the hardship how much of this is real and how much of this is a slight bending of the story um just as a blanket statement There is almost zero altruism in this book There is almost zero generosity like I remember uh times when a character a random unnamed character was generous to Bing or to Benny uh and and that the fact that that is so memorable you know that tells me that that the situation was very very desperate right but the problem with that is is that you know we we all even in times of hardship recognize respect and there's a lot of wholesomeness that comes with a random act of kindness right and understandably in a tough situation like you know Ma's revolution in the wake of that uh Good Deeds are few and far between but what was really really disappointing to see and I'm is really sad to see is the is people doing this to the main characters ma the characters of ma and elder sister were just outright to me it seemed like they were just awful people now the author tries to like soften the blow of this but there is no like there's no justification for ma being extremely abusive to beinging and treating her like a slave throughout most of her childhood there's no justification for elder sister to be one of the most greedy people I have ever read about in literature uh like I tell you you know it's not painted this way by the author because the author has a personal connection to these people and this is kind of where my troubles with with being kind of begin and it and it's and it taints the other three's story because in one minute we can see like a mother figure or some kind of you know uh person who is supposed to be caring for any one of these characters right in one minute we see like you know the the doting loving mother figure and then like the next paragraph It's just straight up abuse and straight up cruelty like at one point even you know Bing runs away and uh because of this abuse and elder sister convinces her to come back because Ma has you know uh she started taking more opium uh she started smoking more opium and she's now calmer a lot more so it's like really does that does that really wholesome tale of love no it's not um and again I think that this is probably cultural we get this from the concept uh from the from the back end of the story from Bing as well uh because the last I would say good 30% of Bing story is her living in the United States and trying to find a suitable husband so this is perfectly understandable um because at the time in and I guess to some degree even to this day uh arranged marriages were the norm uh so Bing being you know not having an ancestral line uh to give her luck right because she remember she her her birth family is was not known people are not like they like being the character mentions love marriages uh for instance and not something that's done out of utility uh for instance several of the characters end up marrying foreigners uh for the utility of having uh dual citizenship or some kind of easier line to to immigrate out of China and Bing is um is no different in that regard she moves to America she's finally able to escape Shanghai and she finds herself in a country where uh she's trying to find a suitable husband specifically for a green card marriage uh she had at the time I think it was 6 months to find a husband um and that is that is what it's about she does mention several times that she would like to have a quote unquote western style love marriage where people are actually getting married because they like each other you know and they they you know they love each other right like Americans are kind of used to uh whereas in China at the time uh the the reason for marriage was more utilitarian so uh that aside that is that is 100% a cultural difference but sometimes this kind of taints things because uh it is in Bing's quest for marriage that we've learned how how greedy elder sister is so you know for again let me just state that I I get the fact that you know during the late 1940s 50s even 60s if you want an unwed Chinese immigrant fresh off the boat from Shanghai uh does does not really face particularly good prospects at the time so trying to marry someone in order to support yourself and is is extremely common um however it is how this Saga is told that we learn a lot about the characters and I don't think we learned some good stuff I think that on the one hand we've got desperation and on the other hand we've got a twinge of greed coming in just to spit it out and give you the example that I'm thinking of is elder sister uh at the time uh there were quite a lot of Chinese immigrants that had immigrated to the United States before Bing and um many of them were uh eligible you know uh Su right so we we learned from like this one chapter where Bing just starts going through dudes you know trying to pick some guy that is you know wealthy like that is the number one criteria this guy must be wealthy uh and elder sister uh even even uh brings it uh to takes it to another degree because she will like SC shout out dudes who are wealthy in order to like kind of bring them around and um being one day meets her what is to become her uh Future Husband uh he's an older guy uh he's much older than she thought uh as we learn later on uh due to his fate uh but he he you know he likes being quite a lot and being thinks that she might have the potential you know after they get married and we settle all this financial stuff she might think that she might actually love this guy at some point so she might have a a chance at a western style marriage after all but no elder sister swoops in and um tells this guy this one guy uh because he seems to be wearing a nice suit or something uh she tells him hey you know the the payment the sort of dowy so to speak for Bing is going to be double what everybody else is um because elder sister could sniff out money literally that's what Bing says so yeah it's like you know are you how much of this is desperation and how much of this is greed um I kind of get the feeling that it's a lot of greed sometimes uh and as we get down into the the the B bottom of the book I I just that that sort of inkling feeling really does turn into a bad taste in my mouth because um at the front of the book we we again learn of a lot of atrocities we learn a lot about some very very bad things but uh and obviously VI L the reasons why all four of these people and their families fled China is because of the crimes that were being committed by the Communists by the Japanese you know at first and it's like look the author's uh opinions start to bleed through in the in the back uh half of the book Because you know I'm sorry this is so disorganized but uh here's what I really mean is like look the back half of Bing's story is her trying to squeeze or her or rather elder sister trying to squeeze an extra th000 worth of doy money out of this guy and then turning around and and trying to run around from the ins and uh you know complaining about this that or the other and like literally in the first half of this book we're learning about you know Japanese soldiers bayonetting civilians and children and the contrast of that just gives me a really bad feeling it just makes me feel like hm this is this is something else isn't it like I have never ever ever read a book or a story about a World War II veteran or a World War II era person or really of of any uh background who is not thankful uh every day of their life for living through the horrors of World War II and the the postwar years you know I have never read a book where the author in the beginning of the book is talking about how families are escaping China because the Communists are putting heads on sticks and displaying them in the town square and by the end of the book one of the main characters is complaining about a suburb of New York being slightly racist and slightly impolite to Chinese immigrants there are more harsh words in this book towards the FBI and the ins than there are towards the Communists who made them flee their own country like toward like once you get to about the halfway point in the book you realize man who are the bad guys in this book the FBI and the ins and uh Senator Joe McCarthy you know famous for McCarthyism right they rooting out the commies everywhere um like they talk literally the author has more harsh words for the ins than for the Communists who were putting heads on sticks so it kind of makes you wonder is this accurate like how much of this is is accurate and I should mention throughout the book we also get like pictures of of these people and you know they're wearing like nice fur coats in New York City or in San Francisco and it's like wait a minute here you know what's going on um how much of this is genuine hardship you know I I don't want to be like you know exceptionally negative towards this thing but these are the kinds of things you have to read about and and and take into account when you're reading a historical account account you know I have never read a book by like a u a veteran of Stalingrad or a u someone who survived you know the Dust Bowl in America you know 1930s you know Great Depression era those people were some hard people and they lived through some hard times because you know only the hard uh people survived in a lot of cases imagine for instance okay here's a good way of explaining imagine for instance that uh Alexander soljan niten the guy who wrote the gulag archipelago survived uh many years in the Soviet gag system imagine for a moment if that guy at the end of his series of books ended up living in a nice suburb of New York City and uh complaining that they didn't have uh you know the right kind of chocolate cake on the menu at the restaurant you know that's like you lived through decades and Decades of hardship and starvation and you're complaining about something that's trivial to me that that kind of taints that would taint the whole book and that's exactly what happens here you get to the end of the book and the author through being the author is uh complaining about like racism and immigration policy in the United States and it's like contrast that with at the beginning of this book that there were so many deceased infants uh on the on the streets of Shanghai that they were just picking them up in carts every morning like how awful is that and you're going to complain to me about the ins like I don't know maybe it's just me being kind of ranty you know I'm sorry I don't mean to be it's just I feel like I was trying to glean some lessons learned from this book book and I feel like I was um I was kind of let on maybe that's my fault uh maybe I had unrealistic expectations for this book I I think I certainly did um because I I expected to learn about the Epic stories of the Chinese who fled Ma's Revolution and at the end of the book I just get an ins lesson and an immigration policy uh letter so it's like you know I don't know but in order to salvage this review uh I do think that there are a few Lessons Learned From This Book and I think they're good ones and uh some of our supporters on patreon and and elsewhere did an exceptionally good job of uh uh separating the wheat from the chaff and uh talking about some of these um issues saber from patreon writes I think your observations about the author's biases and strange sentiments on America are correct but I was happy to learn more about Chinese culture which I saw as the primary value of the book with ch China becoming a bigger deal geopolitically I'll take all the information I can get if it helps me understand the Chinese world view and why their government behaves or behaved the way it does I do wish the author included more information about the Communists motivations and procedures or the transition between Mao era China and modern era China good read anyway in my opinion yeah I agree uh I think that uh that's a good way of of kind of wrapping things up I do appreciate having more of a background of Chinese culture and especially from the 1940s during you know the kind of revolutionary period I wish it was more maybe my expectations again were way too high for this but um it uh it does kind of give you an understanding of of how uh desperate the situation was and especially how people in times of hardship don't necessarily behave the way that you would hope them to uh again another comment from this time from kitten is one takeaway if you're going to run run first and run fast it seems like people who waited too long to flee had fewer exit strategies and more competition both to get out and again when arriving as refugees elsewhere that is definitely a true statement through throughout the book those who did flee early uh had a better chance uh however one common theme throughout the entire book is money now again through my sort of you know Rose tinted goggles I guess uh I tended to view uh money in this book as a source of greed however it is undeniably true that money equals options for all four of them money was a huge problem even for Benny who was exceptionally wealthy uh at the beginning of the book he immediately found himself uh without much of that money as it was confiscated his whole home was was confiscated by uh the Communist revolutionaries so again money buys you options in a time of hardship it's not necessarily stressed in that way um and a lot of the book like I mentioned for Bing like uh you know you'll get the idea that oh well you know we had to focus on money so much because money meant survival and that is true uh however the times when the author uses that excuse for bad behavior it's nothing but greed you know they try to paint the author tries to paint the story of you know elder sister here uh doing what she had to survive by squeezing an extra th000 worth of doy money out of uh being's first husband so it's like man you know that's unfortunate um but yeah you do get the idea that you know money is most certainly a uh an option Giver that is for certain um it's just a shame that for me my own biases I guess my my own bias is that I can't help but see the author's bias so it kind of makes it hard for me to read this book so so wrapping things up I think that this book is an interesting look at how some families fared when it comes to the Chinese Revolution and how they were able to survive and uh proceed with their lives following the Chinese Communist Revolution now when it comes to history the lack of any significant historical data points for this book is um is is a little bit disappointing but we also have to remember that China's history is long very very complicated uh it's it's hotly debated even to this day because as we know you know China is a communist nation and much like how following the the collapse of the Soviet Union we got a a pretty good look in some cases regarding some of the crimes that occurred during the during the Russian uh communist era even to this day we still have trouble in Russia getting a lot of uh research points for instance even World War II history in Russia is sometimes heavily censored and the archives are not public they're they're still closed as state Secrets even things during World War II in China it's even worse uh good luck finding any history in China in modern-day China that is accurate uh so anyone who attempts to to delve into the Chinese Communist history particularly around this subject area when people were trying to leave U ma Revolution you're just not going to find any sort of accuracy uh so as as um as biased as this Source seems uh it might be the best we can do in some situations so again this is one of those giant topics where we must take things with a grain of salt and how uh if we're trying to do some research using this these data points we we really have to be very careful uh where the information is coming from when it comes to what we were really reading this book for which is to learn some modern-day lessons uh that can be applied to our you know modern times today uh you know you can cherry-pick all you want and there are quite a few Lessons Learned but I'm not entirely certain that uh these lessons weren't just kind of tacitly known anyway uh such as money really is going to be your deciding factor the ability to change currency out of a hyperinflated currency is exceptionally valuable uh there were a few stories detailing that about how hyperinflation uh resulted in people having to spend their paychecks within just a few minutes of getting that paycheck before that money lost its value even further so basic economic lessons that we kind of you know passively know uh are very interesting uh but it it does reinforce a lot of what we already know being able to move quickly when necessary and to move fast when you know that something substantial is occurring like you know your nation is is being uh torn through a civil war right and uh you know the reds are coming they're uh they're expanding their control and they'll be in your District soon being able to make decisions quickly uh but not too quickly so much so that you uh make r decisions many times uh decisions made in haste right uh ended up not really being the best option for uh many people so there are lots of little lessons um I'm afraid that we've kind of squeezed all of the lessons we can out of this book so far but I think that it was uh definitely worth reading if you had no idea about uh Chinese history but I would also most certainly recommend to not stop at this book and to definitely seek out additional sources before leaning on this one too heavily I think that's about it I think that's about all I can ramble on about today um hopefully this was helpful for some of you who might be interested in learning a little bit more about not just the content of the book but how we should really view a lot of these research sources either way it's another one under our belt and hopefully it was helpful so thank you again for watching and we will see you next time and as always fight in the shade