Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run is one of the handful of fictions I read during my teenage years. I was trying to learn about life in the modern western world, but I was surprised by how sad Harry the Rabbit was, even when he got everything I was dreaming of, a middle class life.

What was more surprising to me is that when my uncle, who was also my Math tutor at the time, saw the book, he borrowed it. Why would my uncle, a Math professor with a happy family, want to read about such as sad life? I didn’t understand.

My father told me that my uncle denounced his father, my grandfather, during the culture revolution and volunteered to go to Xinjiang, a remote rural area, in the knowledge youth re-education movement.

He built his family there, married a Uyghur woman and had a son. When my grandfather got back from the labor camp, he used his influence in the university to find a job for my uncle, so that my uncle and his whole family can move from Xinjiang back to Wuhan.

Maybe this experienced somehow echoed with Harry’s story in the John Updike novel? I am not sure.

Now that I have reached the age of my uncle when he was tutoring me, I am reading Rabbit, Run again. This time, I truly felt the stingy empathy that drew my uncle to borrowing the book then.

The human condition is upon us and there is no easy way out.

My way of facing the music is write down my vulnerability and share them through this anonymous platform.

BTW, my uncle died of heart attack in 2017. It was very sudden, and I never got to see him again after 2015, the year that my grandfather passed away. In fact, I never got to say thank you for his tutoring.

My father may still hold grudges over his betrayal of my grandfather. I never got to ask them about how they feel about the past.