The disadvantage of super convenient and tasty no knead bread is its short life expectancy of the bread: without added fats it stales pretty fast. The advantage of having stale bread in the kitchen? Opportunities to try some tasty hearty yet healthy panade soup recipes…

Been listening to The Teaching Company’s lectures when in kitchen for months, and what’s playing this evening was Professor Michael Sugrue’s Plato, Socrates, and the Dialogues. Plato’s Republic, which was translated as 理想国 The Ideal Nation in Chinese, trying to find the definition of Justice, the having and doing of what is one’s own.

Then there’s Thomas MORE’s Utopia, which YAN Fu in 1896 translated as 乌托邦, The Nation of No Substance. Linguistically the term Utopianism refers to either ‘no place’ or ‘good place’ according to its Greek root. Most of the studies conducted in the west focus on the ‘no place’ meaning, yet in China it has been always a ‘better place’…

Suddenly remembered LIN Zhao, the outspoken Peking university student executed more than 40 years for speaking out the truth: seeking for justice and tearing off the hypocritical mask of the regime, and HU Jie’s documentary In Search of LIN Zhao’s Soul, which I saw years ago in an underground documentary cinema in Shanghai in a stormy summer night…

The story is still untold, as my search on the internet shows very limited information about the more than 200,000 characters LIN Zhao wrote with a hairpin dipped in her blood. The Wikipedia page was short and dry:

Lin Zhao (林昭) (pen name Peng Lingzhao); 1932–1968, was an outspoken dissident during the Hundred Flowers Movement of 1957. During this time intellectuals such as herself were encouraged to criticize the Communist Party of China, but were eventually punished for doing so.

In October 1960, Lin Zhao was first arrested in Suzhou for being a counterrevolutionary. She was later sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. While in prison, she famously wrote hundreds of pages of critical commentary about Mao Zedong using her own blood. She was executed in 1968.

And none of the Youtube videos of HU Jie’s documentary has English subtitle… What about the beautiful girl and her never published letter to People’s Daily? Where are the documents her sister donated to Hoover Institute? And the farewell heartbreaking smile she gave to her classmate before walking into Ti Lan Qiao Prison…

Will tell the story tomorrow.