Madeleine Thien

At the halfway point of Miriam Toews’ novel, Women Talking, the narrator, August Epp, describes a faded photograph clipped from a London newspaper and pinned to the wall in a nearby co-op. The caption reads, Mennonites like to spend some time chatting under the stars before going to sleep, and the photo “depicts several young men and women from our colony.” Epp says he recognizes a person in this image: “One of the women in the photograph is…

In his book, My Country and My People, the Chinese writer Lin Yutang argues that the way to examine a foreign nation “is by searching, not for the exotic but for the common human values, by penetrating beneath the superficial quaintness of manners … by observing the boys’ naughtiness and the girls’ daydreams and the ring of children’s laughter and the patter of children’s feet and the weeping of women and the sorrows of men—they are all alike.” Lin was writing about the world outside China…