Listened to this in Libby and now I want to get a physical copy and annotate the heck out of it. Beautiful and sad and terrifying and enraging and comforting and hopeful and hopeless. The part that I think really got to me the most was Henry’s paranoia as an adult US citizen. It felt so unnecessary for him to be so freaked out by anything relating to China or politics there and then a phone call and you realize oh…. He’s not unnecessarily paranoid, he’s rightfully paranoid. And it’s a reality so many immigrants from communist countries deal with day to day. My bother told me a few years ago that a lot of the Russian immigrants he meets react similarly to this character and that it takes a long time for them to trust strangers, especially those that speak Russian. And the Russian Jewish immigrants more so than the orthodox Russians that he knew. It’s so hard to wrap my head around feeling so afraid while living in the US. But I can see why it’s not “safe” for so many people even once they’re here and even if they’ve been here for many years. This book really opened my eyes to this in a way I just hadn’t seen it before.