THE LOG is a periodical series about daily encounters giving inspirations for thinking and writing.

“THE LOG” 的中文版本为 近处 . 

“There Will Be Pie In The Sky When I Die!”

I was amused reading this line on the W train to work in the morning. The train was packed as usual in peak hours, but I was lucky to get lost in readings as sitting through from the first stop until getting off at Rector Street near my office in downtown Manhattan. Thinking of how close this is to a Chinese saying “天上掉馅饼!”, I was smiling, or even laughing out loud at my iPhone, which of course, is completely normal on the subway in NY, or any cities on planet earth where subways and iPhones have “colonized”.

I was reading China Hands: The Adventures and Ordeals of the American Journalists Who Joined Forces with the Great Chinese Revolution, a book of stories on western journalists who were searching and reporting their own stories of China in the early twentieth century. I was immediately drawn to the book by the beautiful writing of Peter Rand, a professor at the Boston University. The first chapter of China Hands is about Rayna Phrome and her revolutionary journalist friends (including Mikhail Borodin)  in China, around the time when Chiang Kai-shek broke up with the revolution by killing workers and communists in 1925 Shanghai.  A young American woman with striking red hair and a passionate revolutionary dream to be sought after in China, and obviously very attractive, in both appearance and character, Rayna was one of the only two western women left in Wuhan when workers in Shanghai were massacred and the optimistic atmosphere of Chinese revolution went downhill. At the time, with her journalist friends, equally passionate about Chinese revolution, they were singing "There Will Be Pie in The Sky When I Die!" together.

In fact, the line came from "The Preacher and the Slave", a song written by Joe Hill in 1911 for the Industrial Workers of the World, a labor's union started in Chicago, U.S. There is a very good chance that the Chinese version indeed came from this line, as "Pie in the Sky" became so famous and often replaced the real title of this song. 

On a NY subway, reading Rayna and the Russians, Americans, and Chinese in the story, it truly feels globalization is not just a recent trend at all!

March, 2017

Astoria, New York