Ursula K. Le Guin on the Tao Te Ching -- "It is the most lovable of all the great religious texts, funny, keen, kind, modest, indestructibly outrageous and inexhaustibly refreshing. Of all the deep springs, this is the purest water. To me it is also the deepest spring." Tao Te Ching: Chapter 6 translated by Ursula K. Le Guin The valley spirit never dies. Call it the mystery, the woman. The mystery, the Door of the Woman, is the root of earth and heaven. Forever this endures, forever. And all its uses are easy.

Mira Sorvino and China Mira had been interested in China ever since she read, as a child, Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth.. She went to Harvard in 1985 majoring in East Asian studies and learning Mandarin, the Chinese dialect spoken most throughout the world. She decided to go to China in her junior year. “At first I was lonely,” she recalled. “but after I made some friends I had a great sense of happiness and positivism about having started a new life.”

Mira in "The Replacement Killers"

Mira studied in Beijing and was close to the nascent pro-democracy student movement. Mira returned to Harvard after approximately eight months, fully expecting to return to China to teach. The Massacre In Tiananmen Square shocked the entire world. “It shut a door,” Mira said simply. “If this terrible thing hadn’t been done, my life might have happened in China.”

-- Dotson Rader in Parade

June 26, 2002 shc759