The book was originally titled Educated, Chinese", "You Fly Like a Bird to Your Mountain" by Tara Westover, a Mormon who grew up in the mountains of the United States.
Many people on Douban complained about the title of the book because they did not understand the Bible and did not understand the author's religious background. The phrase "Flee as a bird to your mountain" is from the Bible and Psalms, and this sentence itself has a double interpretation, one is "fleeing" and the other is "finding a new faith."
Mormonism is a type of Christian faith, but does not belong to the existing Christianity (Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant), it is a school of its own, the fourth largest religion in the United States. If it is a layman, it can be understood as an extremely conservative Christian faith. Mormons like the Tara family, who believe in the end of the world and that God will soon come again, refuse to integrate into modern society, and even in Mormonism, they are the most extreme kind.
The Westers can drive, they can connect circuits, they can operate machinery, they can do odd jobs that dispose of garbage and operate machinery, because these are very basic functional things. But they reject what mainstream society "builds" – they never go to the hospital when they get sick and injured but are treated with herbs, children are not allowed to go to school, they can't be vaccinated, and women are inferior to men. Tara's father did not leave God for three words, and spent most of his life trying to hoard supplies, trying to use his piety and foresight to make his family the only surviving family when the end came. As a result, in 1999, he waited for the end of the night to come, and since then, he has become more paranoid.
Another nightmare in Tara's life is her brother Sean. He seems to have inherited his father's psychopathic genes, has a strong tendency to violence, and often abuses his younger siblings at home. He loves and hates his youngest sister, Tara, who confronts Tara when he forces her to operate dangerous machinery, who secretly gives her money when her parents refuse to give Tara tuition, who wants to see Tara when he is seriously injured, but who beats Tara for all sorts of small things. As she grew older and more blind, Tara's resistance to violence gradually surpassed that of her siblings. Her resistance eventually leads to a break with Sean, who repeatedly threatens to kill her.
Tara's relationship with everyone in the family is a complex and long curve. She is the best example of the "native family theory", she let people see that the relationship between people and the original family, the self-growth process of people, is so difficult because everything is too complicated. Love, hate, trust, fear, self, foundation, growth... Mud and sand. Her parents had been proud of her, worried about her, had had so many intimate times with her, and rejected her. And even to the point of breaking ties with her father, Tara is honest – she has exiled him to each other, but she still loves him. She left with love and sincerity on her back, and she flew like a bird to her mountain.
The things that life originally possesses are the source that a person cannot give up in this life. Because they became you in the first place. And what is important is that after love, we must still have the courage to carry those loves and pains to one distant mountain after another.
The Westover family had seven children, none of whom were allowed to go to school in principle, and only three were educated. Fathers are only allowed to go to school if they think it is God's will to go to school that they can help the family, such as Taylor, one of the three later Ph.D.s.
Tara is not only young, but also a girl, and it is even less likely that she will be allowed to go to school. The first time she truly felt the "wisdom of the distance" was when she heard music from her brother Taylor. Music became her initiation. Later, she began to sing at mormon church in the town, and her father was particularly opposed at first, but he was really proud of her when he heard that his daughter was very talented and that everyone liked to hear her sing. Tara continued her singing journey and extended her tentacles to various fields—literature, mathematics, religion, interpersonal relations. By then, their brothers, Taylor and Richard, had begun to secretly read and review books without their father, and they had left home to go to college, and Tara followed them a few years later. She repeatedly argued with her parents, avoided, and fought for several years, and finally passed the exam by self-study in the dark, and entered Brigham Young University, a university where Mormonism was the foundation of the school.
As mentioned earlier, even in Mormonism, which is inherently conservative, the Westovers are the most extreme. So when Tara entered the university, she was constantly exposed to more open people and a wider world. Her education experience is fraught with difficulties - undergraduate education in the United States is not necessarily easy for good students from high school, let alone Tara, who has never been to school for a day. However, Tara survived and was qualified to go to Cambridge.
Among the online criticisms of the book, it is more common to "not describe in detail the details of study, examination, and writing papers." But education is not just about academic achievement, it is about searching for the truth of life in this world full of obstacles. Therefore, every game Tara has with her family in order to go to school, the process of Tara's suffering and treatment of depression, and Tara's journey to overcome every fear to go higher and farther, are all "education".
And even if you consider the details of your studies, you will find Tara's study process extremely inspiring. During the Cambridge exchange, Tara was asked to submit a paper, and here's how she determined her research direction:
"I have made up my mind not to study history, but to study historians. I think my interest came from the sense of unfoundedness after studying the Holocaust and the civil rights movement—realizing that an individual's knowledge of the past is limited and will forever be limited to what others tell them. I know what it's like to have a misunderstanding corrected — to change a big misunderstanding is to change the world. Now, I need to understand how the great gatekeepers of history compromised with their ignorance and prejudice. I think if I can accept that what they write is not absolute, but the result of a biased discourse and a process of revision, perhaps I can accept the fact that the history that most people identify with is not the history I was taught. Dad may be wrong, and so may the great historians Carlisle and Macaulay and Trevellian, but from the ashes of their arguments, I can construct a world and live in it. When I learned that the ground wasn't ground at all, I wanted to stand on it."
This is a very powerful passage, and only a strong mind can be so devoted to the work and engraved with such a deep trace of thought.
Let's look at Tara's thoughts after submitting his paper: "I waited for him to say that this paper was a disaster, the product of an ignorant mind, that it was not self-sufficient, that it cited too little material, and that it drew too many conclusions."
The professor then said it was one of the best papers he had read during his thirty years of teaching at Cambridge.
That's where Tara shines – originality.
Whether it's reading a book or looking at an opinion on the Internet, the most compelling words are always original. Not the writing, not the superficial emotions, but the insight. Human thoughts and emotions have their origins, but the secrets of the human heart are endless, and only those who can let the springs flow through the dry ravines can truly nourish the souls of others.
Tara's parents have seven children, three of whom received doctorates. On the one hand, they inherit the intelligence and diligence of their parents— their parents are lowly educated and psychologically paranoid, but they are really intelligent, they improve their work and life with their hands, and they live well with so much whimsy outside of orthodoxy. On the other hand, the children's growing environment is wild, open, but also full of pain and struggle, and the confluence of these factors gives them a rare desire to explore and think perspectives, allowing them to live a life full of originality.
"When You Fly Like a Bird to Your Mountain" – Before reading it, I thought it was simple inspirational chicken soup, and after reading it, I realized that this is a profound, hearty book of growth, a look back on which Tara has invested all sincerity and conviction. Everyone who has struggled will understand Tara's growth and give himself more and more expectations.
After the end of the book, after the end of our relationships with many people, after the end of the ignorant past—our lives are still not over. We walk on the road, build life, and become ourselves more and more every day. We continue to cultivate and reap our own fruits. We continue to lose, moving in the midst of the separation to the next scene of unknown scenery.
Because every day of life, life is like a red carpet, tirelessly unfolding forward. People walk on the road, and out of the infinity of life.