In Things in Nature Merely Grow, the Chinese-American author writes past grief’s clichés. |
It’s also a rollicking not-quite thriller about family, financing, and (broadly) filmmaking itself. |
On August 11, 2017, hundreds of white supremacists carrying tiki torches mobbed the University of Virginia’s campus, shouting racist and antisemitic slogans and violently attacking the students who stood up to them. The next day, the same hateful crowd rallied in a Charlottesville park that held a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The city of Charlottesville had recently engaged in a public debate over whether to get rid of the statue, and supposedly the white supremacists were there—summoned by a number of neo-Nazis, chief among them Richard Spencer, and a local racist troll named Jason Kessler—to defend it. Really, they had come to court attention and cause harm. They succeeded on both fronts. Their event, called Unite the Right, became national news when they swarmed the UVA campus, chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” (This had what to do with Robert E. Lee?) It became a national tragedy when, on August 12, James Alex Fields Jr., who kept a framed photo of Hitler by his bed, rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring several and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. |
|
.jpg)
