How We Survived Communism

Slavenka Drakulic in her book How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed documents the lives and mentalities of women in Communist Eastern Europe. Such close attention is given to the everyday details (like the lack of tampons and soft toilet paper; instead "Golub appeared--rough brown sheets, folded and pressed together in a square package, so when you took one, you pulled the next one too. It wasn't much better than newspaper") that you feel like you're cramped right alongside with three generations of Eastern Europeans living in the same dingy apartment. In "A Communist Eye, or What did I see in New York?" the author explains her guilt as she sees wasted food in the trash cans, beggars on the streets, and the most economically disparate city in the country. New York, to her, was the cruel reality of the underbelly of Capitalism. She concludes that under socialism, comparatively, "the good thing was that we were all poor; the bad thing was we didn't know it." So many of her stories remind me of my parent's childhood in China (even I grew up using Golub-like toilet paper too, until I was 6). The complexity of my parent's feelings---a mixture of nostalgia, hatred, lamentation, and ambivalence towards their Communist past is echoed in Draculic's Soviet Union as well. To have lived both lives, of Communism and Capitalism, is to constantly compare the two. Undoubtedly the capitalist freedoms and pleasures always come out on top in the end, but there are lingers of a soft spot for a close-knit community of equal, simple-minded, un-materialistic people that are lost and replaced by consumerist isolation and individual ambitions.