With the recent re-election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, his Vice President Vance’s autobiographical book from some years ago, Lamentations of a Hillbilly, has once again hit the internet.
In fact, the book caught fire back in 2017, when Trump was first elected president of the United States, when book critics praised the book for explaining why Trump won the election (Why Trump Won).
I do not know much about American politics and skin color racial origins, so the first time I saw this book, but also do not yet recognize the author Vance, so that when I saw the title of this “Hillbilly’s Lament”, I thought it was a collection of essays written by some of our domestic people who are inclined to literature and art, it is clear that this is a very literary translation of the title of the translation of the translation of the quite a level, I have seen in a forum that a netizen said that in fact, it can also be translated as I can’t help but laugh out loud when I saw a user on a forum say that it could actually be translated as “The Wailing of the Earth Cannon” which is more apt.
The English title of the book is Hillbilly Elegy, and it’s a matter of opinion how to translate it.
The author of the book, Vance, who was born in 1984, is young compared to other politicians in the United States. He is a white man, which puts him at the front of America’s color stigma, but throughout the book he seems to “self-hatred” his group — working-class whites with no college degrees who live in the crumbling old industrial complexes of the Rust Belt — and who have not kept up with the changing times. They can’t keep up with the times, and their lives are filled with poverty, violence, and drugs, and they are called “billbillies” or “white trash” by some Americans, some of whom are barely surviving on U.S. social assistance benefits. social assistance benefits.
When the author describes his life in Middleton, Arkham Steel brought his grandparents everything (Arkham was once their economic savior, from the mountains of Kentucky to the middle class in the United States, but with the decline of the industry, they are living a low-income low-education life again.) At one point, I was reminded of the kind of large state-owned enterprises we had in China that took care of everything that happened to their employees, and it seems that there is nothing new under the sun.
Another point that confirms the similarities between China and the United States is author Vance’s path of “jumping out of the cold”:
Instead of going straight to college after high school, he first joined the Marines and served in Iraq, and after his discharge, he studied hard at the Ohio State University to which he applied (the author says he worked three or four jobs a day and slept only four hours a day), and finally succeeded in getting into the Yale Law School, and like in China, he went to a top-ranking school such as Yale, graduated, practiced law, and then entered the political arena.
According to the book the person the author mentions the most is his grandmother, the person who influenced him the most.
Vance’s mother was a drug-addicted woman who became a mother in high school, and then went through many failed marriages with various men, causing severe childhood trauma to young Vance. Luckily, his grandmother, a poorly educated but tough old lady, picked Vance up from his family of origin, gave him the environment to read, and told Vance, “Don’t be like those people who don’t get ahead and feel like the whole world is against them, you can do whatever you want to do.”
The experience that had the greatest impact on him was his military career in the Marines, where Vance’s character was well educated and his values were better corrected during the grueling service training in the military. He was never again as stubborn, closed-minded, and idle as the kids back home. He gradually realized that life requires not only opportunities and connections, but also the inner character of full commitment and perseverance.
All in all, putting aside the background of the current confrontation between China and the United States, as far as this book is concerned, a young American country boy with a broken family of origin, through his own hard work, entered the United States Marine Corps, and later obtained a Yale Juris Doctorate degree, became a barrister, and had a decent and well-paying job in the Silicon Valley, leading an elite class life to which countless people aspire, and was later elected by the American people to be the Vice President of the United States, is indeed an inspirational autobiography worth reading. It is indeed an inspirational autobiography worth reading.