Thinking About: Kathleen Lee

I’ve had the pleasure recently of reading Kathleen Lee’s novel in manuscript “Taxi to Elsewhere.” Set mostly in China when travelers were still rare it is chock full of experience and observation.

“A woman traveling alone is beguiling. Everyone wants to touch her or stand in the shadow of her courage. What suffering, they wonder, what passion propelled her from the safety of home, companionship, the familiar?….Perhaps she’s a harbinger of an unfathomable future in which women go into the world unaccompanied, in which individuals are not padded and baggaged with siblings, cousins, or aunts….She has dropped into their midst from some unseen altitude, some far-off, unimaginable point of origin; what, what has she come for?”

And my favorite line, from the middle of the novel: “What a strange kind of luck it was, to be alone in the world.”