When I lived in China I frequently had the chance to talk to people who experienced an event that I had only read about. The past 70 years in China have been rather… eventful, and I’d talk to some older person and find out they had first-hand stories about the Cultural Revolution, or occasionally even the Chinese civil war. The difference between what’s written in history books and people’s personal recollections were often stark!
When the COVID pandemic was looming but its significance was still only being talked about in the West by a handful of iconoclastic investors, I really wished I could talk to someone who had been through the Spanish Flu (or hell, the Black Death!) to get a sense of what it felt like right before the excrement hit the air-conditioning.
But even more than that, I’ve always desperately wishe