For Joyce and I (and then four month old Rachel), it's also the anniversary of our trek to Shanghai.
When I finally began teaching, over a month later, one of the first questions my students had was "Why did this man try to kill your President?" Here's what I wrote about my answer elsewhere on this blog.
After almost a month of getting acclimated to our new surroundings (a month in which we learned that "culture shock" is not just a term in an anthropology matching test but a real, very palpable malaise), I finally began teaching. A few days before we had departed for China, President Reagan had been shot. As expected, my students were most interested in understanding the assassination attempt. Why did this young man try to kill your President? they asked on the very first day I taught. Based on what I knew at the time (from a close reading of the Far East Edition of Time Magazine), I tried to explain: "It seems that Hinckley was in love with a movie star named Jodie Foster, who had appeared in a film called Taxi Driver, in which a deranged young man tries to kill a presidential candidate in order to make a young prostitute (played by Foster) fall in love with him. Hinckley, confusing the movies with reality, evidently believed that if he killed the real President of the United States, himself a former Hollywood actor who would later be characterized as the "acting" President, Jodie Foster (the real Jodie Foster, not the character played by her in the film) would then fall in love with him." They listened politely, and they stared at me like I had come from another universe. I wondered that first day I would ever be able to make myself understood by them.
