Revision

Original

About an hour after we arrived, we came upon a line of people. I didn’t think much of it when I first saw it, figuring that it was probably people buying ice cream or something. As we walked on, however, I began to realize that the line was huge. Take every rollercoaster line at the amusement park and sum them all together, and maybe they will sum to half its total length. I walked for thirty straight minutes alongside it and couldn’t see where it started or began. The people in it were more often sitting down than standing up. I studied them, trying to understand what was worth waiting tens of hours under a summer sun.

“It’s the line to enter Mao Zhe Dong’s tomb,” the tour guide said. “People from all over China come here to pay respects to him.”

A tomb. The heat was well past ninety and people voluntarily waited hours to see a dead man reviled by most people around the globe. It was bizarre. Mao Zhe Dong was a tyrant, I learned in high school, who unwittingly killed millions of his own people. His policies eradicated academia in society and raised to high positions the uneducated poor. He destroyed Chinese artifacts and oppressed Chinese history in pursuit of modernity. He killed anyone who disagreed. And here, now, right in front of me, were thousands of people who walked straight into the oven to lay flowers at his grave.

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Revised (Point of View Change)

An hour after they arrived arrived, they came upon a line of people. He didn’t think much of it at first, figuring that it was probably people buying ice cream or something. As they walked on, however, he began to realize that the line was huge. If every roller coaster line at the amusement park was added together, maybe they will sum to half its total length. He walked for thirty straight minutes alongside it and couldn’t see where it started or began. The people in it were more often sitting down than standing up. He studied them, trying to understand what was worth waiting tens of hours under a summer sun.

“It’s the line to enter Mao Zhe Dong’s tomb,” the tour guide said. “People from all over China come here to pay respects to him.”

A tomb. He could not understand. The heat was well past ninety and people voluntarily waited hours to see a dead man reviled by most people around the globe? Mao Zhe Dong was a tyrant, he knew, who unwittingly killed millions of his own people. His policies eradicated academia in society and raised to high positions the uneducated poor. He destroyed Chinese artifacts and oppressed Chinese history in pursuit of modernity. He killed anyone who disagreed. And here, now, right in Tiananmen Square, were thousands of people who walked straight into the oven to lay flowers at his grave.

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Changing the point of view was a terrible idea. The essay was explicitly written with first-person view in mind; in third-person, it was simply impossible for me to convey my emotions and thoughts because a third-person view is much more limited in scope. It was not as easy as simply changing all the I's to Him's and My's to His'. I was forced to change some sentences around so that they better fit the more limited third-person narrator, and in the process lose quite a bit of the meaning I was trying to convey.