Shifting Passions - A Synopsis

Shifting Passions is a Bildungsroman about a young man’s search for love and a meaningful life. The story begins during a time rocked by youth revolts and protests against the Vietnam War, collective passions that culminate in 1968, only to be followed by a turn to private passions, which in the 1980s gave us Thatcher and Reagan. After the hippie, the yuppie. After Mao, Deng.

Part 1: My Future Is With the People

American B-52’s bomb Vietnam, students protest, the Cultural Revolution rages in China, the Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia, and the Beatles sing All You Need is Love. This is the year when fourteen-year-old Johan becomes aware of the unfairness in the world. In eight grade he is elected chair of the student council and begin to read Marx, Lenin, and Mao. In high school, he throws himself into politics while wrestling with puberty and an unrequited love. On the way back from a trip to Leningrad in the spring of 1972 he meets Susan. They fall in love but live far apart and he enters his mandatory military service, so their relation relies to a large degree on their letters. He thinks he has found the love of his life, but she dumps him right before his discharge from the army. 

The Vietnam War ends in April 1975, a victory that is followed by confusion. What now? After a stint as a factory worker, Johan enters Stockholm University and joins a Maoist student association. In 1976, he meets Cecilia who shares his political beliefs, but Mao dies on September 9, and soon after his wife is arrested. “What’s going on in China?” his father asks. Johan finds himself dumbfounded. His certainty is gone.

Part 2: Love without a Compass

Cecilia moves in with Johan and he trades his inner-city studio for a two-bedroom apartment in a working-class suburb. When the editor of the Maoist student magazine leaves, Johan is appointed editor. It turns out to be an all-consuming job. A series of events in late 1978 and early 1979 undermine their relationship, which was built on a shared political ideology. Deng Xiaoping assumes power and introduces capitalist economic reforms. Vietnam invades Kampuchea and China invades Vietnam. Johan struggles to fit the pieces together, but he ends up losing his faith in Maoism and Marxism, while Cecilia begins to dream of starting a family. He is on the other hand overtaken by a private passion and falls – unhappily – in love with another woman. Then his father dies, deepening his existential crisis. He leaves Cecilia and takes a job at a big city newspaper. A new phase of his life begins.

Part 3: Trying to be Normal

Johan is now thirty years old, and he has cut off his ties to the Maoist movement. He is a graduate student and supports himself as a journalist at a large newspaper; but it’s only as a temporary job. He has also resumed his search for a woman. He meets Penny and they end up in her bed that same night. She’s not interested in politics but is generous and sensual. His feelings grows and he proposes to her during a trip to Crete. She tears up but asks for time. Realizing that she looks for safety in a man, he gives up his graduate studies in economics and takes a job as a computer journalist. He waits patiently for her answer, but she breaks up with him after having found another man, one with a good job, a car, and a house. “It was you trying to be normal,” his old friend Carl says. Johan continues his work at the computer paper, but he is elected leader of the local union and ends up in a conflict with the owner. He wins the fight for a contract but leaves to become a freelance journalist.

Part 4: Zigzagging in the Middle Kingdom

Adrift and lonely, Johan sets out on a three-month long journey to China, seeking answers to questions lingering from his youth and collecting material for articles about its economic, cultural, and political transformation under Deng. There are signs that China might be opening up not only to foreign investments and technology, but also to new ideas, and maybe even democratic ones. Can socialism and democracy co-exist, like China’s dissidents hope? Could this be the next collective passion? He has spent the much of his youth first admiring and then studying China. Now he sees the country with his own eyes, and meets many Chinese, and gets to hear their stories. But he is also searching for love. Two months into the journey, he meets an American woman in Beijing. Their paths only cross for two nights, but they fall in love and begin a correspondence that confirms and deepens their feelings. Having written and sold his stories, he flies to New York where she welcomes him. He proposes, and she says yes.