<p>School is out and I've got lots of time on my hands. The enigma and edifying versus puzzling and fabrication issue has been driving me crazy. Finally found the actual passage!!!! It is from a book called The Accidental Asian by Eric Liu. Here is the relevant portion of the passage. Read it for yourself and then read bballaz's excellent argument on the thread "Enigma and Edifying is the correct answer." </p>
<p>Note ETS edited the passage. Here is the passage as it appeared in the book:</p>
<p>One one or two occasions I've sat down with my pocket Chinese-English dictionary, determined to decipher at least the essays that my father wrote. This was painstaking work and I never got very far. For each Chinese character, I first had to determine the ideographic root, then count the brush strokes, then turn to an index ordered by root and by number of strokes, then match the character, then figure out its romanized spelling, then look up its definition. By the time I solved one word, I'd already forgotten the previous one. Meaning was hard enough to determine; context was even more elusive. </p>
<p>So it is, I sometimes think, with my father's life. On the one hand, it's easy to locate my father and my family in the grand narrative of "the Chinese American experience." On the other hand, it doesn't take long for this narrative to seem more like a riddle than a fable. Leafing through the pages of the memorial book, staring dumbly at their blur of ideographs, I realize just how little I know about those years of Baba's life before he arrived in America, and before I arrived in the world.</p>