You’ve probably heard that ancient Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” If we didn’t catch the irony initially, the events of 2020 have forced us to understand. This year seems to have gone on forever, and now we’re living with both a raging pandemic and a president who resists a peaceful transfer of power to the president-elect.

Interesting times, indeed.

So you probably won’t be surprised to learn, if you didn’t already know, that the Chinese have no such expression. It’s just another case of “someone said they did.”

I read recently that Americans are split between those living in a world of fiction and those living in the world of reality. Some of the conspiracy theories I read about seem bizarre beyond belief, but there are people who do believe them and who are sure theirs is the real world.

Even the word “fiction” is complicated. It can mean “a belief or statement that is false, but that is often held to be true because it is expedient to do so” or “invention or fabrication as opposed to fact.” But it can also mean literary fiction, which was the focus of my life as a teacher — stories created by imagination, whole worlds of people and events that become real in the writer’s mind, and then, at least temporarily, for the reader.

If you’ve ever felt tears coming to your eyes as you watch a movie, you’ve had that experience. And we all know characters who live on in our minds. Huck Finn, Hamlet, Oliver Twist. Even Harry Potter.

When students asked me if fiction meant stories that weren’t true, I may have confused them when I’d say no, good fiction is true — in the deepest sense. Our best stories help us experience the truth of other people’s lives. I think of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Ceremony.” Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior.” Raymond Carver’s stories, or Grace Paley’s. James Baldwin’s.

Or take the titles in my bookcase. “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” by Lucia Berlin. Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad” — that’s waiting for me, too. But it’s been a hard week, so I’ll probably turn to “This is Happiness,” by the Irish writer Niall Williams, instead.

Research bears it out: Reading fiction makes you a better person.

My writing group likes to tease me about trying to change the world. If I could somehow change the world, everyone would love to read, fiction and poetry and nonfiction too, and plays. I suspect that in this world, no one would believe, even for a minute, that children kidnapped by NASA 20 years ago are being held in a colony on Mars.

Someone else who wants to change the world, or at least wants her students to “go off and change the world for the better,” is Althea Huesties-Wolf. Since I met Althea when she was a student at Blue Mountain Community College, she has graduated twice from Eastern Oregon University, most recently with an MFA in nonfiction writing. She’s been invited to read at The First Draft Writers’ Series, and Fall/Winter issue of EOU’s Mountaineer Magazine features her work as a CTUIR educator guiding students in a GED classroom.

According to the article, she asks her students to read multicultural fiction — “The Rabbit-Proof Fence,” “Under the Hawthorne Tree,” “Lions of Little Rock” — but poetry too, and nonfiction. In fact, she made Jack Underwood’s “Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World” a major part of the curriculum.

It’s been a while since I read this book, but I remember being stunned by the world-changing effects of corn and potatoes, not to mention the pattern for democracy and contributions to medicine, agriculture, architecture, ecology. And more, the gifts ongoing.

On the playgrounds of my childhood, “Indian giver” meant someone who gave you something, and then wanted it back — the opposite of what indigenous cultures, who knew “the gift must always move,” actually practiced. And what colonialists did practice, on a regular basis. All those broken treaties.

Irony again. We’re getting better at recognizing it, aren’t we?

Kudos to Althea and her students. And to you, survivor of these interesting times. Thanks for reading.