In Frankenstein, the writer Mary Shelley wrote: “My courage and resolution are firm; my hopes, however, fluctuate”. Anyone with political aspirations could agree with this sentence; Catalans, without a doubt, would quickly join in. But I am not bringing it up because I have heard it said by any neighbor from, let's say, Tona, Vilafranca, or l’Ampolla, but because I found it in an excellent novel that speaks of lands very far from ours, and with a very different contextual situation. I am talking about Once Upon a Time in the East, a book by Xiaolu Guo published by Angle Editorial in collaboration with the Catalan International Institute for Peace (ICIP) within the collection Classics of Peace and Non-violence.