Word: alleys
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...nameless small alley is littered with discarded, rusting kerosene cans and shards from broken roof tiles. Ragged bundles of kindling wood tied with string line the sidewalk. Chipped red bricks, tin washbasins and wooden buckets for carrying water are scattered over the hard-packed earth. A few bicycles, all carefully locked, lean against the facades of three-story buildings. Three chickens cluck quietly inside a slatted wooden cage. Children mill about, some of them skipping rope, while their parents do the weekend wash, drawing water from streetside cold-water spigots...
...seediness and poverty of this street scene is a far cry from the calendar-picture China: ruddy-cheeked girls picking ripe fruit in an Eden-like orchard, smiling, neatly dressed workers in a brightly lit industrial plant. But this small alley in the provincial city of Nanning (pop. 500,000), capital of the Kwangsi Autonomous Region bordering North Viet Nam, is typical of China's overall appearance...
...Nanning is also poor. On this little alley, as in so many others, the houses have no running water. Most rooms are lit by dim naked light bulbs that dangle by electrical wires from the ceilings. Window casements are broken, cracked and stained. Nothing looks new or even recently painted. There is inadequate ventilation in the hot summer months. Small braziers, fueled by stamped cakes made from coal dust and mud, serve as the only cooking appliances in shared kitchens. Families live in two or, at most, three small rooms, decorated primarily with peeling propaganda posters or the still ubiquitous...
None of the apartments have toilets; instead the residents use a large common facility around the corner from their alley. The apartment dwellings look as though they were constructed decades ago. In fact, they are barely twelve years old, having been built in 1966, just before the beginning of the Cultural Revolution that plunged China into a decade of chaos...
...Stop the Rain, which wanted to say something about the drug culture, opened in August and died in the marketplace within two months. Audiences also wisely avoided Sylvester Stallone's F.I.S.T., a tedious fictionalization of the life of Jimmy Hoffa, and were almost as wary of Paradise Alley, Stallone's futile attempt to re-create sweaty 1940s realism. Convoy, Ali MacGraw's comeback vehicle, did not get rolling, and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which had all the energy of a wilting lily, never managed to strike up a tune...