Word: betterment
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that is charming or especially exotic. Just a mostly drab and dusty country, a perfect backdrop for the tedious and too often unrewarding nature of daily life. Still, the people seem energetic, if fitful; a fifth of the world's population in a cage. Good, hardworking people who deserve better than the suffocating Communism that limits their enterprise...
...place still looms, as it always has. China is the stuff of our earliest memories, the faraway land where children were starving (or so our parents told us when we were young), so we had better finish our dinners. The place we could reach by digging deep in our sandboxes; a measure of size ("I wouldn't do that for all the tea in China"); a country whose mere name conjured mystery and intrigue...
...professor wants to make one final point. What resonates for most Chinese, he says, "is when Deng and the others argue that permitting Tiananmen to run its course could have led to chaos and disorder, to another Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution is the benchmark against which everything looks better, the one thing above all that we do not want again...
...protector before it marched on Tiananmen, this small, fine-boned woman with searing brown eyes and a complexion Margaret Thatcher would compare to a rose recites some lines of Du Fu, the 8th century poet famous for decrying the gulf between ruled and ruler in China: "So it is better to abandon a daughter at birth than to see her later married to a soldier...
...Eventually it becomes the wedge that pries Emmett out of his shell and forces the girl's grandmother Mamaw (Peggy Rea) to face the feelings that she too has denied since her son's death. These are superb performances as well: Willis has never employed his alert reserve to better effect; Rea perfectly catches both the refrigerator-tidying comedy and the unspoken yearnings of an American Everymom...