Word: boated
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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From high on the hill in the riverside town of Wanxian, Gu Xiaoli looks out over the boat dock from her kitchen window and sighs. She is cooking a modest dinner of rice soup, pigs' feet and steamed buns. In the past two years, she, her husband and her son have all been laid off from textile factories in the town. With their combined pensions of $100 a month, they also have to support her 85-year-old father. Her biggest worry is for her son. After being laid off, he opened a restaurant that failed; then...
...business graduate from Sichuan International Studies University works on the Qianlong cruise ship, a gaudy floating hotel with a prow shaped like a dragon's head. After 18 months making the round trip between Chongqing and Yichang, she is getting tired of the scenery, of life on the boat and of the drunken Taiwanese tourists who make passes at her in the karaoke bar at night. Now she and a friend are planning to move to Beijing, where a travel agent she met on the boat last year has promised them jobs. There is even the possibility of traveling overseas...
...Qianlong is moored for the night at Wushan, and next to it at the dock is a large boat with a neon sign for WUSHAN GODDESS ENTERTAINMENT CITY. Gambling is illegal in China, but this is a casino, open all day, with high-low dice games, blackjack and bingo. Laid-off workers crowd the tables, spending their last renminbi on a few rolls of the dice. The casino is run by an overweight Hong Konger who wears expensive jeans and a heavy gold watch but doesn't want to give his real name. Neither do his two formidable-looking bodyguards...
...river from Nanjing to Shanghai is wide, one mile across, and the boat traffic has increased exponentially: barges, tugs, dredging boats, passenger ferries, tankers, oceangoing liners and container ships. There are so many vessels that the traffic splits up, as on a highway: downstream vessels keep to the left of the stream, upstream vessels keep to the right-hand side, as the chaos of China's interior inexorably gives way to the more ordered march to prosperity of the coastal regions...
...Games legitimize the pursuits of disaffected suburban youth. But not the truly disenfranchised. You have to be pretty tight with someone who owns a boat to learn to barefoot-waterski-jump, or have some serious spare cash to go up in a plane to sky-surf. These are the kinds of recreational activities that spring up when a nation hasn't been off to war in a long time...