Word: chen
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...Chen Jinchang lives with two women, three coffins and the certainty that one day the Yangtze River will flood his simple mud-walled house. But to a barge-towman who spent most of his years in the westernmost of the Three Gorges in central China, straining against ships' ropes of braided bamboo, this looming disaster is relative. "I used to pull boats through there 25 times a month," says the 73-year-old, pointing from his doorway to Qutang Gorge, where the Yangtze rushes between towering limestone cliffs...
When the Three Gorges Dam is finished in 2009 and the reservoir fills his valley, all trace of this singular way of life will be washed away. Looking at the larch-wood coffins that Chen keeps with fatalistic practicality by his family's beds, one suspects that Chen hopes he, his wife and 94-year-old mother will have slipped off by then. Chen, now retired, is one of the trackers who dragged boats upstream through the Gorges in the days before motor transport became standard. Although trackers haven't worked the Yangtze for more than a decade, they...
...years of toil have given Chen the broad shoulders and sturdy frame of a man decades younger. But despite his brawn, he is powerless to save his home from the rising waters of the $20 billion dam project. The world's largest reservoir, 550 km long, will displace 2 million peasants, including Chen, who is tight-lipped about this coming progress. "If you think the dam is bad," he says, "best you don't say anything at all." He's far more voluble about the old path, which will also be submerged, and the way he used to drag...
...have a less cerebral attitude to the sculpture. Jennie C. Wei ‘03 finds herself inexplicably drawn to the mysterious grey figure, confessing that “I’m partially attracted to it”. Many laugh as they walk by, exclaiming like Garwin Y. Chen ‘03, “how weird!”. A few, like Emily Ludmir ‘03, question the overall effect of a Statue of Liberty likeness now sadly contorted and misshapen by shrunken balloons. Ludmir worries that “it almost seems like...
...became the class of the reality-TV field, turning groups of tinkerers loose on a scrap heap to build cannons, gliders, rockets and the like out of detritus, then pit their improvised creations against each other. With humor and an adorable host (Cathy Rogers, the thinking viewer's Julie Chen)--and without the robo-macho aggressiveness of Comedy Central's BattleBots--Junkyard shows that, sometimes, making smart, escapist TV is rocket science...