Word: china
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Although there is nothing inherently funny about two people being romantically thwarted for nearly two decades, Waiting turns, page by careful page, into a deliciously comic novel. Ha Jin, who left his native China in 1985 to study at Brandeis University and then remained in the U.S., tells this tale in an impeccably deadpan manner. He casts a wise, rather than a cold, eye on his characters' struggles, both with an inflexible social system and their own weaknesses. With two earlier collections of stories and a novella, Ha Jin attracted notice as a guide to a world few outside China...
...woman he now loves. But rarely, if ever, has such a fellow been bedeviled by the array of obstacles Lin must confront. Not only is he scrupulously moral and thus vulnerable to all the guilty pangs of wayward husbandhood, but Lin's travails occur in a place--Communist China--and during a time--the early 1960s to the early '80s--when literally all occasions conspire against the quest for such a trivial thing as personal happiness...
...Shuyu so that they would have someone to nurse them through their final illnesses while Lin pursued his medical career far away in the army. Nearly everything about Shuyu appalls Lin, particularly her feet, which were bound in the old-fashioned way during her childhood. "This was the New China," Lin muses. "Who would look up to a young woman with bound feet?" He sees her only during the 12 days he is on leave each year; after the birth of their daughter, some three years into the marriage, Lin stops sleeping with Shuyu for good...
...flow nozzle. Yet in the U.S., 70% of all the wheat, corn and other grain produced goes to feeding herds of livestock. Around the world, as more water is diverted to raising pigs and chickens instead of producing crops for direct consumption, millions of wells are going dry. India, China, North Africa and the U.S. are all running freshwater deficits, pumping more from their aquifers than rain can replenish. As populations in water-scarce regions continue to expand, governments will inevitably act to cut these deficits by shifting water to grow food, not feed. The new policies will raise...
What has proved an unsustainable burden to the life of the planet is also proving unsustainable for the planet's dominant species. In China a recent shift to meat-heavy diets has been linked to increases in obesity, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer and colorectal cancer. U.S. and World Health Organization researchers have announced similar findings for other parts of the world. And then there are the growing concerns about what happens to people who eat the flesh of animals that have been pumped full of genetically modified organisms, hormones and antibiotics...