Word: communed
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...average visitor today does not venture far beyond two dozen cities, though the Chinese promise access next year to such regions as Szechwan, Inner Mongolia, even Tibet, all hitherto denied the ordinary voyager. Though the Foreign Friend's days are rigorously ordained -factory, school, temple, tomb, museum, commune, clinic, department store and garden-any early-rising, enterprising F.F. can roam at will, sniffing, savoring, snapping, visiting and, with the help of an interpreter, freely conversing...
...hour's ride from downtown Shanghai is a teeming farm called the Hsinching People's Commune. It is a model establishment, or it would not be on the F.F. itinerary. As the buses arrive, all hands of all ages are out to greet them, all smiling and hand-clapping (it beats weeding). The F.F.s, after Ni haos! and handshakes, are waved toward basins of cool water and stacks of fresh towels. Then they troop in for the Brief Introduction, the ritualistic prelude to any tourist attraction...
...Hsinching commune, like any farm within hundreds of miles of Shanghai, exists to meet the city's insatiable appetite. Its 2,330 acres are planted mostly with vegetables, though the commune also raises rice, wheat, animal fodder and some livestock. The peasants are particularly proud of their plump chickens, which they say are of a Chinese breed; in fact, they are White Leghorns and (appropriately) Rhode Island Reds...
Hsinching has a population of 21,626; the peasants privately own and cultivate 8% of the land. The commune has a busy, fair-sized hospital staffed by 30 nurses and 40 paramedics, "barefoot" doctors: its bare-toothed dentist boasts that every last piece of equipment was made in Shanghai...
There he lived for two years in a semi-commune of string students. "Not only did I come to feel that music was essential to life," says Stoltzman, "but I was surrounded by people who tried to play like a voice singing, something neglected by clarinetists." He credits those two years with his interest in expanding the clarinet's color, after which his technique was inspired by Kalman Opperman, a New York teacher of the strict "old school...