Word: deng
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...growing wealth (its per-capita income is second only to Japan's in Asia) began to impede growth. By the 1970s, costs were rising so quickly that Hong Kong became uncompetitive in basic manufacturing compared with newly emerging economies elsewhere in Asia. Geography saved the day. In 1979, Deng Xiaoping began opening China to foreign investment, and Hong Kong manufacturers decamped to the mainland to take advantage of the country's vast supply of cheap workers. The trading firms stayed behind. In fact, as more and more manufacturing moved into China, locating a headquarters in Hong Kong, on the doorstep...
...places What Is the What is surprisingly funny. Eggers explains that he didn't want the book to read like "a human-rights report." "We were trying to reflect the whole life, the complete life," he says, "not just disaster after disaster." After all, Deng spent 13 years in refugee camps. He grew up in them. He joked around with friends. He flirted with girls. "The horror was so overwhelming that for many years I never thought that I had this fun," he says. "But there are moments when I no longer recall missing my family. That was the time...
Eggers and Deng worked on What Is the What for three years, recording 100 hours of interviews and visiting Sudan together. What could have been an awkward literary three-legged race became instead a synergistic collaboration. In person there's an obvious and rather touchingly empathic bond between the two: Eggers is the confident, gregarious one, while Deng speaks in quiet, melodious, not-quite-grammatical English. "Dave would listen to me," he says, "and he would write and send me a chapter, and I see him in me. And I ask him sometimes, 'How are you able to put yourself...
From the day his village was destroyed, Deng never stopped looking for a safe, peaceful home. He finally made it to the U.S.--the promised land for many Sudanese--but in America he found new and confusing challenges: menial jobs, discrimination, endless seriocomic misunderstandings. In his first apartment he didn't realize he could turn off the air conditioning and spent a week sleeping with all his clothes on. The loudness and lewdness of the preshow festivities at an NBA game seemed to him "perfectly designed to drive people insane." The book is framed by Deng's experience of being...
After five years in America, Deng has finally managed to matriculate at Allegheny College in western Pennsylvania, where he's designing his major: international diplomacy. He hopes to use his share of the proceeds from What Is the What to fund an educational center in his hometown in Sudan. But his isn't a simple story of suffering and redemption, of a Lost Boy who was finally found. It's more of a long walk that doesn't end. Deng has gone far, but he still...