Word: eyeful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...quick six-day tour of the province, for an oldtimer, is a delight. The small towns throb again, their booths full of sweets, cookies, housewares, clothes, textiles, flower pots and flowers. In big cities like Chengdu and Chongqing, the huge food markets overwhelm the eye with food that can be bought without coupons. Hogs come squealing to market in wheelbarrows, on tractors, even lashed to the backs of bicycles, then reappear in the markets as huge slabs of pink-and-white pork. Peasants bring in their wives' squawking chickens, eight to a basket. Down the market lanes peasants sell geese...
...markets are real. So is the astonishing good health, the ruddy vitality of the people, so different from the scrawny peasants I remember 40 years ago. The gurgling babies pleasure the eye ? no trachoma, no scabies, no rickety limbs, no potbellies of famine...
...eye can deceive. This has been a great year in China: a prospective record harvest, record incomes. Yet peasant prosperity is fragile. Here was Sichuan in green spring, the wheat turning yellow, soon to be golden. But if the rains fell at the wrong time, the wheat would be beaten to the ground and lost, and there would be a slim rice crop in the fall. This huge province lives on the margin of hunger...
Peking now is, to the eye, a far better place. The city's long avenues of young trees, its handsome new architecture, its broad esplanades all promise coming splendor. The people are well dressed. Well-marked buses course their routes ? on time. Men and women are healthy; the children are cherubs; the parks are flecked with the colors of young couples courting or families airing babies. The stores are well stocked, from dumplings to ducks. Bookstores are crowded, moviehouses and theaters jammed. Color
Being "sent down," or Xiafang, as the Chinese call it, was very simple punishment. "Stinking intellectuals" were supposed to learn from the peasants what life is like when one must stoop for hours transplanting rice seedlings in the wet muck. Horror stories spurt ? not grisly horror like eye gouging (which was reported only in south China), but simpler torment like being interrogated round the clock by Red Guards...