Word: half
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...decades neither knows if the other has been killed. Fast-forward a half-century. The twins have survived. Peiyuan, politically maimed from the Cultural Revolution, lives quietly on a small pension in Changsha, the gray, polluted capital of Hunan. Peiji, who made his way to Taiwan with the retreating KMT, lives very unquietly in neon-struck Taipei. He is president of CTS, one of Taiwan's main TV networks. As boys they were indistinguishable. Now their faces tell very different stories: Peiyuan's face, thin and ravaged, is the story of a China that Mao wrought, with its famines, executions...
...come to visit the Pope of Marxism-Leninism up a long and rickety elevator. It is in the process of being refurbished, but instead of being shut down, the elevator continues to run, half alive. The claw-hammer handle that the elevator operators once used has been replaced by gleaming new push buttons, but typically for China, the elevator operator has not been replaced. She still sits there, complete with a little one-foot-square desk and a bottle of green tea, carrying the nation's top Marxists up and down for eight hours a day. The pope...
With China's future in the balance, Yang, a wealthy landowner with three wives, is breaking up his family. Yang Peiyuan, the older twin by half an hour, is to return to their hometown and join the communists. Yang Peiji, the younger twin, is to go south to join the Kuomintang (KMT) and fight in their Nationalist army. The train is about to leave. Peiji tells his brother to try to persuade their father to escape to Hong Kong. They hug, and Peiyuan boards the train...
...having Peiyuan join up failed. He was executed in 1952 during Mao's anti-landlord campaign, which took perhaps a million lives across China. At that time Peiyuan was with the Chinese army in Korea, fighting the Americans in a war that was to claim nearly 2 million lives, half of them Chinese. His left wrist was shattered by shrapnel. He still keeps his shirt sleeve pulled down to cover the deformity...
After the war ended in 1953, he studied in Beijing; then he came back to teach in Changsha. In 1958 he was one of half a million intellectuals who lost their jobs in Mao's anti-rightist campaign. This was the beginning of two decades in the political wilderness for Peiyuan that would culminate in labor camp. "I lost the golden years of my life, from 1958 to 1979," he says...