Word: lao
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...Pathet Lao builds a harsh new world...
...decades of civil war and three years of Communist rule have taken the bloom off. Under the Puritan discipline of the Pathet Lao, who seized control in 1975, the gentle life of the Laotians has undergone a harsh transformation...
Nowhere is this more evident than in Phong Saly province, a remote region that juts into southern China. There, the Pa thet Lao have set up prison camps for "enemies of the state" that seem like something out of Solzhenitsyn: their heavy log walls are covered with barbed wire and bordered with sharp bamboo stakes; beyond, there is nothing but dense jungle and forbidding mountains. "You can try to escape," the guards taunt their charges, "but we'll have you back here within seven days...
Among the most gifted of the newly rehabilitated writers is Lao She, a chronicler of pre-Communist China's lower classes who is best known in the West for his 1936 novel Rickshaw Boy. During the Cultural Revolution, Lao came under ferocious attack by the fanatical Red Guards. After a dutiful attempt to write proletarian poetry in accord with the party line of that chaotic period, Lao She told his wife he was leaving home in search of "a peaceful place." He walked to the nearby T'ai-p'ing (Great Peace) Lake in Peking, where...
...ulcers. But Fast leaves him tanned, muscular and poor, smelling of fish and brine, married at last to the Chinese lover he would not wed before. One can almost see Fast the grinning Zen Buddhist, sitting in his solar-heated home, tying off the novel with a quote from Lao Tzu about the wisdom of stepping off the merry-go-round of ambition. "I'm not given to pessimism," Fast explains...