Word: lings
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...sitting in a Starbucks coffee shop in the toniest neighborhood in Shanghai, around the corner from the Louis Vuitton store, and Wang Ling is getting steamed up over being evicted from her home. "They're liars," she says, pulling out official documents. "They're not going according to government regulations!" The Wangs got caught up in the dealings of a shady property tycoon who is serving three years in jail for stock manipulation--but not before they and thousands of others were tossed out of their homes to make way for the tycoon's now deferred project. They allege...
...stoned tableaux are lightened by intrusions of real-world comedy: the visit of a Yellow Pages ad salesman to a stoned Blake; the door-to-door missionary zeal of two young Mormons. Ricky Jay provides a few moments of irrelevant coherence with his story of a magician named Chung Ling Su. But these interludes can't bring Last Days to life. The film is so studied and self-conscious that the audience can never concentrate on Blake; it can only watch the camera watching...
...Soongs, Seagrave contends, knew exactly how to beguile America, one day with images of the mysterious East, the next with snapshots of God-fearing, Westernized democrats battling the Red Menace. While Harvard-educated T.V. wheedled millions out of his poker buddies in Washington, Wellesley Graduate May-ling wooed Congress with her slit skirt and florid rhetoric. In the process, the Soongs also hypnotized such powerful cheerleaders as Henry Luce and Columnist Joseph Alsop, who saw in them the lineaments of a progressive new China, ready to enter the American Century...
...North Carolina Methodists. Of the founding father's six children, four gate-crashed their way into history: Eldest Son T.V. (for Tse-ven) parlayed his career as a financial administrator into a fortune that made him, by some accounts, the richest man in the world; Eldest Daughter Ai-ling came to power behind the scenes by marrying H.H. Kung, a fabulously rich lineal descendant of Confucius; Middle Daughter Ching-ling wed Dr. Sun Yat-sen, godfather of the Chinese Revolution, and eventually became a Vice Chairman of Mao's People's Republic; Youngest Daughter May-ling became Mme. Chiang Kaishek...
...Chiang and his colleagues would surely have been executed. Estimates of those killed in the famine vary widely, Seagrave acknowledges, but Chiang's pro-Communist antagonist Edgar Snow places it at a million, so a million it is. Seagrave's enemies' enemies are invariably his friends: thus Ching-ling, the family's black sheep, is portrayed as a "transcendent beauty" and the Red Army is found worthy of "authentic heroism." By contrast, "Chiang at his best was pathologically devious...