Word: mandarin
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China's relationship with foreign journalists is far from based on mutual trust. United States press organizations operating in Beijing are confined to office space within a few selected foreign residence compounds. Bureaus are provided with a Mandarin translator, who many correspondents believe is more spy than...
That great leveling effect, however, has not made pop any more palatable to old-line intellectuals. The contempt was, until rather recently, obligatory and absolute. Mandarin ill will reached a peak in "Masscult & Midcult," Dwight Macdonald's acutely cranky 1960 essay. "Masscult is bad in a new way," he wrote, because "it doesn't even have the theoretical possibility of being good." A pernicious "Gresham's law" was inevitable: good art would be driven out by the bad -- by pop. Another ferocious holdout is William Gass, a very intelligent critic whose opaque, self-conscious novels are the sort of fiction...
...give me baby./ I give you V.D."). But as the authors pass out their pictures, they also provide moving autobiographies. Wendy Wilder Larsen reconstructs the early '70s from the American point of view; Tran Thi Nga offers a far more unusual perspective. The daughter of a Vietnamese mandarin, she twice became the second wife in polygamous marriages, first to a Chinese general, then to her sister's husband. She managed to escape to the south and later watched Saigon dissolve. "So many . . . left in shallow graves," she recalls from her new U.S. home, "souls wandering ceaselessly...
...story shifts moods, and Omar changes motivations (Candide to Sammy Glick), in an eyewink. Stephen Frears' direction can be lyrical and clumsy by turns; it can soar or trip over its headlong ambitiousness. The splendid cast is urged toward caricature, then plays through it, with Seth magnificent as a mandarin socialist in decay. He is the eloquent conscience of a people stranded in a land whose imperial sun has set. Alas, they are too busy making it, on the empire's old terms, to listen...
...position in the fast-growing market for citrus drinks. Pepsi scored an instant hit last year, when it introduced Slice, a lemon-lime soda containing 10% real fruit juice. Designed to appeal to health-conscious sippers, Slice had 1985 sales of about $400 million. Pepsi unveiled a new mandarin-orange version of Slice last week, but Coke countered with an announcement of its own. In February, Coke's Minute Maid division will market lemon-lime and orange soft drinks containing fruit juice and try to take a slice out of Slice's sales...