Word: mandarins
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Flying Saucers. South Viet Nam's housewives have a proverb that "a wise woman makes a mandarin out of her husband," and publicly Vietnamese women are usually models of submissiveness. At home, though, the Vietnamese wife is known as the "minister of the interior," while her husband is the "foreign minister." In practice, that means that he brings his paychecks home to her and she dispenses pocket money to him. She pays all the big bills. If they eat out, it is generally the wife who discreetly picks up the restaurant tab. When she throws a temper tantrum...
...academician; of cancer; in Paris. As longtime editor (1925-40, 1953-68) of the prestigious monthly La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, Paulhan helped guide the careers of such luminaries as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. He be rated the mediocre, praised the promising, and generally acted like a mandarin of French letters. He was elected to the sedate Academic Française in 1963, even though it was rumored that he had written L'Histoire d'O, a novel about the joys of masochism...
...Tibet, the two sides are literally at bayonet point, patrolling within sight and sound of each other on opposite sides of a single strand of wire. Asian-style politesse prevails in the low-key propaganda war at Natu Pass. Indian loudspeakers kick off daily with news and propaganda in Mandarin Chinese at 5:30 a.m. The Chinese speakers reply in somewhat stilted classical Hindi, which most jawans do not understand, from 6:30 to 11. Then the Indians resume until 1:30 p.m., when both sides fall silent for the rest of the day. Neither side interrupts the other...
Wandering Wraith. Ho was born in French Indo-China, not far from the Gulf of Tonkin, 78 years ago. His father was a celebrated scholar and minor official-following the mandarin tradition-in the imperial puppet government. He was fired because the French suspected him of "patriotic" sympathies. Embittered, he used to declare that "being a mandarin is the ultimate form of slavery." He went on to eke out an existence as a nomadic marketplace storyteller, scribe and sometime bonesetter, but he somehow had contrived to send his son to schools in Hue and Saigon...
...honestly, for Bo is one of the Viet Minh's "old comrades." As a Viet Minh major, he was wounded and captured by the French, who even then were impressed. Born July 9, 1917, in a Mekong Delta town 150 miles from Saigon, Bo's Southern mandarin background makes him an appropriate emissary not only for Hanoi but also for the Viet Cong...