Word: mao
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There is something creepy about cruising the darkening streets of Beijing sunk in the velvet upholstery of Madame Mao's 1970s Red Flag limousine. My feet propped up on the jump seat?just as Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong's third wife, liked to sit on her own tours of the capital?I sip champagne, nibble caviar and nod as my 20-year-old tour guide, Maggie, recounts tales of China's glorious communist past. As we pass Tiananmen Square and its floodlit portrait of Chairman Mao, I've suddenly had enough. Unable to take more of Maggie's garbled history...
...TRAVEL Beijing's Mao-stalgia House...
...ones. Western music is equally verboten as Ma, the film's violin-playing narrator, discovers when the village chief threatens to punish him for playing a Mozart tune. Quick-witted Luo saves the day by explaining that the name of the song is "Mozart Is Always Thinking of Chairman Mao." You can see the forlornness in the boys' eyes as they begin to sense the worst fear of every teenager: they are going to die of boredom...
...tale. It doesn't help that Dai seems to forget that the boys are living in the middle of the Cultural Revolution; with its postcard-perfect vistas and the endless free time the trio enjoys, life in Phoenix on the Sky seems less re-education camp than Mao's Outward Bound. But Seamstress, which earned a Golden Globe nomination for best foreign-language film, achieves moments of quiet beauty as well. Ma sheds confused tears at the mention of Balzac's Chinese translator, punished as a reactionary like Ma's father; Luo reads Ursule Mirouet out loud...
...TRAVEL Beijing's Mao-stalgia House...