Word: meetings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Quan's admiration for Zhao may be a bit too public, but many of the Chinese I meet seem to share it. About 1,000 miles from Quan's farm, in Guanxian, a group of excited Chinese tourists is visiting the Dujiangyan irrigation system -- another marvel of China's ancient genius -- built 2,200 years ago. On a misty morning the tourists can barely make out an aging, abandoned hydroelectric plant about a mile upstream. Like much of what was built by the Soviets during the heyday of Sino-Soviet cooperation in the 1950s, this power station too is crumbling...
...increasing their sick leave and slowing their production. At school, the results of an essay competition glorifying the army's role in Tiananmen are supposed to have been made public weeks ago. Perhaps too many entries reflect the view of an eleven-year-old girl whose grandparents I meet. Her short, three-page paper, reflecting the unpopularity of China's conservative Premier, has Li Peng resigning because he is "too stinking." Most significant of all, perhaps, few people seem to have become informers in spite of a well-advertised Ratters Anonymous network...
Most of those I meet seem to believe that despite the current retrenchment, China's economy is evolving into one not unlike South Korea's or Taiwan's. And while neither of those nations offers the political freedoms available in the West, both are light-years ahead of China economically. Is that really where China is going, or will the new resemble the old, a return to the Stalinist economic system that even Mikhail Gorbachev is trying to abandon? Will Deng succeed in anointing party chief Jiang Zemin as his successor, and would Jiang, in power, affirm continued economic liberalism...
...impossible, after just five weeks "inside," to say what China is like. It is possible only to meet some people, sketch some scenes, let some voices tell their stories. And if, up close, childhood impressions fade, enough incongruities and paradoxes survive to concentrate the mind. Like the newspapers that urge "bitter struggle" against "bourgeois liberalism" while trumpeting the pleasures of disco dancing on the same page. Like the never ending loop of music in the lobby of a hotel in Sichuan province that alternates between a Rod Stewart oldie (Sailing) and a socialist goody (Without the Communist Party There Would...
Within a year he marries, not knowing that Kim has escaped to Bangkok -- and borne him a son. Then a veterans' group puts him in contact with his Vietnamese family. Chris comes to Thailand, meaning to meet his responsibilities, instead completing Kim's psychic destruction. Her last desperate act is to ensure her son's future at the cost of her own. The primacy of love over money, the tale implies, is evident only to those who can be sure of both...