Word: ni
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After much fingering, it is courteously returned to Subject Ma. After this a quintet of F.F.s take a stroll through Wusih's back streets. They are immediately surrounded by laughing, chattering locals, many descending from homeward-bound bicycles. "Ni hao! Ni hao!" (How do you do?) Congeniality on such a scale can be slightly frightening, but it is authentic and spontaneous. Back in the hermetic bus on the way to the railroad station, Richard Lloyd Jones, president of the Tulsa (Okla.) Tribune, mops his brow and remarks: "This is how F.D.R. must have felt riding down Pennsylvania Avenue...
...teeming farm called the Hsinching People's Commune. It is a model establishment, or it would not be on the F.F. itinerary. As the buses arrive, all hands of all ages are out to greet them, all smiling and hand-clapping (it beats weeding). The F.F.s, after Ni haos! and handshakes, are waved toward basins of cool water and stacks of fresh towels. Then they troop in for the Brief Introduction, the ritualistic prelude to any tourist attraction...
...fictitious Central American republic, a territory of the mind that has lately received many tourists. Joan Didion exercised her talents there in A Book of Common Prayer. García 3's The Autumn of the Patriarch also took place in such a Central American dreamscape. Niña Huanca strikes similar social and political chords, but Gonzalez-Aller also seeks the high notes of myth and the mysteries of human motives...
...Greek myth of the castration of Uranus, the rebellious son has the help of his mother. Niña Huanca, raped by Colonel Arruza when she was 17, is a figure of legendary proportions...
Matalax himself fathers only sterile hatreds and a longing for a private immortality that the world can never deliver. Yet without such longing he would lack the painful humanity that makes him a poignant character. There is throughout Niña Huanca an echo of Spanish Philosopher Miguel de Unamuno's "tragic sense of life," recaptured and amplified in just the right tones of modern inconsolability...