Word: pagoda
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There are no skyscrapers or neon signs. The largest building around is the Strand Hotel, left over from colonial days, where you can get a lobster dinner for four bucks. But the city is really dominated by the Shwedagon Pagoda, a huge golden dome three kilometers above the city, surrounded on eight sides by smaller pagodas in resplendent red and silver. Both the men and women on the streets wear the traditional longgyi, a tube-shaped piece of cloth knotted at the waist and falling to the ankles. Even children, but especially old women, smoke sold everywhere on the sidewalks...
...Shwedagon Pagoda, my friend Tom and I were lucky enough to happen on a pwe, one of the Burmese religious festivals that go on all night and all day, held on various special occasions, like weddings. We stood at the door watching as two female dancers in elaborate face make-up and gold-embroidered longgyis danced to the rhythm of traditional wooden Burmese instruments. The dancers were encircled by small children at their feet and adults further back, all squatting on the floor...
...events have conspired to keep Americans at home, while European and Asian tourists can feel at home abroad visiting Disney World's ersatz Eiffel Tower, Piazza San Marco and Japanese pagoda. Between March and September, U.S. amusement parks and theme attractions will have lured 235 million visitors through the turnstiles (average admission: $10) for a robust brand of professional patriotism. During the show at Florida Cypress Gardens, 30 miles from Disney World, a stunt man gliding high above the crowd effuses, "One thing I can see from here--or from any height--is that America sure is beautiful...
Mother and son live in a pagoda beach house called the Savannah Cabana, a sales model bought from a failed real estate developer who threw in a shack for Theenie, the family maid. The boy's private name for his father is the Progenitor, an impersonal though not inappropriate designation. Simons' parents are divorced; on visits, the Progenitor tries to exchange his son's mullet pole for a baseball bat and tempt him with the upscale life. But every paternal gesture meets with failure or misunderstanding. His sex lecture about contraception, for example, leaves Simons with...
...bells no longer shuffle through; nor do mules with their red tufts; nor shepherds with their flocks. Yanan is now a small north Chinatown, its main street traffic controlled by two stop lights. It boasts cigarette factories, woolen mills, an opera house, a modern hotel. Only the yellow Song pagoda marks the village where history once happened...