Word: paule
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Paul was our national tour guide. Employed by the central state agency for tourism, he traveled around China with us, advising us on fair prices and playing shepherd to the inevitable two or three people who never seemed to find their way back to the tour bus. He wore bright-colored golf shirts and navy blue pants and carried an $800 camera from Hong Kong...
...Paul seemed to me the epitome of the new China--he spoke English fluently, had been to college and, he told me proudly, had a library of over 500 American books. He was newly married and his wife was expecting a child in two months...
...almost three weeks, Paul led me and my 31 fellow travellers--Americans, though many of them were as different from me as the omnipresent Chinese grandmothers who lined the streets, selling fragrant buds of jasmine to tourists...
...Paul, as with most of the people I met on the 20-day tour of China in June, was far more complex than I had thought. One day, as we sat fanning ourselves in one of the dozens of "Friendship Stores" that cater to foreign visitors, Paul told me his story...
During the Cultural Revolution, the 10-year period when Mao Zedong made war on the intellectuals and reduced the country to a virtual standstill, Paul was forced to leave school and was sent to the country for two years. There he worked from 7 a.m. until 9 p.m. in the rice fields, receiving little or no wages and barely enough food for subsistence. His education was put on hold, and he was forced to concentrate on survival--his classmates in the city, members of the Red Guard, had labeled him a "reactionary," the gravest crime in Mao's China...