Word: peasant
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...labor-intensive method designed for countries where labor is abundant. A two-ton tractor, by contrast, would require a peasant family's entire income just to keep it in gasoline and thirty-weight...
...Ivan Chonkin bears a Slavic resemblance to Jaroslav Haśek's The Good Soldier Schweik. But where Schweik was a shrewd operator in the Austro-Czech army of World War I, Good Soldier Chonkin belongs to an older tradition. He is the wise fool, the slow-witted peasant who mulishly plows a straight furrow through a devious world. Chonkin even looks as if he had plodded from the pages of folklore, "his field shirt hanging out over his belt, his forage cap down over his big red ears, his puttees slipping...
Over the centuries, the original opposition of the church, the skepticism of certain historians and officially inspired waves of violence against church buildings have not halted peasant adoration of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Her brown face adorned the banners of the troops that overthrew Spain and those of Zapata's land-hungry rebels. Today she appears everywhere in Mexico, from cantinas to taxicab dashboards to countless adobes. But the original remains on Juan Diego's cloak in the basilica. The cloak is made of a crude cactus fiber that usually lasts about 20 years; this one is still...
...tells the girl about Fu Mu Lan, a legendary woman warrior. The daughter mystically imagines herself undergoing 15 years of martial training, raising a peasant army of millions and deposing a cruel emperor. The role does not fit her new reality: "To avenge my family, I'd have to storm across China to take back our farm from the Communists; I'd have to rage across the United States and take back the laundry in New York and the one in California." There are other reasons why the old customs cannot be embraced. She will not endure...
...lien, 63, Vice Premier and commander of the Peking Military Region. Once a peasant guerrilla fighter, Ch'en rose through the ranks of the Red Army. His support was probably essential in Hua's lightning coup against the radicals...