Word: peiyuan
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...decades neither knows if the other has been killed. Fast-forward a half-century. The twins have survived. Peiyuan, politically maimed from the Cultural Revolution, lives quietly on a small pension in Changsha, the gray, polluted capital of Hunan. Peiji, who made his way to Taiwan with the retreating KMT, lives very unquietly in neon-struck Taipei. He is president of CTS, one of Taiwan's main TV networks. As boys they were indistinguishable. Now their faces tell very different stories: Peiyuan's face, thin and ravaged, is the story of a China that Mao wrought, with its famines, executions...
With China's future in the balance, Yang, a wealthy landowner with three wives, is breaking up his family. Yang Peiyuan, the older twin by half an hour, is to return to their hometown and join the communists. Yang Peiji, the younger twin, is to go south to join the Kuomintang (KMT) and fight in their Nationalist army. The train is about to leave. Peiji tells his brother to try to persuade their father to escape to Hong Kong. They hug, and Peiyuan boards the train...
...plot is not black and white; despite his ordeals, Peiyuan is more self-assured, more confident of his Chinese identity. His brother Peiji, the eminent achiever, broadcasts insecurity and a trace of guilt at the good life he has enjoyed. Peiyuan is resigned to China's failings. Peiji has indigestion from Taiwan's success. Tell their family story, and you also start to tell the story of China over the past 50 years, with all its contradictions, betrayals and unburied ghosts. Confucian thought has always seen the family as a model of the state. Obedience to the father...