Word: quan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...back to China, Quan stopped in California to pick up some orange- tree saplings. "You know the Chinese were the first to grow orange trees," he says. "But like a good deal else that the Chinese invented first, they had forgotten how to do it." Today almost all the villages around Quan's 300-acre farm, which may be the largest private landholding in China, are growing oranges...
...Quan spends most evenings in his new two-story home "drinking beer and watching my Rambo tapes, because it's so damn boring here." Many of those who remember Quan and his family from before the revolution think he was crazy to return, despite his roots in Taishan. "Most of my friends here thought I was on the lam when I showed up." Others thought Quan could not possibly have anything to offer. "The Chinese have an incredible superiority complex," he says. "They're backward as hell, but they still believe the world revolves around China. They take great pride...
...Quan has another claim to local fame: in the middle of his orange groves he has erected a 6-ft. shrine to Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party leader whose tacit support of the student protesters in Tiananmen Square contributed to his ouster in late June. Near the top of the tiled column is a photograph of Zhao -- with Tommy Quan standing at his side in his Seattle Seahawks cap. "Zhao made it all possible," says Quan. "He showed people that incentives can turn China around. Now that he is out of favor, my friends think I should tear my monument...
...Quan's admiration for Zhao may be a bit too public, but many of the Chinese I meet seem to share it. About 1,000 miles from Quan's farm, in Guanxian, a group of excited Chinese tourists is visiting the Dujiangyan irrigation system -- another marvel of China's ancient genius -- built 2,200 years ago. On a misty morning the tourists can barely make out an aging, abandoned hydroelectric plant about a mile upstream. Like much of what was built by the Soviets during the heyday of Sino-Soviet cooperation in the 1950s, this power station too is crumbling...
...typical Chinese nursery school combines day attendees and quan tuo | (literally "whole care") students. From Monday through Saturday, with the exception of Wednesday evenings, a quan tuo student lives at his school around the clock, a situation no one seems to think the least bit odd. For despite filial devotion and the supposed centrality of family life, long separation is common in China. It is not rare for spouses to work in different cities and see each other infrequently. Similarly, far from signaling neglect, paying to deposit a three-year-old in another's care for a week away from...