Word: sampans
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Without a boat to drag, the walk along the Qutang towpath only takes four hours. A sampan carries us to the north side of the Yangtze, where the path runs some 50 m above the late-summer waterline. About 1.5 m wide, it's paved with well fitting flagstones running westward through light brush. Only a few sections have crumbled since its completion in 1900, a sharp contrast to most roads in the area. Below us are traces of lower trails, narrow and treacherous paths used by workmen who needed to be closer to the river. Short, granite pillars line...
...look down. The jade-green water that laps the shores is slimy to the touch, glinting with an oily iridescence and dotted with tourist flotsam and jetsam of which carrier bags and lumps of polystyrene are among the least noxious. The fisherfolk who invite visitors aboard their sampan settlements with offers of rice wine or bamboo bongs also sell coral and shells stolen from the few reefs that remain. And the grenades and dynamite sticks that you see stored in the cabins below give a blunt indication of the level of respect the fishermen pay to Ha Long...
Kien takes over from there. The fictional author forces the reader and himself through a "parade of memories" that "push upstream like a sampan toward the past." Some are gentle, as when his squad mistakenly receives a shipment of bras and side-button pants. Others are stark, as when he collapses drunk at Saigon airport at war's end and wakes up next to a dead, naked prostitute...
That, of course, is of paramount importance to both countries. While the Chinese dragon and the British lion have been warily circling each other, the world's third-largest financial center has responded to every shift in the bargaining like a sampan in a typhoon. As uncertainty over Hong Kong's future mounted, untold billions of dollars left the colony; foreign consulates have been flooded with visa applications from jittery locals, businessmen in particular. The value of the Hong Kong dollar fell 40% last year, as did the price of choice properties. The Hang Seng stock market index...
When the American fleet arrived at the end of the war, Blumenthal hired a sampan and sailed out to greet the ships. He received a U.S. visa in 1947 and settled in San Francisco. He recalls: "I had no commitments, no obligations, no money−nothing but opportunity." He made the most of it. To put himself through the University of California at Berkeley, he worked as a janitor, a movie ticket taker, a stagehand, a casino shill. After graduation, he enrolled in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. Within five years, he earned three...