Word: shaanxi
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...grew up in the social ghetto reserved for children of traitors. During the Cultural Revolution he was forced to leave high school, barred from applying to college, and given a job fit for the lowliest of political undesirables: as a night-shift janitor at a cotton mill in central Shaanxi province. When college entrance exams were reintroduced in 1977, Zhang was too old to be eligible. His only hope lay in the camera he purchased with the proceeds gained from selling his own blood...
...teacher was killed recently by a hit man, according to the police, after he told local journalists that 600 teachers had not been paid in months because the local government was pocketing their salaries. Last month, a millet farmer surnamed Song traveled 36 hours from Yan'an county in Shaanxi province to Beijing to complain about having to pay $700 a year in local taxes when his annual income was only $800. Song took his petition to the special complaints office in Beijing reserved for Shaanxi residents, only to watch a yawning bureaucrat toss his papers in the trash...
...never imagined he would marry his shy first cousin Hai. Though intramarriage was common in imperial days, it is taboo in modern China. But at age 20, with his friends already paired off, Liu found himself the odd man out. His parents, farmers in the village of Nanliang in Shaanxi province, could not raise the $2,000 required to attract a woman to Nanliang to marry their son. With so many men to choose from, women are loath to settle in hardscrabble villages like Nanliang. Desperate, Liu's mother contacted her sister and requested a favor: Could...
...Shaanxi's Qiaogou village, children play under a dusty apple tree. The noise is the raucous glee of boys being boys. There is only one girl among them. Asked what he thinks his future will hold, Xiaochun, 7, replies, "I'll get married and be a good farmer, of course." Where will he get a wife? "I think in other villages far away, there are many more girls," Xiaochun says. "I will get my wife from there." Across China, millions of boys are hoping the same thing, but only a few will ever meet the woman of their dreams...
...life will become more popular. But these institutions will only be able to soak up a limited number of men, and the government fears a rise in crime, prostitution and drug use as a swarm of bachelors roam the countryside. A hint of that future has already arrived in Shaanxi's Qiaogou village, where children play under a dusty apple tree, tossing scraps of vegetables as makeshift toys. The noise is the raucous glee of boys being boys. There is only one girl playing among them. Seven-year-old Xiaochun is astonished when asked what he thinks his future will...