Word: stooping
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...Revolution, he was officially named the "No. 2 capitalist reader" in the party, after Liu Shaoqi. Accused of arrogance, gluttony and dissolute habits (addiction to bridge and mah-jongg), he was purged and paraded through the streets of Peking wearing a dunce cap. He was rusticated several times-to stoop labor in Jiangxi, later to serve meals at the mess of a party training camp outside Peking. But he bears larger scars of memory. During the Great Terror, one of his sons was forced to jump-or was pushed-from the fourth-story window of his student dormitory...
...Jianying, 86. From the Communist uprising in Canton in 1927 to the coup against the Gang of Four in 1976, Ye was central. He now carries no official title, is ailing, will almost surely be replaced soon. He too bears wounds. His son, an aviator, was forced to stoop labor during the Terror. Overworked, exhausted, beaten, the son one night put his hand into the gears of a threshing machine; the hand was mangled. That son will never fly again. So Ye does not forget...
Being "sent down," or Xiafang, as the Chinese call it, was very simple punishment. "Stinking intellectuals" were supposed to learn from the peasants what life is like when one must stoop for hours transplanting rice seedlings in the wet muck. Horror stories spurt ? not grisly horror like eye gouging (which was reported only in south China), but simpler torment like being interrogated round the clock by Red Guards...
...didn't pass without my mother calling me a whore, and saying that I'd end up in Potter's Field, dead, forgotten and damned for all eternity. Most kids have nightmares about being taken away from their parents. I would sit on our front stoop, crooning softly of going far, far away to find another mother. "What she did to my young brother was worse. When he was two years old, she tried to hang him from the shower curtain and drown him in the toilet. He still has tic-tac-toe marks across his chest...
...listen to her: " 'I have to trust. I have to feel,' she told me. I have to go to bed, I thought. Never had I heard such tripe." Fortunately, Weiner is not nearly as wicked or unprincipled as he pretends. "There was nothing I wouldn't stoop to," he says, but the claim is transparently false. His ineptitude as a villain is exceeded only by his bafflement at the world around...