Word: toure
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Paul was our national tour guide. Employed by the central state agency for tourism, he traveled around China with us, advising us on fair prices and playing shepherd to the inevitable two or three people who never seemed to find their way back to the tour bus. He wore bright-colored golf shirts and navy blue pants and carried an $800 camera from Hong Kong...
...Paul, as with most of the people I met on the 20-day tour of China in June, was far more complex than I had thought. One day, as we sat fanning ourselves in one of the dozens of "Friendship Stores" that cater to foreign visitors, Paul told me his story...
From local tour guides, from the owners of private stores, from everyone, it seemed, who spoke English, I heard the phrase "after the Cultural Revolution." The four most oft-repeated words of my stay in China became a metaphor for the vast changes the country is undergoing, for the experiences of suffering which bind the people together and for the limited extent to which I was capable of communicating with the Chinese people...
...through conversations with tour guides such as Paul, through bargaining with street vendors--a mixture of broken English phrases and hand signals--and through interaction with the children who gathered curiously on the streets to greet Americans, I was able to take away a sense of the Chinese people...
...just want their money," said the candid guide, who had announced to the tour group earlier that she did not belong to the Chinese Communist party and would be giving us "no propaganda...