Word: tourister
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Mydans and Demarest are among the first American journalists permitted to make such an extensive tourist's journey China. Mydans, who shot more than 100 rolls of film his visit, was amazed to discover how receptive the Chinese were to having their pictures taken. "In the 1940s " says Mydans, "most Chinese avoided being photographed because they believed that the camera catches the soul as well as the image; But today they are relaxed, willing and smiling in front of the camera...
...poesy, blood, sweat, glory and incongruity as the riven country that greeted Marco Polo. The temples and tombs, palaces and pagodas and gardens, majestic mountains and mighty rivers, art and artifacts as old as civilization: they are all there, glittering, tangible and not quite believable. Off the usual tourist track are the ramshackle tenements, mud-walled village cottages and the grinding labor of the peasant, equally hard for the Westerner to comprehend. They will all become picture postcards of the mind, but on first encounter they are closer to hallucination than reality...
...tourist is prepared for the pyramids or the Parthenon. But the Great Wall of China? More than 2,480 mortised miles of esplanade, built over the bodies of 300,000 serfs and some of the world's ruggedest mountain terrain, to no ultimate military purpose. On a windswept turret of the wall completed in 214 B.C., in a 500-year-old pavilion of the Forbidden City or Soochow's leaning Tiger Hill Pagoda (it has a 3¾° tilt), the visitor is not so much awed as numbed. Who were-and are - the people who could construct...
...hands of all ages are out to greet them, all smiling and hand-clapping (it beats weeding). The F.F.s, after Ni haos! and handshakes, are waved toward basins of cool water and stacks of fresh towels. Then they troop in for the Brief Introduction, the ritualistic prelude to any tourist attraction...
...even tabulate the requests from politicians, legislators, friends and special interests. There are 1,620 accredited White House correspondents, photographers and technicians constantly battering the doors. While the First Family has almost total privacy on the second floor of the mansion, once Carter goes out on the Truman balcony, tourists train their binoculars on him from in front of the south lawn. On these heavy tourist days at the White House (1.5 million visitors a year now), the corridors are so jammed that Rosalynn Carter, to get to her East Wing office undetected, must either walk outside on the drive...