Word: tourists
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Lois-Ann Yamanaka has set all four of her novels in Hawaii, yet none are likely to be promoted by the local tourist bureau. In her latest work particularly, the haunting yet hopeful Father of the Four Passages (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 233 pages; $23), the author seems impervious to her state's natural splendor, focusing instead on the blighted emotional landscape of her characters. Chief among them is Sonia Kurisu, the youngest daughter of a Japanese-American family living in Hilo. After a fraught childhood, Sonia stumbles through addictions to drugs and the men who provide them and undergoes...
...Chinese, show venal monks digging out people's eyeballs to settle debts and stretching the skin of dead serfs over drum heads. Communist propaganda vilifies exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama as a "splittist" seeking to restore feudalism. Such images die hard. Yang Bo, a 30-year-old Chinese tourist who absorbed many propaganda films on Tibet, recoiled while visiting one of Tibetan Buddhism's holiest places, the Labrang Monastery in Gansu province: "It was dark, and the spinning prayer wheels sounded savage...
...satisfied with merely importing Tibetan culture and commerce, Chinese are increasingly making the tourist trek to Tibet itself. The region received roughly zero non-Tibetan visitors at the start of the last century, but last year 420,000 Chinese tourists inhaled its thin air, up almost 50% from two years earlier. That means opportunity to people like Ouyang Xu, a cocky 33-year-old entrepreneur who opened the Himalaya Travel Agency last year, and took 700 Chinese to Tibet in six months. They multiply the impact of the many Chinese who have moved to Tibet in the past decade...
...Meanwhile, Mongla grew. Casinos and other tourist attractions were built, and soon thousands of Chinese day-trippers from neighboring Yunnan province were pouring over the border to visit them. Later I picked up an official tourism leaflet, written in Chinese, which described Mongla as "a beautiful and prosperous region (with) unique natural scenery and curious local customs." One of those curious customs was public executions. Lin governed his private fiefdom with medieval brutality. On one occasion three men suspected of plotting to assassinate him were dragged into the busy market and machine-gunned to death by his teenage bodyguards...
...right, strip clubs. Nudie bars abound in Florida's very own "Sin City." It has been estimated that there are currently 72 different places where women take off their clothes on stage for the viewing pleasure of mostly randy adolescents, depraved business men, and the occasional wide-eyed tourist...