Word: wanxian
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Life was infinitely more bitter under Mao. "My generation had the worst luck," says Zhang Shixun, the 48-year-old captain of Feizhang No. 3, a ferry that makes the daily trip from Chongqing downstream to Wanxian. "When we were starting to build our bodies, there was no food (the famines caused by Mao's Great Leap Forward killed more than 20 million). When we started to study, the Cultural Revolution happened, so we were sent to the countryside and stopped learning. Now as we start to make some money, there are all these layoffs. The younger generation will have...
From high on the hill in the riverside town of Wanxian, Gu Xiaoli looks out over the boat dock from her kitchen window and sighs. She is cooking a modest dinner of rice soup, pigs' feet and steamed buns. In the past two years, she, her husband and her son have all been laid off from textile factories in the town. With their combined pensions of $100 a month, they also have to support her 85-year-old father. Her biggest worry is for her son. After being laid off, he opened a restaurant that failed; then...
...From Wanxian, the river grows narrower, hemmed in by mountain ridges that tower above the boats. This is the start of the famed Three Gorges, a long, picturesque stretch with such place names as the Bellows Gorge, Drinking Phoenix Spring, Witches Gorge and Misty Screen Peak. The rapids that wrecked many wooden junks in the past have been tamed over the years by dynamiting rocks, and are now destined to disappear under 600 ft. of water after the dam is built...
Down the Yangtze from Chongqing I see stone hackers carving building blocks out of the riverbed reefs ? labor so uselessly expended when concrete is available that it can only be economical if recognized as forced labor. Farther down the river, at Wanxian, a young woman stevedore, of the same age as the oscilloscope workers, bends and stoops; all her muscles quiver as she heaves and finally lifts two huge buckets of pig livers for the third-class passengers. She staggers, makes it, totters up the gangplank. She is followed by other young women, beasts of burden, staggering under...
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