Word: womanfully
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hush," says an elderly woman. "Zhao will return...
...abandon. While elsewhere in China, government booklets like The True Story of Tiananmen Square are prominently displayed alongside issues of Vogue, Elle and Glamour, you have to hunt for the lies at Wangfujing, Beijing's largest bookstore. The section labeled "Ideology and Political Education" actually displays books titled Modern Woman, Smart Woman, Handbook on Love and Life and dozens of how- to monographs like Eighty-Eight Points on Developing Public Relations. In other cities the regime appears successful at banishing books and periodicals dealing with "pornography, bourgeois liberalism and feudal superstition." Here one can buy steamy romances, political biographies...
Even the dead bride's Thatcher fixation tells a larger tale. The young woman, it seems, idolized Thatcher, not because she shared her politics but because with a single phrase Thatcher once captured her own world view: "If you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman...
...This is their wedding day. I don't want to hear anymore. Let us leave quietly." Then, apropos of nothing more than the increasingly common disdain many Chinese appear to feel for the army they saw as their great protector before it marched on Tiananmen, this small, fine-boned woman with searing brown eyes and a complexion Margaret Thatcher would compare to a rose recites some lines of Du Fu, the 8th century poet famous for decrying the gulf between ruled and ruler in China: "So it is better to abandon a daughter at birth than to see her later...
...guests are stunned. Everyone realizes that the sentiment just expressed -- as well as the wedding itself -- could easily cause this gentle woman's expulsion from the Communist Party, a "home" she later says she "entered out of love and idealism" 32 years earlier. The guests glance about nervously. Has the woman gone too far? Is someone in the crowd an informer...