China Tour Quotes

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Only desperation can account for what the Chinese do in the name of 'medicine.' That's something you might remind your New Age friends who've gone gaga over 'holistic medicine' and 'alternative Chinese cures.
Anthony Bourdain (A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines)
Nowadays,” my tour guide says, “it is a man’s world here in China. But 6000 years ago, it was a woman’s world. Man and woman don’t need to get married. Man can just visit the woman’s house at night. When you have a baby, it doesn’t matter who the father is.
Dipa Sanatani (The Merchant of Stories: A Creative Entrepreneur's Journey)
How dare you - " "How dare I offer you more than you could've ever dreamed?" "How dare you waltz in here and presume - " "Presume to prescribe a future with hope and promise?" I shut my mouth abruptly, glaring at him. Then, "Are you quite finished?" "Are you?" he asked. "I am a free woman, Mr.Kensington. Grown. I can do as I wish.I may be blood kin to you, but I am not your employee." My eyes cut to Mama, but hers remained on the barn. "Regardless, you shall do as I say." I let out a sputtering, exasperated laugh. "And if I do not?" He traced the edge of his chipped china saucer. "That would be ill advised.
Lisa Tawn Bergren (Glamorous Illusions (Grand Tour, #1))
The Anorexic Eats a Salad Mountains rise, fall, rise again. Stars complete their slow trek into oblivion. A snail tours the length of China’s Great Wall twice. All those pesky cancers—cured. Somewhere in Lower Manhattan, a barista finally smiles. Roundworms evolve into ovals. Flatworms get chesty. Molasses, a tortoise, and sedimentation run the fifty-yard dash. Results pending. Temps plunge in hell. The devil waxes his skis. She has almost made it through her first bite.
Christine Heppermann (Poisoned Apples: Poems for You, My Pretty)
During duty tours in China during the 1930s Carlson accompanied Mao Tse-tung and his army on the Long March and into combat against the Japanese. Carlson deeply admired Mao.
Joseph Wheelan (Midnight in the Pacific: Guadalcanal—The World War II Battle That Turned the Tide of War)
The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, is a city consecrated to the worship of a father-son dynasty. (I came to think of them, with their nuclear-family implications, as 'Fat Man and Little Boy.') And a river runs through it. And on this river, the Taedong River, is moored the only American naval vessel in captivity. It was in January 1968 that the U.S.S. Pueblo strayed into North Korean waters, and was boarded and captured. One sailor was killed; the rest were held for nearly a year before being released. I looked over the spy ship, its radio antennae and surveillance equipment still intact, and found photographs of the captain and crew with their hands on their heads in gestures of abject surrender. Copies of their groveling 'confessions,' written in tremulous script, were also on show. So was a humiliating document from the United States government, admitting wrongdoing in the penetration of North Korean waters and petitioning the 'D.P.R.K.' (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) for 'lenience.' Kim Il Sung ('Fat Man') was eventually lenient about the men, but not about the ship. Madeleine Albright didn't ask to see the vessel on her visit last October, during which she described the gruesome, depopulated vistas of Pyongyang as 'beautiful.' As I got back onto the wharf, I noticed a refreshment cart, staffed by two women under a frayed umbrella. It didn't look like much—one of its three wheels was missing and a piece of brick was propping it up—but it was the only such cart I'd see. What toothsome local snacks might the ladies be offering? The choices turned out to be slices of dry bread and cups of warm water. Nor did Madeleine Albright visit the absurdly misnamed 'Demilitarized Zone,' one of the most heavily militarized strips of land on earth. Across the waist of the Korean peninsula lies a wasteland, roughly following the 38th parallel, and packed with a titanic concentration of potential violence. It is four kilometers wide (I have now looked apprehensively at it from both sides) and very near to the capital cities of both North and South. On the day I spent on the northern side, I met a group of aging Chinese veterans, all from Szechuan, touring the old battlefields and reliving a war they helped North Korea nearly win (China sacrificed perhaps a million soldiers in that campaign, including Mao Anying, son of Mao himself). Across the frontier are 37,000 United States soldiers. Their arsenal, which has included undeclared nuclear weapons, is the reason given by Washington for its refusal to sign the land-mines treaty. In August 1976, U.S. officers entered the neutral zone to trim a tree that was obscuring the view of an observation post. A posse of North Koreans came after them, and one, seizing the ax with which the trimming was to be done, hacked two U.S. servicemen to death with it. I visited the ax also; it's proudly displayed in a glass case on the North Korean side.
Christopher Hitchens (Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays)
Today tours can be taken around the white-stucco red-tiled colonnaded building, rather grand in its colonial style, with neatly trimmed gardens, painted curbstones, clipped conifers and beautiful deep pink rosa china hibiscus flowers by the door through which those about to die would enter. In May, which is autumn in the southern hemisphere, the trees turn rich shades of russet and chestnut.
Paul Vallely (Pope Francis: Untying the Knots)
Ils se laissèrent porter en direction du nord, vers la gare de Perdido. Ils tournaient lentement, revigorés par cette présence urbaine massive, profane, en dessous d'eux, par ce lieu fécond, grouillant, tel qu'aucun de leurs semblables n'en avait jamais connu jusque là. Partout, le moindre secteur – ponts obscurs, hôtels particuliers vieux de cinq siècles, bazars tortueux, entrepôts de béton, tours, péniches d'habitation, taudis répugnants et parcs au cordeau – grouillait de nourriture. C'était une jungle dépourvue de prédateurs. Un terrain de chasse.
China Miéville (Perdido Street Station: Tome 1)
Thegirls also ordered catalogues for items they could never buy, and theLisbons' mailbox filled up once again: furniture catalogues fromScottshruptine, high-end clothing, exotic vacations. Unable to goanywhere, the girls traveled in their imaginations to goldtipped Siamesetemples, or past an old man with bucket and leaf broom tidying amoss-carpeted speck of Japan. As soon as we learned the names of thesebrochures we sent for them ourselves to see where the girls wanted togo. Far East Adventures. Footloose Tours. Tunnel to China Tours. OrientExpress. We got them all. And, flipping pages, hiked through dustypasses with the girls, stopping every now and then to help them take offtheir backpacks, placing our hands on their warm, moist shoulders andgazing off at papaya sunsets. We drank tea with them in a waterpavilion, above blazing goldfish. We did whatever we wanted to, andCecilia hadn't killed herself: she was a bride in Calcutta, with a redveil and the soles of her feet dyed with henna. The only way we couldfeel close to the girls was through these impossible excursions, whichhave scarred us forever, making us happier with dreams than wives.
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
To make way for more resorts with spectacular views, developers destroy native habitats and ignore local concerns. Preservationists decry the growing propensity to bulldoze old hotels and buildings in favor of constructing new resorts, water holes and entertainment spots that look identical whether in Singapore, Dubai or Johannesburg; a world where diversity is replaced with homogeneity. Another catastrophe for countries betting on tourism has come from wealthy vacationers who fall in love with a country and buy so many second houses that locals can no longer afford to live in their own towns and villages. Among the more thoughtful questions is how mass tourism has changed cultures. African children told anthropologists that they want to grow up to be tourists so they could spend the day doing nothing but eating. The tourists who do not speak the local language and rely on guides to tell them what they are seeing and what to think marvel at countries like China with its new wealth and appearance of democracy. Environmentalists wonder how long the globe can continue to support 1 billion people racing around the world for a long weekend on a beach or a ten-day tour of an African game park.
Elizabeth Becker (Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism)
You could see the future right away here,” Hu Renzhong, a pig and poultry producer, told me. “Food was expensive and people didn’t have enough meat to eat. They couldn’t afford it. The land was good, though, and back then it was still cheap.” Hu received me one morning at his mansion farmhouse on the outskirts of Lusaka, offering me a seat in the marble chill of his enormous living room, before taking me on a long walking tour of his acres and acres of hog-breeding pens and sprawling, temperature-controlled chicken hatcheries, all impressively modern and minutely organized. He had come to Zambia from China’s Jiangxi province in 1995 as a twenty-two-year-old simple laborer, but soon got into business for himself, raising chickens at first with another Chinese immigrant. It wasn’t long before the two had struck it rich, buying land and building ever-bigger houses. “Things had started developing really fast back home, and a lot of people tried to tell me I’d made a mistake,” he said. “But I’ve never really looked back.” I
Howard W. French (China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa)
The road north out of central Lusaka quickly transitions from a world of impressively broad avenues and fancy new commercial districts to a stop-and-start tour of desolate, overcrowded slums. There, half-dressed young men sit around glumly, seemingly lacking the motivation in the face of persistently high unemployment to even bother looking for work. When at last one reaches the highway that leads north to the Copper Belt it is the oncoming traffic that makes the strongest impression. It consists mostly of van after jam-packed van full of poor Zambians. They are overwhelmingly young and desperate to get off the land and they arrive in the capital with dreams of remaking their lives in the big city. When most people think about China’s relationship with Africa they reduce it to a single proposition: securing access to natural resources, of which Africa is the world’s greatest storehouse. As one of the top copper-producing nations, Zambia, a landlocked country in southern Africa, is doubtlessly a very big part of that story.
Howard W. French (China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa)
Each of the three recognized categories—care, service, and education—would encompass a wide range of activities, with different levels of compensation for full- and part-time participation. Care work could include parenting of young children, attending to an aging parent, assisting a friend or family member dealing with illness, or helping someone with mental or physical disabilities live life to the fullest. This category would create a veritable army of people—loved ones, friends, or even strangers—who could assist those in need, offering them what my entrepreneur friend’s touchscreen device for the elderly never could: human warmth. Service work would be similarly broadly defined, encompassing much of the current work of nonprofit groups as well as the kinds of volunteers I saw in Taiwan. Tasks could include performing environmental remediation, leading afterschool programs, guiding tours at national parks, or collecting oral histories from elders in our communities. Participants in these programs would register with an established group and commit to a certain number of hours of service work to meet the requirements of the stipend. Finally, education could range from professional training for the jobs of the AI age to taking classes that could transform a hobby into a career. Some recipients of the stipend will use that financial freedom to pursue a degree in machine learning and use it to find a high-paying job.
Kai-Fu Lee (AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order)
Greater international visibility is likely to open new bargaining arenas for mainland Chinese democracy activists, who are more likely to be invited to join study tours, international conferences and background briefings with diplomats, politicians and policy makers if they are globally known.
Andreas Fulda (The Struggle for Democracy in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong: Sharp Power and its Discontents (China Policy Series))
I spent a long time in China after this tour. I don't think I would be ever able to repeat anything like this ever in my life.
Martins Ate (Destination: Me: 108 Ascetic Days Across Eurasia (Vedatrac Book 1))
Socialism, in other words, would not be possible until capitalism had exhausted its ability to expand and increase profits. That the end is coming is hard now to dispute, although one would be foolish to predict when. Global capitalism, in its final iteration, may replicate China’s totalitarian capitalism, a brutal system sustained by severe repression where workers are modern-day serfs.
Chris Hedges (America: The Farewell Tour)
Anand was on tour in a distant village when the shattering news of the Chinese invasion was announced. Within hours, there was an astonishing metamorphosis in the prevailing atmosphere. Except for the lone troubled voice that came from the radio, there was a numbed silence all around. Every citizen was in the grip of an indescribable mixture of anger, anguish, a sense of disappointment, and above all, a feeling of unity with every other Indian. Just when Anand was about to leave, a lad of about ten came forward. He put his hand in his shirt pocket and produced a twenty-five paise coin. He held it out tentatively and stammered, "This is my contribution to defeat China..." Anand accepted the coin and hugged the boy. He controlled his emotion with some difficulty. The gesture electrified the atmosphere. For the first time faces brightened somewhat. "Why not raise a fund in the village?", said the Sarpanch. "Yes!" interjected the villagers. "We must give and give and give until it hurts! Each a little more than he can afford to." God! Does this country need the threat of external aggression to unite it internally? wondered Anand, as his car turned into the highway.
P.V. Narasimha Rao (The insider)
in China, the Communists’ Russian advisers were fresh from long combat tours fighting and defeating the world’s most lethal army.
S.C.M. Paine (The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949)
Two Weeks Big Ticket Tour After four days satiating yourself on Běijīng’s mandatory highlights – the Forbidden City, Tiān’ānmén Square, the Summer Palace, the Great Wall and the city’s charming hútòng (alleyways) – hop on the overnight high-speed Z class sleeper across north China from Běijīng West to Xī’ān to inspect the famed Terracotta Warriors, walk around the city’s formidable Ming dynasty walls and climb the granite peaks of Taoist Huà Shān. Climb aboard the late-afternoon high-speed Z class sleeper to pulsating Shànghǎi, which pulls into town before breakfast. After three days sightseeing, museum-going, shopping and sizing up the sizzling skyscrapers of Pǔdōng, detour for a day to the former southern Song dynasty capital of Hángzhōu, before flying from either Hángzhōu or Shànghǎi to Guìlín for some of China’s most serene and ageless panoramas, the breathtaking karst landscapes of Yángshuò.
Damian Harper (Lonely Planet China (Travel Guide))
One Week Get tussled about by Bangkok’s chaos, then cruise up to Sukhothai to tour the quiet old ruins. Continue north to Chiang Mai, an easygoing cultural city. Climb up the mountain range to Pai for mountain scenery and bluesy late-nighters.
China Williams (Southeast Asia on a Shoestring)
I love a mysterious underground and have exploited this in many of my books: the ice tunnels of Greenland, the volcanic tubes of Iceland, the mysterious passageways beneath an ancient African hillside or a Buddhist monastery in central China. And of course, London's famous tube system, setting for my book LONDON UNDERGROUND. It's a funny sort of fixation, especially given my mother's claustrophobia, which I saw her deal with on many occasions. We once lined up to take a tour into the Lascaux Caverns in France to see the ancient cave paintings. My mother didn't make it past the first quirky turn into the depths, and she sent me on by myself. Given her interest in history and archaeology, which she used as the basis for a series of mysteries she published and which inspired my own writing, it always surprised me she still loved to write about places she could never visit.
Chris Angus
Before either men could commence a deliberation over who knew more of the hotel’s history, Coraline injected, “India was writing the last chapters of its saga of independence when The Imperial opened its doors in the 1930s.” She paused before proceeding, “Pandit Nehru, Mahatama Gandhi, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Lord Mountbatten met under congenial conditions to discuss the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan on the very ground we stand on. Adding to that, the Nehru family also had a permanent suite within the walls of this ‘Maiden of the East.’” She let out a discreet chuckle that I think only I caught. Both men stared at the female, not knowing how to respond. Before either one of them could opine, she continued, “If only walls could speak. Here indeed is a repository of fascinating anecdotal material for authors of romantic and detective fiction. It was here, at this very site, that one could clink glasses for the Royals to their war efforts, urge Gandhi to quit the India movement, or dance to the strains of Blue Danube, belly dance like a belle from Beirut or be serenaded by an orchestra from London.” The group of us stared at the big sister, wondering how in the world she knew so much about The Imperial. My teacher and Jabril pressed for affirmation. Instead, she vociferated, “Notably, The Imperial has the largest collection on display of land war gallantry awards in India and among its neighbouring countries such as Afghanistan, Burma, Bhutan and China. It also holds a sizeable record of orders and decorations bestowed by the British Royalties to the Emperor of India as an honour to the local Maharajas, Sultans and ruling Princes from the various Indian states.” While Narnia’s chaperone continued her historical spiel, the recruit pulled me aside and whispered amusingly, “Although everything my big sister said is true, she’s having fun with you guys. Her information is from the hotel’s brochure in the guest rooms.” I quipped. “Why didn’t you tell the rest of our group? I thought she was an expert in India’s history!” She gave me a wet kiss and said saucily, “I’m telling you because I like you.” Stunned by her raciness, I was speechless. I couldn’t decide whether to tell her there and then that I was gay – but at that very moment, Andy appeared from around the corner. “Where did you two disappear to?” he inquired. When Narnia was out of earshot, I muttered knowingly to my BB, “I’ll tell you later.”, as we continued the art tour browsing portraitures of India’s Princely Rulers of yore.
Young (Turpitude (A Harem Boy's Saga Book 4))
Bethlehemu iliteuliwa na Mungu kuwa mahali pa kuzaliwa Mfalme. Kwa sababu ya Bethlehemu, dhambi zetu zote zilisamehewa. Wakristo wengi wakipata pesa wanakwenda Dubai, China, Marekani, Uingereza, na mahali pengine kutalii. Lakini hawaendi Bethlehemu.
Enock Maregesi
There’s a country that does something a little like this. Its young people, including its very best educational prospects from all different backgrounds, spend two or three years training and solving problems in a nonhierarchical environment and get together every year. Many then collaborate to start companies. This country leads the world in venture capital investments per capita (over $170, versus $75 in the United States in 2010).1 It has more companies on the NASDAQ than any non-US country except for China, despite having a population of less than eight million.2 Its quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate was above 5 percent in 2011 and it’s in the top thirty globally in per capita GDP, above Spain and Saudi Arabia, among others.3 This country is Israel, where eighteen-year-olds complete two- or three-year tours in the military, getting to know each other in highly selective military units. They operate at a high level of autonomy and responsibility and then travel the world for months before heading to college and/or grad school. In Dan Senor and Saul Singer’s book Start-up Nation, this network and training ground is credited as helping give rise to a culture of risk taking and entrepreneurship. By the time Israelis graduate from college, they’re in their midtwenties and mature; in many cases, they’ve already been in operating environments and borne life-and-death responsibilities. This cocktail of experience gives rise to a mixture of both courage and impatience. As one entrepreneur put it, “When an Israeli entrepreneur has a business idea, he will start it that week. The notion that one should accumulate credentials before launching a venture simply does not exist. . . . Too much time can only teach you what can go wrong, not what could be transformative.”4 Another observer commented, “Israelis . . .  don’t care about the social price of failure and they develop their projects regardless of the economic . . . situation.”5
Andrew Yang (Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America)
Some people travel for the culture, or the place’s history, or the sheer experience. Our aim is total dissolution. We travel from Egypt to Estonia, big clunky blocks of metal hanging from our necks, naïve and stuttering and asking all the right questions at all the right times—“Is this the Great Wall I’ve been hearing so much about?”—flashing a few photos and no one looks twice, except maybe to point and laugh but we are just harmless Americans come for a tour of life on the other side.
Chris Campanioni (Tourist Trap)
Growing up I had been ambivalent about being Chinese, occasionally taking pride in my ancestry but more often ignoring it because I disliked the way that Caucasians reacted to my Chineseness. It bothered me that my almond-shaped eyes and straight black hair struck people as “cute” when I was a toddler and that as I grew older I was always being asked, even by strangers, “What is your nationality?”—as if only Caucasians or immigrants from Europe could be Americans. So I would put them in their place by telling them that I was born in the United States and therefore my nationality is U.S. Then I would add, “If you want to know my ethnicity, my parents immigrated from southern China.” Whereupon they would exclaim, “But you speak English so well!” knowing full well that I had lived in the United States and had gone to American schools all my life. I hated being viewed as “exotic.” When I was a kid, it meant being identified with Fu Manchu, the sinister movie character created by Sax Rohmer who in the popular imagination represented the “yellow peril” threatening Western culture. When I was in college, I wanted to scream when people came up to me and said I reminded them of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, a Wellesley College graduate from a wealthy Chinese family, who was constantly touring the country seeking support for her dictator husband in the Kuomintang’s struggles against the Japanese and the Chinese Communists. Even though I was too ignorant and politically unaware to take sides in the civil war in China, I knew enough to recognize that I was being stereotyped. When I was asked to wear Chinese dress and speak about China at a meeting or a social function, I would decline because of my ignorance of things Chinese and also because the only Chinese outfit I owned was the one my mother wore on her arrival in this country.
Grace Lee Boggs (Living for Change: An Autobiography)
In the fall of 1932, Bergelson undertook the longest journey of his life. He traveled the Trans-Siberian Railway all the way through Siberia and beyond, disembarking just fifty miles shy of the border with China, in the budding Jewish autonomy of Birobidzhan. The Jews of Birobidzhan welcomed him grandly, as if he were a long-lost descendant of a royal Yiddish tribe. A plenary session of the settlement council convened in his honor. He toured the new collective farms in the company of local authorities. He participated, as a guest of honor, in the celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution—an unprecedented role for a foreign national.
Masha Gessen (Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region (Jewish Encounters Series))
Table 1-3. Sample search queries and intent Term Queries Intent Monetary value Beijing Airport 980 Nav Low Hotels in Xi’an 2,644 Info Mid 7-Day China tour package 127 Trans High Sichuan jellyfish recipe 53 Info Low This type of analysis can help you determine where to place ads and where to concentrate content and links.
Eric Enge (The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization)
I'd wanted to travel through Asia most of my life, sample all the incredible street food in Thailand and Vietnam, tour Japan's famous convenience stores that sold food as good as their restaurants, slurp cumin lamb hand-torn noodles in China.
Amanda Elliot (Best Served Hot)
The elderly in China play mah-jong. American senior citizens go on cruises and play golf. Europeans visit museums, tour wineries and dine at Michelin-star restaurants. Indian elders visit temples.
Shoba Narayan (Food and Faith: A Pilgrim's Journey through India)
Bush went off to a tour of “the caves” beneath the city that had been arranged for him by Deng Xiaoping. It was a memorable Christmas Day. “Dig tunnels deep,” Mao had ordered his people, “store grain everywhere.” Mao’s mission: to create a means by which his people might survive a nuclear assault from the Soviet Union. The result: a vast project to create enormous underground shelters across China. Bush was met at an intersection and taken to a clothing store, where his tour guide pressed a concealed button that operated a trapdoor. They climbed down into the tunnels. Bush walked from room to room. There was enough space, he thought, for thousands in this subterranean kingdom.
Jon Meacham (Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush)
China is indeed favored by the gods to have such a lovely blossom grace its throne.” Out of the corner of her eye, Mulan saw Shang’s expression darken. She too heard the insult in those words. Flowers were beautiful and delicate. Ornamental. She bared her teeth in a thin smile. “I’m quite fond of flowers myself. After your’e settled in the state guesthouses, you must tour the imperial gardens. There’s a particular variety called snow lace, a white blossom with rose-tinged petals. I collected it myself from the Tung-Shao Pass. Are you familiar with that region?” The ambassador’s smirk froze on his face. The Tung-Shao Pass was where Mulan’s regiment had defeated Shan Yu’s men. There were already multiple ballads commemorating how Mulan used a rocket to trigger the avalanche that buried his entire army. “Yes, I am familiar with that pass.” “I’m glad,” said Mulan. “It’s the mark of a good ambassador to know his host nation’s land and history, and I’m sure you are one of the very best.
Livia Blackburne (Feather and Flame (The Queen's Council, #2))
For example, in the mid-1960s there were direct flights from London to Interlaken (with British Eagle), and in the late 1980s Brits were still the most numerous hotel guests in Interlaken, outnumbering even the Swiss. However, in 2012 Britain only managed No. 8, overtaken by the likes of India, Korea, China and Japan. The British century (and a half) in Switzerland is over; the Asian one has just begun.
Diccon Bewes (Slow Train to Switzerland: One Tour, Two Trips, 150 Years and a World of Change Apart)
Traveling with us did have its advantages. Before Barack’s presidency was over, our girls would enjoy a baseball game in Havana, walk along the Great Wall of China, and visit the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio one evening in magical, misty darkness. But it could also be a pain in the neck, especially when we were trying to tend to things unrelated to the presidency. Earlier in Malia’s junior year, the two of us had gone to spend a day visiting colleges in New York City, for instance, setting up tours at New York University and Columbia. It had worked fine for a while. We’d moved through NYU’s campus at a brisk pace, our efficiency aided by the fact that it was still early and many students were not yet up for the day. We’d checked out classrooms, poked our heads into a dorm room, and chatted with a dean before heading uptown to grab an early lunch and move on to the next tour. The problem is that there’s no hiding a First Lady–sized motorcade, especially on the island of Manhattan in the middle of a weekday. By the time we finished eating, about a hundred people had gathered on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, the commotion only breeding more commotion. We stepped out to find dozens of cell phones hoisted in our direction as we were engulfed by a chorus of cheers. It was beneficent, this attention—“Come to Columbia, Malia!” people were shouting—but it was not especially useful for a girl who was trying quietly to imagine her own future. I knew immediately what I needed to do, and that was to bench myself—to let Malia go see the next campus without me, sending Kristin Jones, my personal assistant, as her escort instead. Without me there, Malia’s odds of being recognized went down. She could move faster and with a lot fewer agents. Without me, she could maybe, possibly, look like just another kid walking the quad. I at least owed her a shot at that.
Michelle Obama (Becoming)
He spoke with the aunties in the different wards, asking questions and taking notes. He saw stuffed animals piled in corners, and a broken bicycle, and a single brightly colored mobile hanging from the ceiling of one room without furnishings, where young girls played together. They all stared at him as he passed, some with hopeful looks, others haunted, others without expression at all. The older they were, the quieter and more subdued they seemed. There was something not at all childlike about them. He had trouble bringing himself to meet their gazes. The babies had made him want to smile. The older children just made him want to hurry, especially the ones kept off in a room by themselves, with cleft palates or misshapen limbs or the vacant stare of profound retardation. He looked through the doorway at them but couldn't bring himself to go inside. He picked up the pace as he completed his tour, growing more uncomfortable with each room.
David Ball (China Run)