Happy Chinese New Year All! A memory from a different time not that long ago, when the east seemed terrifically far away. I hope to be fully back in touch soon. Yours ever, The Perfumed Dandy
She wasn’t a grade school teacher always. This woman has a past.
Taking a break from marking books of summer holiday reminiscences rendered in schoolboy scrawl, she decides to look again at the photographs.
Just five years after Nixon, she too went to China. It was ’78 and the next year an embassy would open in what everybody still called Peeking then.
Someone had to ready it for the arrivals.
Who better than the wife of the man who would be first cultural attache to the land of the Cultural Revolution?
In an uncommon moment of decor diplomacy, it was decided to break from American tradition: to forgo a little piece of the Uncle Sam overseas. Local sensitivities relating to cultural imperialism were judged to preclude the parochial neo-classicism of a White House away from home.
So the style would be Sino- American, through and through.
In the photographs, honeyed…
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The Perfumed Dandy. 
That was a great review, Mr. Dandy. Happy Chinese New Year! It’s the Year of the Horse. I wonder what that means? Maybe the year will gallop wildly and freely.