[virgil]

Good movie. In The Sand Pebbles, the sailors had the Chinese coolies doing their work for them because it was “their rice bowl.” Seems a little like the current situation. Like a kind of inertia has taken over.

[PUGACHEV]

The Sand Pebbles was a good movie, with a memorable score, but the book is much better, and was written by a man who had been a China sailor. If you found the political and cultural ironies and contradictions interesting in the movie, you had only a taste of what's in the book.