15 year
old Malia and 12 year old Sasha Obama have joined their mom Michelle Obama and
grandmom Marian Robinson in China for a seven-day, three-city goodwill tour
that focuses on cultural and educational exchange. The quartet's first top was
in the city of Beijing on Friday, March 21, 2014. While the weeklong trip to
China seemed to start as a spring break holiday with her mother and daughters
but has turned out to include far more substance — and politics — than the
cheerful advocate of fitness and healthful eating she often displays at home.
On
Monday, Malia, Sasha and Michelle visited the Mutianyu section of the Great
Wall of China, looking sporty and stylish in relaxed attire and comfy shoes.
The beautiful ladies were photographed laughing while exploring the historical
Forbidden City. FLOTUS even danced with traditional Chinese performers on the
City Wall in China's central Shaanxi province.
As part
of her first-ever trip to China, the First Lady made just one major speech on
Saturday at the Stanford Center at Peking University in Beijing, where she
openly addressed China's restrictions on media freedom. "My husband and I
are on the receiving end of plenty of questioning and criticism from our media
and our fellow citizens, and it’s not always easy, but we wouldn’t trade it for
anything in the world," she told students at China's oldest university, as
reported by Time. "It is so important for information and ideas to flow
freely over the Internet ... because that's how we discover the truth."
At a
high school here on Tuesday, Mrs. Obama pointedly told students that the United
States championed “the right to say what we think and worship as we choose,”
even as she conceded that Americans still lived those ideals imperfectly and
that minorities had struggled to overcome a legacy of discrimination.
“Many
decades ago, there were actually laws in America that allowed discrimination
against black people like me, who are a minority in the United States,” Mrs.
Obama said in a speech at the No. 7 School here. “But over time, ordinary
citizens decided that those laws were unfair. So they held peaceful protests
and marches.”
Slowly
but surely, Mrs. Obama said to her rapt young Chinese audience, America
changed, and “today, 50 years later, my husband and I are president and first
lady of the United States.”
The
family is scheduled to be reunited with President Barack Obama stateside in
Washington, D.C. on Wednesday.
Of
course critics of the Obamas quibble about the cost of the First Lady’s trip,
about the fact that she took her daughters and mother with her, and about their
view that the trip is little more than a vacation, blah, blah, blah. Naturally, if anyone else
paid for the trip or if the trip was financed by China, etc., etc, etc. we’d
hear about that also. (If you want to read the right wing’s negative press that
always accompanies every one of Michelle Obama’s trips, just google the subject. I decided not to take
that tact in this article.)
Sources:
The information in this article originally appeared on Usmagazine.com. March
24, 2014 and in the New York Times, March 25, 2014.
0 comments:
Post a Comment