How importing cute Chinese guest workers on temporary visas became a cuddly “Kumbaya” dream for New York’s rich and powerful.
“Children love pandas!” declared Representative Carolyn Maloney with the giddy conviction of a politician getting behind something incontrovertible.
Up on the 18th floor of the soon-to-be-gutted, now-owned-by-the Chinese monument to American Greatness the Waldorf Astoria, a crowd of 450 was deep in thrall to a strange panda fantasia—one that has drifted through the city’s power elite like a wishful-thinking, public-spirited psychedelic reverie over the past few months (intensified, in a way, by the anti-Establishment election).
This story is from the March 6–19, 2017 edition of New York magazine.
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This story is from the March 6–19, 2017 edition of New York magazine.
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