Age of Ambition (11 page)

Li peered at the students and called them to their feet. They were doctors in their thirties and forties, selected by Beijing hospitals to work at the following summer's Olympic Games. But like millions of English learners in China, they had almost no confidence speaking the language that they had spent years studying by textbook. Li had made his name with an ESL technique that a Hong Kong newspaper called English as a Shouted Language. Shouting, Li argued, was the way to unleash what he called the “international muscles.” Li stood before the students, his right arm raised in the manner of a tent revivalist, and launched them into English at the top of their lungs. “I!” he thundered. “
I!
” they thundered back.

“Would!”

“
Would!
”

“Like!”

“
Like!
”

“To!”

“
To!
”

“Take!”

“
Take!
”

“Your!”

“
Your!
”

“Tem! Per! Ture!”

“
Tem! Per! Ture!
”

One by one, the doctors tried it out. A woman in stylish black glasses said, “I would like to take your temperature.” Li gave a theatrical shake of his head and made her do it again. Her cheeks flushed, and in a sudden burst, she bellowed,
“I would like to take your temperature!”
Then came a thickset man in a military uniform who needed no encouragement—
“I would like to take your temperature!”—
followed by a tiny woman, who let out a paint-peeling scream. Around the room we went, each voice a bit more confident than the one before. I wondered how a patient might react, but before I could ask, Li was out the door, and on to another group in the adjoining classroom.

Li routinely taught in arenas, to classes of ten thousand people or more. The most ardent fans paid for a “diamond degree” ticket, which included bonus small-group sessions with the great man. The list price was $250 a day—more than a full month's wages for the average Chinese worker. Students thronged him for autographs. On occasion, they sent love letters, wrapped around undergarments.

There was another widespread view of Li's work. “The jury is still out on whether he actually helps people learn English,” Bob Adamson, an English-language specialist at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, told me. Li's patented brand of shouting occupied a specific register: to my ear, it was not quite the shriek reserved for alerting someone to an oncoming truck, but it was more urgent than a summons to the dinner table. He favored flamboyantly patriotic slogans such as “Conquer English to Make China Stronger!” On his website, he declared, “America, England, Japan—they don't want China to be big and powerful! What they want most is for China's youth to have long hair, wear bizarre clothes, drink soda, listen to Western music, have no fighting spirit, love pleasure and comfort! The more China's youth degenerated, the happier they are!” Wang Shuo, one of China's most influential novelists, was put off by Li's nationalist rhetoric. “I have seen this kind of agitation,” he wrote. “It's a kind of old witchcraft: Summon a big crowd of people, get them excited with words, and create a sense of power strong enough to topple mountains and overturn the seas.” Wang went on: “I believe that Li Yang loves the country. But act this way and your patriotism, I fear, will become the same shit as racism.”

But I started spending time around his students and found that they regarded him less as a language teacher than as a testament to the promise of self-transformation. Li gave classes in the Forbidden City and atop the Great Wall. His name appeared on the cover of more than a hundred books, videos, audio boxed sets, and software packages. Most of Li's products bore one of his portraits: rimless glasses, a commanding grin, an archetypal Chinese citizen for the twenty-first century. In conversation, Li was grandiose, comparing his fame to Oprah's and claiming that he had sold “billions of copies” of his books. (The truth was hardly worth embroidering: one of his publishers estimated to me that his book sales were in the millions.) A columnist in the state-run
China Daily
pronounced Li a “demagogue.” The
South China Morning Post
asked whether Crazy English was becoming “one of those cults where the leaders insist on being treated like deities.” (
Cult
is a dangerous word in China, where the spiritual group Falun Gong was given that label in 1999, and the government has rounded up its followers ever since.)

When I asked Li about the
South China Morning Post
piece, he said, “I was pissed off.” He had no interest in being worshipped, he said. His motivations were nothing more than mercenary. “The secret of success,” he said, “is to have them continuously paying. That's the conclusion I've reached.” For all his students' devotion, his goal was simple: “How can we make them pay again and again and again?”

Li's cosmology tied the ability to speak English to personal strength, and personal strength to national power. It was a combination that produced intense, sometimes desperate, adoration. A student named Feng Tao told me about the time he realized he had enough cash for tuition to one of Li's lectures but not enough for the train fare to get there. “I went and sold blood,” he said. Collect a crowd of those fans, and the atmosphere could be overwhelming. Li's wife, an American named Kim Lee, told me, “There have been times when I've had to run in, or ask someone bigger, a guy, to go pull my daughter out of a crowd that is just pushing so much that I'm scared.” She said, “Those aren't like a ‘Wow, he's famous' moment. Those are like an ‘Oh God, this is out-of-control famous' moment.”

Kim Lee struck me as an oasis of normalcy in the world of Crazy English. “I'm just a mom who came into a bizarre life by happenstance,” she said, laughing. She was a teacher in Florida when she met Li Yang during a trip to China with the Miami teachers' union in 1999. They married four years later, had two children, and she started teaching beside Li onstage. Her dry wit and all-American looks were the perfect foil to her husband's style: an American Alice Kramden to his Chinese Ralph. At first, she had been baffled by Li's antics and nationalist fire-breathing, but when she noticed how students responded, she was taken with his ability to connect with them. She said, “This guy is really passionate about what he's doing, and as a teacher, how can you not be moved by that?”

*   *   *

A few weeks after the class in Beijing, I attended Li's most anticipated event of the year: the Crazy English Intensive Winter Training Camp. That weekend, China was hit with its worst winter weather in half a century. The blizzards coincided with the travel weekend for Lunar New Year, the most important family holiday in the Chinese calendar. The havoc was unprecedented; in Guangzhou, hundreds of thousands of travelers were left stranded in the streets around the train station. Somehow, seven hundred adults and children managed to make it to a college campus in the southern city of Conghua. A ten-year-old boy told me that he had traveled by car for four days, with his older brother at the wheel.

At the English camp, supervisors dressed in camouflage and used megaphones; they escorted students in formation around the campus. Li's face could be seen everywhere, on oversize posters accompanied by English phrases. Above the stairs to the cafeteria:
HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT WHETHER YOU DESERVE THE MEAL
? Along the plaza where students lined up before lectures:
NEVER LET YOUR COUNTRY DOWN!
Above the doorway leading into the arena:
AT LEAST ONCE IN YOUR LIFE, YOU SHOULD EXPERIENCE TOTAL CRAZINESS.

Shortly before nine o'clock on opening day, the students filed into the arena. It was unheated and frigid, like their dormitories. (The previous night, I had slept in a full set of clothes and a hat.) Li associated the ability to speak English with physical toughness based on his fundamental principle: the gap between the English-speaking world and the non-English-speaking world was so profound that any act of hard work or humiliation was worth the effort. He ordered his students “to love losing face.” In a video for middle and high school students, he said, “You have to make a lot of mistakes. You have to be laughed at by a lot of people. But that doesn't matter, because your future is totally different from other people's futures.”

A long red-carpeted catwalk cut through the center of the crowd, and after a burst of firecrackers, Li bounded onstage. He carried a cordless microphone and paced back and forth on the catwalk, his feet shoulder height to the seated crowd staring up at him.

“One-sixth of the world's population speaks Chinese. Why are we studying English?” he asked. He turned and gestured to a row of foreign teachers seated glumly behind him. “Because we pity them for not being able to speak Chinese!” The crowd roared.

For the next four hours, in numbing cold, Li swooped from hectoring to inspiring; he preened for the camera; he mocked Chinese speakers with fancy college degrees. The crowd was rapt. In the days afterward, students would run together at dawn, shouting English. On the final night, they walked on a bed of hot coals. Between classes, the campus was scattered with learners muttering like rabbinical students, Li's books pressed to their faces, their lips racing.

*   *   *

One afternoon, I wandered outside for some fresh air. By the door, I met Zhang Zhiming, a slim, inquisitive twenty-three-year-old with a plume of hair in the front that made him look like Tintin. He preferred to use the name Michael, and he told me he had studied Crazy English for five years. He was the son of a retired coal miner and couldn't afford a ticket to the camp, so the previous year he had worked as a camp security guard and strained to hear as much as he could from the sidelines. This year, he was promoted to teaching assistant at the camp and was receiving a small stipend.

“Usually when I see Li Yang, I feel a little nervous,” Michael told me as we sat outside in the sun. “He is a superman.”

Michael's enthusiasm was infectious. “When I didn't know about Crazy English, I was a very shy Chinese person,” he said. “I couldn't say anything. I was very timid. Now I am very confident. I can speak to anyone in public, and I can inspire people to speak together.”

Michael's older brother had worked for Li as an assistant. The brother never learned much English, but Michael began spending as much as eight hours a day on the language, listening over and over to a tape of Li's voice, which sounded to him “like music.”

His favorite book was
Li Yang Standard American Pronunciation Bible
, which helped him hone his vowels and punch up his consonants. Eventually, he got a job teaching at an English school, with the hope that someday he might open a school of his own. I met scores of Li Yang students that winter, and I always asked them what purpose English had served in their lives. A hog farmer wanted to be able to greet his American buyers; a finance worker, studying during his vacation, wanted to get an edge in the office. Michael had no doubts about what English might do for him. A few years earlier, his brother got involved in a direct-sales network, pushing health drinks and potions. Schemes such as these, known in Mandarin as “rats' societies,” proliferated in China's era of surging growth, fueled by get-rich-quick dreams and a population adrift between ideological faiths.

“He always wanted me to be involved in that,” Michael went on, and I tried to picture him extolling the benefits of a health tonic with the same passion that he now expressed about English. “I spent half a year doing this business, and I gained nothing.” Michael's brother eventually made it to the United States to try to earn money to repay his creditors. He was working as a waiter in New York, Michael said, and until he returned, it would be up to Michael to support their parents.

As Michael talked, the vigor in his voice faded. His brother wanted him to go to America, too. “He has big dreams,” he said. “But I don't really want to go there, because I want to have my own business. If you are a worker, you can't be a rich man. You can't buy a house, buy a car, support a family.”

Michael stared at his feet and said, “I have no choice. This is life. I should always keep smiling. But actually I feel I'm under a lot of pressure. Sometimes I want to cry. But I'm a man.”

He stopped. The air was silent except for a warm wind that carried a trace of Li's voice, booming in the stadium behind us.

*   *   *

A few weeks later, Michael invited me for lunch at the apartment he shared with his parents in Guangzhou. It was in a cluster of modern high-rises on Gold Panning Road. When Michael met me at the gate, he was in a good mood. “I got promoted to teaching supervisor,” he said. “I got a raise.” The family's apartment consisted of a living room, two small bedrooms, and a kitchen. His parents were cooking, and the air smelled of ginger. Michael and his father shared a bunk bed in one room, and his mother and his older sister occupied the other. Michael's room was cluttered with English study books and an overfilled desk. English felt tangible, like a third, and messy, roommate. He rooted around in a box to show me the homemade vocabulary cards he carried, just as Li Yang once did. He pulled out a card marked “Occupations: Astronomer, Baker, Barber, Barkeeper, Biologist, Blue-Collar Worker, Boss/Superior, Botanist…”

When Michael was a child, the family lived in a coal mining town called Mine Number Five. His parents, who had survived the harshest years of poverty and political turmoil, had only “one goal in life,” Michael said: “to pass the days normally.” But Michael was desperate to get out of Mine Number Five. In a passage he used for language practice, he wrote:

I couldn't stand eating steamed bread, leftover greens, and sweet potatoes every day. I couldn't stand wearing the same patched clothes year after year, when I was laughed at by my classmates. I couldn't stand walking one hour on foot to get to that old shabby school.