Age of Ambition (46 page)

Local reporters rushed to the scene in Hardware City and filled out the portrait: At a shop on the corner called New China Wholesale Safety Gear, the boss said he'd been busy doing the books, and his wife was cooking dinner. “I heard a child's cry,” he told them, “but just for a moment or two, and then it was gone. I didn't give it another thought.” The local press tracked down the man on the red three-wheeler, but all he would say was, “I did not notice her,” a phrase he repeated ten times. Online, people scoured the video and identified the owner of a plumbing supply store on the corner; he had stepped out of his shop, glanced down, and slipped back inside. He insisted he never saw the wounded child in the road, but people called him “unconscionable” and defaced his website. At the same time, they lionized the scavenger who stopped to help. Reporters asked her, over and over, why she had intervened. The question bewildered her. After the reporters moved on, she asked her daughter-in-law, “What did I have to fear about helping a child?”

*   *   *

The Chinese pride themselves on “humaneness,” or
ren
, as it was known, and it was an idea as fundamental to conceptions of morality in China as the principle of “do unto others” was in the West. But in recent years, as a practical matter, kids in China were also raised to be mindful of less inspiring concerns, such as
zuo haoshi bei e
—which means “doing something helpful and getting cheated in the process.” It was a fear that came with its own categories as specific as a
pengci'r
—a person who “blames you for breaking a piece of porcelain that was already broken.”

For many people, living in China in this day and age felt like living on a newly prosperous island that was surrounded by treacherous currents—stay on dry land, and life could be safe and rewarding; lose your footing for a moment, and the world could collapse. They had so little margin to absorb a disaster in their lives that they felt they had no choice but to keep up their defenses. My friend Faye Li, a journalist whose father was a physics teacher, told me about the day her father was on his bicycle and a car knocked him to the ground. “He got up and rode away as fast as possible,” she said, only realizing after he was home that
he
was the victim. He was convinced that someone would try to take advantage of him. She said, “I think, in China, it's easy to get into trouble.” Over the years, the risk of being blamed for helping someone was a scenario that appeared over and over in the headlines. In November 2006 an elderly woman in Nanjing fell at a bus stop, and a young man named Peng Yu stopped to help her get to the hospital. In recovery, she accused Peng of causing her fall, and a local judge agreed, ordering him to pay more than seven thousand dollars—a judgment based not on evidence, but on what the verdict called “logical thinking”: that Peng would never have helped if he hadn't been motivated by guilt.

That verdict became a sensation, and the more interested I became in the case of Little Yueyue, the more I noticed that practically every person I met had heard about the “Peng Yu case.” Often people volunteered similar stories: a helpful young member of the urban middle class done in by a gimlet-eyed scam artist. The lesson never changed: what little you have assembled in life can be gone in an instant. After a young man named Chen was falsely accused of injuring a cyclist, he told reporters, “I really don't know if I will help out again if I encounter a similar situation.”

Though the chances of ever becoming an extorted Good Samaritan seemed small, they swelled in the public consciousness because they confirmed the anxieties people felt about their moment in time, the sense that the race to get ahead was eroding China's ethics. And the less people thought of their fellow citizens, the less willing they were to help—and the cycle continued. Zhou Runan, an anthropologist who studied Hardware City, told me that nobody was more alert to the risk of being tricked than migrants far from home. “In America, an individual is the basis of civil society, but in China, the collective is breaking down, and there is nothing yet there to replace it … When you come to a new place, you take care of yourself; you make a life with your family at its core—your wife, your husband, your child—and everybody else becomes less important,” he said. “You divide your mind.”

The Chinese press was quick to reinforce the theory that cases like this reflected the alienation of big-city life:
HEARTLESS BYSTANDERS NOT SOLELY CHINESE PROBLEM
, declared
Global Times
, and the
People's Daily
described the cases as “unavoidable during the country's process of urbanization.” Yet, the more I studied the stories of Little Yueyue and others, the more I found these explanations incomplete.

*   *   *

The Chinese were not the first people to suspect that urbanization was damaging their moral health. In 1964, Americans were shocked by the murder of a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Kitty Genovese in New York. As
The New York Times
described it at the time, “For more than half an hour thirty-eight respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman,” and none of them called police or came to her aid. Americans embraced the story because it conformed to their fears of becoming an uncaring urban society, and the “Genovese syndrome,” as it was known, became a standard explanation in social psychology.

Except that it wasn't quite true. Years later, researchers returned to witnesses and court records and found that only three or four people who heard her cries understood what was happening to her, and at least one witness probably called the police during the attack. Officers, however, arrived too late to save her. (The story of thirty-eight silent bystanders had been mentioned to the newspaper, not incidentally, by the police commissioner.) In the case of Little Yueyue, apathy might not have been the only explanation for why people hesitated. The anthropologist Yan Yunxiang examined twenty-six cases of Good Samaritans who had been the victims of extortion in China, and he found that, in every instance, the local police and the courts treated the helpers as guilty until proven innocent. In none of the twenty-six cases was the extortionist ever required to provide a witness to back up the accusation; nor was the extortionist ever punished, even after the helper was found to be falsely accused.

In the years of the boom, people had picked up more reasons to fear the law than to trust it. Growing up at a time when law enforcement jobs were sometimes sold to the highest bidder, and judges were regularly available to be bribed, people were bound to be wary. When the China scholar Wang Zhengxu surveyed people in 2008, he found “significantly lower trust in the government and the Party among the post-reform citizens.” Police were single-minded in achieving convictions, and a series of cases was coming to light that suggested the consequences of haste. A man named She Xianglin served eleven years for the murder of his estranged wife—until she returned one day to visit her family. It turned out that she had moved to another province and remarried; the defendant, who had been tortured for ten days and ten nights into a false confession, was released in 2005. A study of Chinese attitudes published in the journal
Science
in 2013 found that young Chinese men and women were, in the researchers' words, “less trusting, less trustworthy, more risk-averse, less competitive, more pessimistic, and less conscientious individuals.”

Virtually everyone who had passed Little Yueyue insisted that they saw nothing, with the exception of one: the mother who had walked by with her daughter. Her name was Lin Qingfei, and when local reporters tracked her down, she did not flinch from the memory of what passed through her mind that day: “She was crying in a very faint voice … There was a young man standing in front of the shop. So I asked him whether the child was his. He waved me off and didn't say anything. My daughter said, ‘That little girl is covered in blood.' I was so scared, and I dragged my daughter away.” Lin reached her own shop, and she told her husband what she had seen, but he was buried in his work. “Nobody else dared to touch her,” Lin said, “so how could I?”

*   *   *

At the hospital, Little Yueyue's parents wondered if their daughter might receive better care if they figured out a way to gain access to one of China's elite hospitals that was off-limits to the regular public. They did an inventory of their relationships in the market and approached a fellow Shandong migrant who connected them to another migrant who owned a shop called King Abrasives, which sold the replacement discs for electric sanders. He was an army veteran; he made a phone call and succeeded in getting the child transferred to the ICU at a military hospital in Guangzhou. He had seen the video. “I recognized a lot of the people who walked by and didn't stop,” he said later. When he confronted one of them, he was told, “It's not even your own child; why are you getting wrapped up in something that's not your business!”

By October 15, two days after the collision, Little Yueyue was in a large hospital room with pale turquoise walls, surrounded by tubes and racks of machines. She had received an emergency operation to open the back of her skull, but she was still in critical condition. Her parents turned their attention to finding out who was responsible. They went door-to-door, asking, “Do you know the driver of the bread loaf van in this video?” They hung flyers around Hardware City offering fifty thousand yuan—more than eight thousand dollars—for leads on the identity of the driver. Wang posted a notice online, registering under the name Nu'er Hui Haode, which means “My daughter will be okay.”

In the home of the driver, Hu Jun, a dark realization was taking hold. His brother-in-law was the first in the family to see the video. “At that moment, Hu Jun thought back and realized, ‘I think I hit something two days ago,'” his lawyer, Li Wangdong, told me. Hu Jun watched the tape. “He went numb from head to toe,” Li said.

The driver turned himself in to the police. “It was raining, and the pounding of the rain on the roof was so loud that I didn't hear the child cry. I looked in the mirror on the right-hand side and saw nothing, so I drove on,” he told police, according to the
Yangcheng Evening News
. “If I'd known I had hit someone, I definitely would have stopped.” In the hours after the collision, he had not acted much like a guilty man, his lawyer told me. “He didn't wash the car or wipe it down with a rag. When he got home, he wasn't nervous or panicked. In conversation with other shopkeepers, he did nothing unusual.”

After the arrest, local reporters pressed the girl's father, Wang Chichang, for a reaction. “I really don't know what to express: Hatred? Anger? What's the use in that? Will hatred make my child recover?” Days passed, and Yueyue remained in the ICU, separated from her parents by a pane of glass. She would not recover. Just after midnight on the morning of October 21, she died of multiple organ failure.

*   *   *

Months after the television cameras moved on from Hardware City, I was in Foshan and decided to visit the scene of the accident. It looked the same as it did on TV: big bundles by the roadside, the twilight from above. I wandered into the nearest storefront, which was called Clever Hardware, and found a man behind a cluttered desk. His name was Chen Dongyang. He was his late fifties, with hair brushed back in the style of Chairman Mao and reading glasses on the tip of his nose. He seemed to guess why I was there, and he offered me a seat. Before I could ask a question, he said that his daughter had been working that day and “she didn't hear a thing.”

Chen and I talked for a long time. To him, a conversation about Little Yue was a conversation about what you could trust. “In the past, if you saw something, you knew it was true because who had the time or the money to make something fake?” he said, adding, “Now even the fin on a fish can be fake … In the past, if you didn't have enough food, I would give you a bite. That's how it was. But after Reform and Opening Up, it's different. If you have one bite of food and I have one bite, I will try to take yours and have two for myself, and leave you with nothing.

“We've learned all these bad habits from countries like yours,” he said, smiling, “and we've forgotten our good traditions. Look at me: I didn't even remember to serve you tea!” He bolted up, looked around the shop for tea, and then gave up and sat back down. I asked him if he wasn't overdoing it a bit on the ‘good old days' routine.

“Everyone has some cash in his pocket, but the money isn't safe. You need a sense of security to be comfortable,” he said. I asked Chen how he would've responded if he had seen the little girl in the road. He said nothing for a moment.

“If it was before Reform and Opening Up, I would have rushed out and risked my life to save her,” he said. “But after? I would probably hesitate. I wouldn't be that brave. That's what I'm trying to say: this is the world we're in now.” Chen had a granddaughter, and I asked, “When she grows up, what kind of person do you want her to be?”

“That depends on what's going on in society,” he said. “If good people run things, she should be a good person. If it's bad people, well, you have no choice but to be bad.”

That night, I had dinner with Chen Xianmei, the grandmother who pulled Little Yueyue from the road. She was perhaps the smallest adult I have ever met: four feet seven inches tall, which the family chalked up to her childhood in the mountains of Guangdong, where food was scarce. She spoke only a local dialect that other people struggled to make out. Her son and his wife were her interpreters, her links to the world. In the mornings, she cooked for workers in Hardware City, and in the afternoons, she hunted for loose screws and scraps. “Every little thing can be resold,” she said. On the day of the accident, her family had urged her not to go out because it was raining. But a rainy day was a gold mine, she said, because the other scavengers stayed home.