Age of Ambition (54 page)

Chen credited his father for seeding a sense of possibility in his mind. “He thought that a person has a basic capacity for kindness and justice, and you have to be brave enough to speak.” I asked him if he believed the Party would eventually reform itself from within. “That's hard to imagine,” he said. “It still believes in the power of violence, that it can control situations, finally, with force.” The Party often described Chen and other dissidents as anomalies, but Chen didn't see himself that way. “Twenty-five hundred years ago, Confucius said people take different routes but they will eventually come to the same conclusion. Look at how different Ai Weiwei's background is from mine; he is from an elite family, and I am from a poor family, but we share the pursuit of justice.” He drew a comparison. “It's like the surface of water: When it's untouched, it's very peaceful. But when you throw in a pebble, it sends ripples in all directions, and sometimes they intersect. Awareness of your rights operates like that.”

As we talked, Chen went online using a braille module—a black machine about the size of a keyboard that produced a physical read-out beneath his fingertips, instead of a display. But when I asked Chen whether the Internet played an important role in China's changes, he sighed and described technology as beside the point. “It's not like everyone in China is relying on the Internet,” he said. “There are many other channels. In Chinese we say, ‘Word of mouth is faster than the wind. It passes from one person to ten, and from ten to a hundred.'”

Chen was not an easy person to interview. When he found my questions vague or uninspiring, I sensed his impatience, and I found myself stumbling in Chinese. The more I tried to untangle my syntax, the more he attended to his computer. I asked his assistant to help me express what I was trying to say, but after an hour or so, I sensed that our interview had run its course. I thanked him, and he politely walked me to the door.

Walking back across Washington Square Park, I realized that our encounter was difficult in ways I hadn't anticipated. He was argumentative, and I was frustrated. But what had I expected? The only reason he was in New York was that he was constitutionally unwilling to accept ideas that he found unpersuasive. It occurred to me that Chen had been an exile all his life, even when he was in his village: he was blind in a country that made few allowances for it; he was stubborn in a culture that privileged accommodation. How else had he taught himself the law, scaled the walls of his yard, slipped past his guards, and outmaneuvered the diplomats who brokered a deal on his behalf? I was foolish for having expected much else. On some level, I had been drawn to Chen for the same reason I had been drawn to the defecting soldier Lin Yifu, or many of the others over the years: each of them had considered what destiny ordained—and rejected it. Up close, they looked less like the icons and villains their admirers and foes imagined; they were simply the “unbound feet” of Chinese history.

It was not the last time Chen Guangcheng would defy people's expectations. Four months after I met him, he waded into American partisan politics: he allied himself with opponents of abortion, including Bob Fu of ChinaAid and a PR consultant named Mark Corallo, a former spokesman for Attorney General John Ashcroft, who “had a hand in almost every newsworthy piece of Republican crisis management in Washington over the past decade,” according to his website. Christopher Smith, a conservative congressman from New Jersey, accused NYU of trying to prevent Chen from meeting with him, and Chen accused the university of refusing to extend his fellowship because it wanted to please the Chinese government. (The school denied both counts.) Chen released a statement that read, “The work of the Chinese Communists within academic circles in the United States is far greater than what people imagine,” though he declined to explain what he meant. Chen's falling-out with NYU dismayed many of his supporters, including Jerome Cohen, who said glumly, “I have failed as a teacher.” In the fall of 2013, Chen became a senior fellow at the Witherspoon Institute, a conservative research organization opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage. At the same time, in an effort to avoid being pinned to any one ideology, he became a visiting fellow at Catholic University and an advisor to the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights & Justice, a liberal organization that had awarded Chen a prize earlier in the year.

Watching Chen's life veer in a new direction, I sensed that the instincts he honed in China had led him into a political minefield in America that would have been difficult for anyone to navigate, but especially him. For years he had survived by distrusting authority of all kinds, and in many ways, he had applied that principle to his new life in New York. It alienated him from people who might have helped him. Chen didn't know how long he would stay in America, but history suggested that life in exile would not get easier. In the Soviet era, Solzhenitsyn had holed up in Vermont and raged against enemies real and imagined. After Milan Kundera fled from Prague to Paris, he worried that his work would become as “meaningless as the twittering of birds.” Chinese dissidents in particular had struggled abroad: Wei Jingsheng, who spent eighteen years in Chinese prisons, was China's most prominent exile when he arrived in New York, straight from jail, in 1997; within a few years, he had alienated his patrons and other activists, and their attention moved on. Some people were quick to say that Chen was reenacting the fate of previous Chinese exiles. But if his history was any guide, he had more incarnations ahead of him. It struck me as premature to predict his future based on the fate of the countrymen who came before him. Over the course of his life, he had sought, above all, the right to be treated as his own man.

*   *   *

Chen's odyssey from Dongshigu Village to Beijing and New York and onward was so dramatic and specific that it was easy to dismiss it as an oddity. There had always been dissidents escaping authoritarian countries; what did it have to do with the lives of ordinary people in China? But in his determination to escape his circumstances, Chen was enacting a force far larger than he. I had arrived in a country that was driven by the need to put deprivation behind it, where people had been so hungry so recently that they could not initially conceive their ambitions beyond that most essential imperative. But that moment had passed. Chen was motivated by neither fortune nor power; he was driven by an idea about his own fate, and his own dignity, and in this he shared something fundamental with many others.

In March 2013, I got a call from Michael the English teacher. For years he had talked about coming to Beijing, and finally he was getting his chance. He had received a call from a small publishing house; one of its staff members had heard him teach a class and he invited Michael to Beijing for a job writing textbooks. The last time I'd seen him, a couple of months earlier, he'd been in the doldrums, but this opportunity thrilled him. “They found
me
,” he told me over the phone, before setting out on the thirteen-hour train ride to the capital. Even for a young man who had lived in the big city of Guangzhou, Beijing still carried the hint of transformative potential, the “crucible,” as Mao had put it, in which one could not but be transformed.

When Michael's train arrived, he asked me to help proofread some of his lessons. I invited him over. We met at the Lama Temple subway stop and walked back to my house, past the fortune-tellers and the name-givers. In the living room, he dropped his backpack and pulled out his laptop. In the months since the disgrace of his former idol Li Yang of Crazy English, Michael had decided that Li Yang's attempt to mass-produce English speakers was a mistake; his method touched the lives of many people, but not deeply. “Li Yang always told me, ‘You have to make a lot of money in the future.' But I don't want to do that,” Michael said. “Money is not the only way of living. It's just one part of life. You have to
be
somebody. Just like Steve Jobs.”

Michael had found his new icon. “Steve Jobs is my hero,” he said. “Steve Jobs used the iPod to change the music industry, and he used the iPhone Four to change the world. Can you believe it?” After his death in 2011, Jobs had become an object of fascination in China; to his young Chinese admirers, he was a nonconformist who became a billionaire. I met young men who couldn't afford iPhones but could afford Chinese translations of Walter Isaacson's Jobs biography, and they quoted it like scripture. On his laptop, Michael clicked on a video file. It was an old Apple television ad that he had found online. “
Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes…”
It ended with the phrase, “Think Different” and, under his breath, Michael said, “Beautiful.”

Michael, as always, had some new ideas to share. Some were practical (he wanted to license the rights to publish a short, simplified-English version of the Steve Jobs biography, with phonetic markings to help students pronounce the words correctly) and some were preposterous: he was trying to popularize a marketing word he had dreamed up,
charmiac
, to describe people like him, who were charmed by something to the point of distraction. When I told him it wasn't the best use of his time, he sounded disappointed and said under his breath, “Bruce Lee got
kung fu
into the dictionary.” We ran through some of the new lessons Michael had written. In one, he encouraged students to fill in the blank with a description of what drove them: “Jobs's mission was to change the world by technology. Edison's mission was to bring light to the world. Bruce Lee's mission was to make kung fu well known around the world. And my mission is to _________.”

Once we were done, we went out to get some fresh air and we passed a poster celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of Mao's discovery of the selfless soldier Lei Feng. The poster said,
INHERIT THE BANNER OF LEI FENG, JOIN VOLUNTEER ACTIVITIES.
Michael read it and smiled; before he had come upon Li Yang Crazy English, Michael had considered Lei Feng one of his childhood idols. I asked him if he still thought the fables about Lei Feng darning socks and collecting manure were true. He frowned and said, “At least forty percent true, I think.” I realized it was a sensible way to answer the question in the country that considered Mao “seventy percent right and thirty percent wrong.” Michael wasn't holding Lei Feng to too high a standard, and I felt silly for having raised the question. “If somebody can really touch my deep heart, I'll believe it,” he said. Over the years, I'd noticed that Michael incorporated influences from every corner of his life, from his mother's Christianity to own devotion to Crazy English. In one of his lessons, he lumped them into a single paragraph for his students to recite:

“We're here to put a dent in the universe.” This is a classic saying from the Great Jobs. He let me know that the most powerful and valuable thing in our lives is the soul, and its final resting place is faith. There is truly nothing that can influence us more powerfully than faith! Throughout human history—politics, economics, technology, culture, art, or religion—all of it begins with faith. It's just like Jesus, Confucius, Jobs, Bruce Lee, Mao Zedong, and Lei Feng. To create a more beautiful world, they started by changing themselves.

After he had been in Beijing for a few days, Michael called me and said the publishing experience wasn't going well. “They want to control everything,” he said. “They don't care about me; they just care about making money. They're older, and they're putting pressure on me,” he said. I took a cab over to see him at the publisher's office. It was up in the technology district, not far from where Tang Jie was running his nationalist website. Michael met me at the subway and led me into a complex marked by a sign that read,
OFFICE OF VETERINARY DRUG CONTROL
. He had no idea why his textbook publisher was based at the Office of Veterinary Drug Control, but he was accustomed to mysterious business arrangements, and he decided not to ask much about it.

It was a weekend, and the place was half empty. Michael was working out of a borrowed office nicely decorated with traditional Chinese furniture and calligraphy. His electronics and notebooks were scattered around. For days, he had been writing English lessons and handing them up to editors to polish, but he was frustrated by their demands. As we talked, someone knocked quickly at the door and peered in. It was the boss—a stumpy man with a puckered face—and Michael made polite gestures of introduction. After he left, Michael made a face and said, “He's always making me crazy. ‘What did you write today? Show me what you have.'”

We decided to leave before the boss came back and checked on him again. I asked Michael where he was living, and he led me back out to the street, past a string of food stalls, and into the parking lot behind a supermarket. On one side was a two-story boardinghouse where Michael rented a bed in a room he shared with nine other men. His bunk cost him
Â¥
280 a month—about $1.50 a day. A list of rules in the hallway said the boardinghouse took responsibility for nothing. “Residents,” it said, “must carry their valuables (such as laptops) everywhere they go.”

When we reached his room, Michael held his index finger to his lips to remind me to be quiet. It was the middle of the day; some of his roommates worked the night shift, so they were asleep now. Inside, it was airless and dank and cramped. There were five sets of metal bunk beds around a tiny patch of floor filled with luggage; in front of the window, a rod was hung with clothes. In the ceiling was a ragged hole the size of a basketball. These kinds of boardinghouses were proliferating on the edges of Chinese cities, where college graduates and job seekers were stacking up, looking for a break. The clusters became known in Mandarin as “ant tribes.”

The term reminded me of the book from the seventies about the “Emperor of the Blue Ants.” Back then, the metaphor had been a fair description of China's reality, but a generation later, the young and ambitious called themselves ants out of resentment. If China did not begin to integrate them into the cities, the urban underclass would reach five hundred million people by 2030 (half the entire urban population), but the government found this fact uncomfortable, so in December 2010 the agency responsible for unemployment data put out a set of rosy statistics reporting that more than 90 percent of the previous year's college graduates were now employed. People mocked this claim; the Web was rife with testimonials from students who said their schools forced them to describe themselves as “employed” in order to boost the numbers and protect the schools' reputations.