Oracle Bones (10 page)

How is it going with you at present?

I hope that you are not feeling lonely while in the city of Peking. Some chinese xiaojie will be sure to have hots for you. But better be careful that some Chinese girls always blow hot and cold.

It has been raining all these days here, my feeling is just like the raining days…. Actually, I am a little bit bored and annoyed by the things around me in the school. For long I have no mood for teaching. As soon as I stand on the platform of the classroom, I hope that the bell rings. All the students are yahoos. Some of them are brutal and uneducated. Many of the students want to drop out of the school while I failed to block the way out for some students…. many yahoos notice that they have been had, surely more students will escape from the school….

What interests me most is that I can learn English via VOA and a dictionary of American Colloquialism. I hope that in a short time I could put them into use correctly and freely. Afraid that my strong will be damaged, I wish myself a way out….

Yuhuan is a very small place. In other word, it is somewhat isolated from wonderful outside world. I am afraid I will not be able to use English well as long as I stay here. You see, I have zealtry about the English language which is considered to be my better half all my life….

By the way, is your pager number 6491-1166
—
56599
? Need I dial the zone code (
010
)? How do you think of the military from NATO against Yugoslavian Union?

Take care!

Yours,

William Foster
[printed]

William Jefferson Foster [signed]

AT THE BEGINNING
of the May Day holiday, Willy purchased a new notebook and carefully inscribed a title on the first page:

Listening Journal

William Jefferson Foster

Spouse: Nancy Drew

May 1st, Nineteen Ninety-9

Nancy’s last name had been suggested by Adam Meier, during their final year at Fuling. In fact, the couple hadn’t married, and they hadn’t yet made formal plans to do so. In the past, their situation would have been scandalous: a young unmarried couple sharing an apartment. Occasionally, they ran into trouble; once, they were refused a room in a Wenzhou guesthouse because they couldn’t produce a marriage certificate. But such problems were rare, and nobody at the Hundred Talents High School caused a fuss. One of the first things that migrants learned was that locals didn’t want to think about them at all.

That spring, Willy continued to study English every night, maintaining his Voice of America journal:

Summit of NATO

(1) Regard Milosovic as Hitler who wanted to make a people die away

(2) Japanese

Tibet issue Xinjiang issue

objection to interference in internal affairs

Tibet is just like Kosovo

Research shows that homosexuality is not caused by gene

Bill Clinton Colorado Denver

After the NATO bombing, Willy’s journal entries became even more chaotic:

May 8th, 1999

We have no other intention

military site

express it’s deep sorry

war crime

The missile attack on Chinese Ambassy in Yugoslavia has deeply intensified the Sino-American relation

May 9th, 1999

It is said Belgrade transferred weapons into Chinese ambassy

Chinese give intelligence to Belgrade—collaboration.

humantiaratity community

mission access—cooperate

CIA

“Down with USA” “Down with NATO”

WILLY CALLED ME
frequently that week. He was concerned about my safety in Beijing, and after the situation had calmed down, we continued to talk regularly. At one point, he mentioned the possibility of looking for work in the capital, and I told him I’d do my best to help if he came.

But he decided to try again in Wenzhou. He attended job fairs in the city, but nobody wanted to hire a young Sichuanese teacher with a degree from an obscure college on the Yangtze. One day, he happened to see an ad in the newspaper for a teaching position at a private school in Yueqing, a satellite city outside of Wenzhou. He visited the school, where a woman administrator asked him to teach a mock lesson. He was always good in such situations: he spoke English easily, and he felt comfortable in front of a classroom. After his performance, the woman offered him a job starting in September.

The administrator made a good impression on Willy, but the experiences of the past year had taught him to be wary of promises. Nevertheless, the school existed: it was fixed, with a campus that stayed in the same place every year. He figured that was a good sign. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that he couldn’t do worse than the Hundred Talents High School.

Near the end of summer, William Jefferson Foster and Nancy Drew packed in secret. Mr. Wang expected them to teach the new semester, and Willy liked the idea of the headmaster having to find two substitute instructors at the last minute. Between them, Willy and Nancy possessed two bags, a television, a pile of old blankets, and a total savings of about two hundred dollars. They left Yuhuan without saying goodbye.

3

The Broken Bridge

June 4, 1999

THAT SUMMER MARKED THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEMONSTRATIONS
in Tiananmen Square. During the latter part of May, the foreign newspapers ran commemorative articles. In the bureau, I clipped the stories and filed them under
T
:

TEA

THINK TANKS

TIANANMEN SQUARE

TRADE FAIRS

TRANSPORTATION

One of the problems with the anniversary was that it was hard to name an event that Chinese people couldn’t talk about openly. While clipping, I kept an informal list of terms used by the foreign press:

the Tiananmen Square crackdown

the Tiananmen Square massacre

the Tiananmen Square clampdown

the bloody suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square

the June 4 crackdown

the bloody crackdown in and around Tiananmen Square

the June 4, 1989, military crackdown on the demonstrations

the crackdown on student protestors near Tiananmen Square

There weren’t any stories in the Beijing papers; since 1989, the state-controlled media had rarely acknowledged the event. The average Chinese simply called it
Liu Si
: June Fourth. In the provinces, impressions of the incident were particularly hazy; when I had lived in Fuling, some of my good friends asked me earnestly if students had actually died in the crackdown. In Beijing, where many citizens had been in the streets that year, there weren’t any illusions about whether it had occurred. People vividly remembered specific scenes, but the big picture remained a mystery. Nobody knew exactly how the crackdown had developed or what the death toll had been. Most foreign publications estimated that at least hundreds had died.

There was just enough information to know that the most commonly used names for the incident were slightly flawed. The vast majority of casualties had been sustained outside of Tiananmen Square, in various streets around the city, particularly to the west. And the crackdown had actually started on the evening of June 3, not the fourth. In 1989, after violence had descended on the city, a brave Chinese journalist had broadcast a message over the state media’s official English radio service: “This is Radio Beijing International. Please remember June 3, 1989. The most tragic event happened in the Chinese capital, Beijing. Thousands of people, most of them innocent civilians, were killed by fully armed soldiers…”

A decade later, most memorials had shifted the date slightly, and the location had become focused onto the Square. Even if the details had blurred, the basic memory was probably as much as the journalist had hoped for. Reportedly he had been punished by several years of reeducation outside the capital.

ON THE DAY
of the fourth, the
Wall Street Journal
correspondents and I took turns going out to Tiananmen, to see if there were any commemorations. We missed the two most prominent demonstrations, each of which involved exactly one person and lasted only a few seconds. A middle-aged man opened a white umbrella decorated with handwritten slogans:

REMEMBER THE STUDENT MOVEMENT

DISTRIBUTE STATE ASSETS TO THE PEOPLE

Plainclothes officers quickly hustled the man away, but an Associated Press photographer captured the moment. A while later, a male university student threw leaflets into the air and was immediately detained. The leaflets contained antigovernment slogans, as well as the phrase
DOWN WITH AMERICAN IMPERIALISM
.

I took the late-afternoon shift. The Square itself had been cordoned off—conveniently, it was being refurbished for the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. But there was still an open area in front of Tiananmen, the “Gate of Heavenly Peace.” It was a sunny day, and tourists from the provinces chattered and took photographs with the Chairman Mao portrait in the background.

After a while, I began to notice that some people in the crowd didn’t look like tourists. They were men, usually in their thirties and forties, and many of them had crew cuts. They were not well dressed: worn trousers, cheap windbreakers. They did not look educated. They did not look like they were enjoying themselves—they weren’t smiling, or taking pictures, or buying souvenirs. They loitered and lingered; they lurked and looked. They dawdled. Sometimes, a man would stand directly behind a group of talking tourists, as if trying to overhear the conversation. Periodically, one of the crew-cut men sauntered over to another crew-cut man, said something, and then sauntered away. Several held rolled up newspapers. I saw one man raise his newspaper, hold it next to his face, and speak to it. Curious, I walked past and took a furtive look. Inside the rolled paper, I caught a glimpse of black plastic—walkie-talkie.

I watched the plainclothes men work for most of an hour, and that was the only visible commemoration of the anniversary. Afterward, I biked over to the Muslim dumpling joint in Yabaolu for an early dinner. While I was eating, a pedicab driver pulled over and asked if he could share my street-side table, which would allow him to keep an eye on his bike. He ordered a bottle of
baijiu
and a bowl of peanuts. He poured vinegar onto the peanuts and ate them while he drank. He drank the
baijiu
quickly and he did not make that face. His bare legs looked tough and knotted, as if they had been carved from some slab of ancient hardwood.

It was still early for dinner and we were the only customers. The boss, a Beijing native, dozed nearby, his arms crossed on a dirty tabletop. The pedicab driver told me that he could earn more than ten dollars a day during the summer. He was ethnic Manchurian and proud of it. He told me how the Manchurians had founded the Qing dynasty and ruled China for nearly three hundred years. They were a warlike people and the Han Chinese couldn’t compare; even the Qing emperors had known how to fight. It was a hell of a thing, being Manchurian.

After finishing the peanuts, the pedicab driver woke up the boss and ordered a huge bowl of dumplings. He dipped the dumplings into the vinegar, just like the peanuts. I hadn’t seen anybody eat that much in a long time. Out of curiosity, I asked the man what the date was. He didn’t know, so he turned to the restaurant owner.

“June Fourth,” the boss said immediately. He crossed two fingers, forming the Chinese character for ten:
. His face was completely expressionless. He said, “Tenth anniversary.”

IN YABAOLU, I
learned to get information from Polat. He seemed to know everybody in the neighborhood, and his connections were excellent; in early July, when Heineken sponsored a foreign music festival in the local park, Polat acquired a stack of workers’ passes. During a jazz set, a half dozen of us stood around the stage, the least convincing group of maintenance men that had ever been assembled in the capital: one American clipper, two Uighur middlemen, a Chinese clothes dealer, and two other Chinese who were employed as security guards at the Workers Stadium. By introducing the security guards to jazz, Polat was guaranteed free entrance to any upcoming soccer matches.