Oracle Bones (14 page)

It seems to me that I haven’t been really happy for quite a long time. Sometimes I owe my being dispirited to the surroundings, especially the oppressive atmosphere in our college. But I find the other students can enjoy themselves while I am complaining, so I think the problem is in myself.

Everything she wrote that year marked her as different. She contradicted her classmates; she skirted the Party line; she held her own opinions. She was one of the few students whose parents were well educated; her father was a math professor at the college. She wrote about his experiences during the Cultural Revolution, when he had been exiled to work in a rural coal mine. During our unit on “business writing,” when I asked my students to compose a formal letter to an American organization, Emily chose the Country Music Association, in Nashville, Tennessee. She told me that she was curious to learn what country music was like. Another time, in a journal entry, she asked if I had any black friends, because she had never seen a black person, except on television.
When my literature class performed
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, she played Titania. She was a good actress, although she had a tendency to perform every role with a touch of a smile, as if she were watching herself from afar. She had high cheekbones, full lips, and dark, fast-moving eyes in a wide-open face. She had named herself after Emily Brontë.

She left home immediately after graduation. She went south with her boyfriend, Anry—one of the more mysterious “English” names in the department. He was among the best athletes in the class, a handsome young man from the countryside. He had a square face, bristly hair, and hard black eyes. His temper was quick—it seemed more than coincidence that his name was only one letter away from “Angry.” Years later, Emily told me that he had often been critical of her.

“He used to tell me that I shouldn’t smile when I talk with other men,” she remembered. “I should keep my face completely expressionless. He always criticized me for that; he said I smiled too much. And he said that I had a way of blinking my eyes when I talked to a man, and it wasn’t appropriate. I used to stand in front of a mirror and look at myself, trying to figure out how to act right. At that time, I believed anything he said. Later I realized that he was wrong about everything.”

They had left home for different reasons. Anry’s family needed money: a year earlier, his older brother had been fishing with explosives and got caught with a short fuse. After the accident, he was nearly blind and couldn’t use his hands. He had a wife and child to support. Fishing with explosives was illegal but peasants still did it in the remote countryside.

For Emily, whose father had a stable position at the college, money wasn’t so critical. In fact, she was never able to tell me exactly why she had left Fuling. “There was something in the heart,” she said once. “My mother says that I won’t be satisfied with a happy life. She says I’m determined to
chiku
, eat bitter.” In any event, she couldn’t imagine being content with life as a local schoolteacher in Fuling. “Teaching is a good job for a woman, and it’s easy to find a husband, because men like to have teachers as their wives. It could have been a very comfortable life. But if it’s too comfortable, I think it’s like death.”

Emily and Anry first went to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, where they found separate apartments and looked for jobs. The new economy had given rise to “talent markets,” or employment centers, and Emily and Anry visited them all across Kunming. Neither of them had much luck. Emily had been one of the best English students in her class, but nobody at the talent markets asked her a single question about her degree. Many listings re
quired female applicants to be at least 1.6 meters (five feet two inches) tall and
wuguan duanzheng
—literally, “the five senses are regular.” The five senses are the ears, eyes, lips, nose, and tongue; essentially, the phrase means “beautiful.” Emily knew that by classical standards of beauty, her eyes were a little small and her lips a bit big. She stood only 1.53 meters tall. After a few months in Kunming, she had found nothing better than a low-paying secretarial position, and she decided to try another city.

Shenzhen was the natural choice. Any young person from Sichuan had grown up hearing about the Overnight City, whose tales often had the ring of legend: the migrant who became a millionaire, the young secretary who rose to the top of a trading company. When Emily was a child, she often heard neighbors talk about a local girl who had moved to Shenzhen and become a great success, frequently sending money back to her parents. Emily’s mother praised the woman as a model of independence; those stories had helped inspire Emily’s sister to go south.

But Anry was determined to go to Shanghai, where he had connections. The couple argued about it bitterly and finally split up: he went east, she went south. In Shenzhen, Emily’s sister had recently left a job, and the two of them spent half a month at the talent markets, where factory recruiters set up stands and interviewed workers. A ticket to the market cost ten yuan a day—a little more than a dollar. Between them, the sisters had only two hundred dollars to live on, and after a week they started buying one daily ticket. They combined other resources as well: Emily had better qualifications, but her sister was a better talker, so she usually entered the markets armed with Emily’s résumé. Finally, she lined up a second interview for Emily at a Taiwanese trade company. The boss seemed impressed by Emily’s English, and she got the job in November of 1997. Her starting monthly salary was 870 yuan—just over one hundred dollars. That fall, she sent me a letter:

During the first two days, only one girl in our office showed her hospitality; others acted as if they didn’t notice my exist. I felt very lonely. I thought of you—you must have felt very lonely in your early stay in Fuling. I encouraged myself to try to show my anxiety to make friends with them. My efforts ended in success; I was took as one of them soon.

In our office there are only eight people. Except the boss (an old man), others are all young girls. They are from three different provinces. Lulu, Luyun, Xuli, Lily are from Jiangxi Province; Yi Xiaoying from Hunan, Linna from Sichuan. Lulu is the most beautiful, able and shortest girl, who is liked by everyone. Luyun is very kind, who reminds me of Airane [a Fuling classmate]. Xuli is a classical beauty, most private telephones from boys are for her. But I don’t like her very much, for her word sometimes hurtful. Lily is the other secretary, who came two days earlier than me. She leaves us an impression of stupid and irresponsible. So she is not very popular in the office. Xiaoying is the fatest girl concerning much about losing weight. She is very good at computer but poor in English. We have an oral contract that she teaches me how to use computer and I teach her English. Linna is the one I can speak Sichuan dialect with. But Sichuan dialect is so understandable by everyone that we don’t have a sense of superiority when speaking it.

Oh! Till now, you still don’t know what our company does. Our company was just moved from Taiwan several months before. It acts in the field of exporting fashion, costume and shell jewelry. My job is keeping touch with our customers by letters or faxes, receiving purchase orders, giving order to factories and finding the best company to ship products to our customers. Since I’m not familiar with my work, Lulu helps me a lot these days.

EMILY’S STORIES DRIFTED
up from the south. She wrote letters, and sometimes at night she telephoned, if the boss had gone home. Often, she talked about her older sister, who was constantly changing jobs. Emily’s sister had initially worked as an accountant at a factory that made plastic lawn furniture, and then she found a position as a traveling saleswoman. After that, she was recruited by a company that ran a pyramid scheme. She knew that it was a scam—the government was cracking down on pyramids, which had run rampant across southern China. But Emily’s sister went to the recruiting meeting anyway, and she brought Emily with her. “A lot of the salespeople had low cultural levels, but they had learned how to talk,” Emily told me later. “I didn’t think it was a good way to make money, but it was a good way to improve yourself and improve your confidence.”

One evening, during my last year in Fuling, Emily phoned and reported that she had gotten a raise to one thousand yuan. That was more than $120, and I congratulated her. But on the phone she sounded a little reserved, and finally I asked if something was wrong.

“The company has an agent in Hong Kong,” she said slowly. “He often comes here to Shenzhen. He is an old man, and he likes me.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Silence.

I tried again. “Why does he like you?”

“Because I am fat.” She giggled nervously on the phone. I knew that since moving to Shenzhen she had gained a little weight, which probably made her prettier than before.

“What do you mean when you say that he likes you because of that?” I asked.

Silence.

“Does he want you to be his girlfriend?”

“Perhaps.”

“Is he married?”

“He is divorced. He has small children in Taiwan, where he is from. But he usually works in Hong Kong.”

“How often does he come to Shenzhen?”

“Twice a month.”

“Is it a big problem?”

“He always finds a way to be with me. He says he will help me find a job in Hong Kong if I want one. The salaries are much higher there, you know. He says I can make much more money if I go to Hong Kong.”

I chose my words carefully. “That sounds like a very bad idea,” I said slowly. “If you want another job, you should not ask him for help. That will only cause big problems in the future.”

“I know. I think I would never do that.”

“You should try to avoid him.”

“I do,” she said. “And I tell my co-workers to always be with me if he is there.”

“Do you think it is a big problem?”

“Not now.”

“Well, if it becomes a big problem, you should leave the job. That can be a very bad situation.”

“I know,” she said. “I don’t think that will be necessary. But it is not such a good job, and if I have to leave, I will.”

SHENZHEN WAS THE
only place in China with a modern city wall. It was about ten feet high, and made of chain link; some sections were topped by barbed wire. The entire structure was sixty-seven miles long. If you approached the city from the north, you entered one of the wall’s checkpoints and followed a modern highway through low green hills. The new buildings grew taller as you approached the downtown area. At the intersection of Shennan and Hongling roads, there was a massive billboard that represented, at least in the spiritual sense, the heart of the city. The billboard featured an enormous image of
Deng Xiaoping against a backdrop of the Shenzhen skyline, with the phrase
PERSIST IN FOLLOWING THE COMMUNIST PARTY’S BASIC LINE FOR ONE HUNDRED YEARS WITHOUT CHANGE
. Locals and visitors often posed for photographs in front of the sign. In February of 1997, when Deng died, thousands of Shenzhen residents spontaneously gathered at the billboard to make offerings of flowers, written verses, and other memorials. They sang “Spring Story,” which was the official Shenzhen song:

In the spring of 1979

An old man drew a circle

on the southern coast of China

And city after city rose up like fairy tales

And mountains and mountains of gold

      
gathered like a miracle…

Other Chinese cities celebrated their history, but Shenzhen’s origins had the flavor of myth—the miraculous birth, the benevolent god. From 1949 until the late-1970s, the government had deliberately avoided developing the region, because it neighbored Hong Kong. The Communists feared political and economic contamination from the capitalist British colony, and they designated the Shenzhen region as a “political defense frontier.” Few state-owned industries were located there; most residents relied on fishing and farming.

After 1978, when Reform and Opening began, Deng and the other leaders faced the problem of where to start. They didn’t want to test radical changes in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, where mistakes would be politically disastrous. Instead, Deng decided to experiment in distant, less developed areas, in what came to be known as Special Economic Zones. Through tax breaks and investment privileges, the government hoped to encourage foreign firms to set up shop in these zones. In 1980, China officially designated the first Special Economic Zones: Shenzhen and Zhuhai, a city that bordered the Portuguese colony of Macao.

Over the course of the 1980s, the government granted Special Economic Zone status to five cities and regions, but Shenzhen was always the most important. Officials labeled the city a “reform laboratory” and a “testing ground”; it was a “window to the outside world.” They viewed the city as an experiment, and like a good petri dish, it had the benefit of being relatively uncontaminated by the past. Whereas other parts of China struggled to privatize inefficient state-owned industries, laying off workers and attempting to restructure factories, Shenzhen’s economy was a tabula rasa. The government’s development of the city was simple and straightforward: build infrastructure, invite foreign in
vestment, and attract migrants. In two decades, the city’s population exploded from around three hundred thousand to more than four million people. During the same period, Shenzhen’s GDP had an annual growth rate of more than 30 percent. In the first five years of the 1980s, Shenzhen was given credit for testing more than two hundred economic reforms, many of which were subsequently adopted by other cities across China.

Everything about Shenzhen felt new. The average resident was less than twenty-nine years old; there were few elderly people. Shenzhen University didn’t have a history department; students could major in Golf Management instead (the region had some of the best courses in China). At the Shenzhen Museum, some halfhearted exhibits paid lip service to ancient times and the Opium War, along with a dutiful inscription in Chinese and English:
WHEN YOU ARE INTOXICATED WITH THE MAGNIFICENCE OF THE “OVERNIGHT CITY,” HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT OF BRAVE AND DILIGENT ANCESTORS WHO HAVE SHED BLOOD AND OOZED SWEAT FOR THE HOMELAND?