Oracle Bones (28 page)

“People say it’s like the American West, but that’s not really accurate. The American West was just waiting to be exploited, and it became successful because of the railroad. Shenzhen is successful because of politics. It’s all because of Deng Xiaoping. If he had wanted Yunnan to be the Special Economic Zone, then Yunnan would have succeeded.”

“I’m also an experimental object. Look at how young I went out on my own!”

“In Shenzhen nobody cares about your past or your background. They only care about your ability. Can you do it or not? That’s the only question that matters.”

I had never been in a Chinese city that felt as divided as Shenzhen. The fence split the factory world, but the social partitions were even more dramatic. Different generations rarely interacted, because most people’s families had stayed in the interior. Emily, like other residents, frequently talked about the differences between “white-collar” and “blue-collar” people (she classified herself in the second category). Hu Xiaomei was a blue-collar heroine; Miao Yong belonged to white-collar life. In a country controlled by a single political party, and in a city where almost everybody considered themselves members of one ethnic group, it was remarkable how segregated the society could become in only two decades.

Some divides, though, were as artificial and as porous as the fence itself. Across China, Reform and Opening had introduced an entirely new framework of social class and upward mobility, but the system still felt incomplete. Even in America, which prided itself on egalitarianism, there were old families, old schools, old ways to succeed. China hadn’t yet developed this, at least not in the new climate. It was hard to define how education, experience, and determination added up; success was a murky concept. The climate was perfect for impostors—even a politically sensitive city such as Beijing had plenty of bogus ID dealers. In Shenzhen, this particular trade had achieved industrial proportions. At the factory, Emily had handled worker registration, and she said that many of the employees used identity cards that were obviously false. In front of the local Wal-Mart, venders sold bogus bachelor’s degrees for less than a hundred dollars. One Shenzhen ID dealer told me that he had used five different names during the past five years.

Despite the city’s powerful sense of structure—the dorms and the assembly lines, the city wall and the class divisions—Shenzhen was full of people who didn’t quite fit in. The Overnight City promised opportunity, but it was also true that many migrants left their hometowns out of restlessness (“there was something in the heart,” as Emily once told me). In Shenzhen, a young woman might enter a factory, turn out cheap jewelry for a few months, and then move on to another job. Another migrant took her place, and on the surface, nothing changed—the factory kept producing cheap jewelry. But it was impossible to guess how the individual’s ideas might change in the new environment.

It was equally hard to define what twenty years had meant in the life of this city. In the end, the government hardly tried to mark the anniversary—no
parades for the leaders, no holiday for the workers. Not a single member of the Politburo showed up to make a speech. Reportedly, an internal Communist Party directive had called for officials to downplay the anniversary.

On the day itself, the
Shenzhen Special Zone Daily
issued a commemorative edition of the newspaper. The top headline read, in huge characters

TREMENDOUS SOLICITUDE,
GREAT EXPERIMENT

The front page featured a reproduction of Deng Xiaoping’s calligraphy, as well as a long proclamation from Jiang Zemin, who described Shenzhen as “a miniature of historic reforms being carried out during the last two decades.” At the newsstand, I picked up two popular women’s monthly magazines. The article titles didn’t make a single reference to the anniversary:

ONE HUNDRED SHENZHEN FEMALE BOSSES’
EXPERIENCES IN STARTING THEIR OWN
BUSINESSES

THE END OF FIRST LOVE

WHY DO PEOPLE DECIDE TO LIVE TOGETHER
BEFORE MARRIAGE?
WHY DO PEOPLE DECIDE TO HAVE ABORTIONS?

A TRAP SET BY AN OLD MAN

ONE NIGHT’S BRIDE

INTERVIEWS WITH SHENZHEN WOMAN BOSSES

I AM NOT A LADY

ON MY LAST
night in Shenzhen, Zhu Yunfeng returned home depressed after a bad day at work. That afternoon, a laborer under his supervision had been injured. The factory was working overtime on a new product, trying to fill orders, and such periods were always bad for accidents. The new product was a metal thermos. The injury hadn’t been serious, but Zhu Yunfeng told Emily that he wanted to be alone for a while.

Sometimes Zhu Yunfeng talked to me about his factory, and he asked questions about life in Beijing, but for the most part he kept out of my conversations with Emily. In China, it was unusual for a young woman to have male
friends apart from her boyfriend, and Zhu Yunfeng had been exceptionally tolerant of my being around. He was a calm man, without the bullying insecurity that seemed common to many Chinese males. It helped that I was a foreigner, as well as a former teacher, but I knew that the situation was unusual. I expected that in the future I would hear less from Emily. That was a common pattern among my female students: Right after marriage, there was usually a period when they didn’t make much contact. Once their lives settled—usually, after they had a baby—they got back in touch.

During my last night, Emily and I left Zhu Yunfeng in the apartment. We climbed a hill to a park that overlooked the town. It was a small factory settlement, the type of place that was common beyond the Shenzhen gates: a cluster of shops and apartment buildings wedged into a dusty cut in the hills, and then, fanning out along two main roads, strips of factories and dormitories. A number of local plants produced shoes and clothing, and there was one computer accessory factory whose top story had been gutted in a recent fire. The white-tiled walls were still streaked with black from the smoke. Emily said that nobody had been hurt in that fire, but down the road there was another plant where, a few years ago, some workers had died in a massive blaze. That factory had been producing plastic Christmas decorations and lawn furniture.

In two weeks, Emily would start her new teaching job. She worried that her English had slipped during the years at the jewelry factory, and she wondered if she would be able to discipline the children. But she liked the school campus, and she smiled whenever she talked about the new position. She kept her hair short now, her bangs pinned back with plastic barrettes. Around her neck she wore a simple necklace that Zhu Yunfeng had given her—a jade dragon, her birth sign.

It was a warm, clear night, and the stars were bright. From the top of the hill, we could see everything: the rows of blocky dormitories, their windows still glowing in the last hour before curfew. It was after eleven o’clock. I wondered how many people there were in each room, and how many rooms were tuned to the radio. Emily had brought her old battery-powered set, and we sat on top of the hill and listened to
At Night You’re Not Lonely
. The volume control on the radio was broken, and Hu Xiaomei’s voice crackled thinly in the night air. We strained to hear.

The first caller started crying because she regretted the way she’d treated her old boyfriend, who’d finally left her. Hu Xiaomei told her that the experience should be good for her; maybe next time she’d get it right. The second caller missed his high-school girlfriend, who was far away, working in another
part of the country. “Haven’t any girls here smiled at you?” Hu Xiaomei asked. The third caller was upset because her boyfriend had recently asked for some time apart; he was a wonderful man who agreed with her even when she wasn’t right. Hu Xiaomei said, “If a man listens to you when you’re wrong, then there’s something wrong with him.”

Down below, the factory lights disappeared in groups. Sometimes, a row of windows along a floor suddenly became dark, or an entire building of illuminated squares shut off at once. It was never a matter of individual lights going out. The workers in the rooms didn’t control the switches; everything followed the set schedules of the curfews.

The last caller was a woman who had been living with a man for years, but she continued to have affairs. She didn’t know why—her boyfriend had money, a good career, good habits. When Hu Xiaomei pressed her to explain the infidelity, the woman asked if the host had read Miao Yong’s novel.

“I don’t like that book,” Hu Xiaomei said sharply. “You shouldn’t base your life on that. The question is, what’s wrong with your principles?”

Emily looked at me and grinned. The show ended at midnight, the static crackling into a rush of advertisements, and then, down below, the last factory lights snapped off. The landscape disappeared into darkness.

For a while, we sat there in silence, and I remembered something else that Emily had said, a few days earlier. She had tried to put some historical perspective on the changes in cities like Shenzhen. “In original society, people lived in groups,” she said. “Eventually, these groups broke down into families, and now they’re breaking down again, into so many different people. Finally, it will be just one single person.”

She paused and looked unhappy. “If you could have some kind of perfect socialism, that would be the best,” she said. “But it’s impossible. That was just a beautiful ideal.”

I asked if she wanted to leave Shenzhen, and she shook her head. In her opinion, the isolation had some good aspects, because it pressured people to make decisions. “The result is that people will have more ability,” she said. “And they’ll have more creativity. Afterward, there will be more different ideas. It won’t be a matter of everybody having the same opinion.”

I said, “How do you think this will change China?”

She fell silent. I had no idea how I would answer the question myself, although I liked to think that once people learned to take care of themselves, the system would naturally improve. But I had seen Shenzhen’s fragmentation—the walled city, the walled factories, the solitary people far from home—
and I wondered how all of it could ever be brought together into something coherent.

I looked at Emily and realized that the question wasn’t important to her. Since coming to Shenzhen, she had found a job, left it, and found another. She had fallen in love and she had broken curfew. She had sent a death threat to a factory owner, and she had stood up to her boss. She was twenty-four years old. She was doing fine. She smiled and said, “I don’t know.”

8

Immigration

October 2000

THE LAST TIME POLAT AND I CHANGED MONEY, THE RATE HAD
dropped to 8.4 yuan to the dollar. He was smoking heavily now, Hilton after Hilton, and his face was drawn. He wanted to get rid of his Chinese currency, so I brought 450 American dollars. After we finished the transaction, he introduced me to another trustworthy money changer in Yabaolu. It was a nice gesture, but I knew that my black-market days were coming to a close. The street rate had fallen so low that it was hardly worth it, and I didn’t expect to spend much time in Yabaolu after Polat was gone. The neighborhood wouldn’t be the same without him.

That week, we met several times at the Uighur restaurant. Polat told me that he was considering the possibility of settling in four cities in the United States: Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C., and Oklahoma City.

“Oklahoma City?” I said.

He saw the look on my face and quickly continued. “I’ve heard that Oklahoma is hot and the wind blows very hard,” he said. “People say it’s a bad place, like the southern parts of Xinjiang.”

I told him that was more or less true. Polat explained that a number of Uighurs had settled near Oklahoma City, where some of them studied at a local college. A small community had also formed around Sidik Haji Rouzi, a Uighur intellectual who was based near Oklahoma City. He often contributed to Uighur-related broadcasts for the Voice of America. His wife, Rebiya Kadeer, had formerly been a successful entrepreneur in Urumqi, and for years
the Chinese government had praised her as a model of ethnic minority achievement. But then her husband’s VOA broadcasts crossed some invisible line, and back in Xinjiang, she was arrested on charges of revealing “state secrets.” Most people believed that she had done no more than send Chinese newspaper clippings to her husband. Since the arrest, Rebiya Kadeer had become the most famous Uighur political prisoner, but the efforts of foreign diplomats had failed to win her release (several years later, in 2005, she would finally be allowed to leave China).

Polat said that Oklahoma was just one option; there were also a number of Uighurs around New York City and Washington, D.C. The main thing he worried about was making it through immigration at the Los Angeles Airport. He planned to overstay his visa and then apply for political asylum, and friends had told him that his odds were better if he made it to Oklahoma City or Washington, D.C. In both places there were lawyers who had worked with other Uighurs in the past.

During our conversations, Polat often asked for advice, but he was planning to enter a world that was completely foreign to me as an American-born citizen. I intended to visit the United States in the winter, and I told him that I could introduce him to Chinese-speaking friends in the major cities. But I knew nothing about the asylum process. From the beginning, I had been skeptical of Polat’s American plans, but now I feared serious trouble. I knew that if he failed to get asylum and was deported, there was a chance of his spending time in a Chinese prison. But he trusted the advice he was getting from Uighurs in America.

Often, it sounded like he was preparing for a game with obscure rules and frighteningly high stakes. Uighur safe spots were scattered around the country, from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City to Washington, D.C., and one of the game’s fundamental rules was that making it past immigration at the airport improved one’s odds at asylum. Later, I learned that Polat was actually right about this detail. If an individual requested political asylum at a U.S. airport, he could be placed in “expedited removal,” a process that determined whether his application was credible. Even if the case was accepted for further review, the individual might be detained, which made it harder to consult with a lawyer. Sometimes, detainees were placed in the county jail, along with common criminals. One immigration lawyer told me that he had visited an applicant for political asylum who was being held in leg irons in a Pennsylvania county jail.