Oracle Bones (36 page)

Zhejiang and Sichuan are both big province in China. But they are different in many aspects, esp. in eating. Zhejiang is near the East Sea and people here like eating sea food. They think it very fresh. I don’t like food from the sea although I know it has high nutrition. I taste it strange. People here don’t like spicy food, so I often eat what we cooked ourselves.

People here have differnet point of veiw from our inland people. Many people here give much more importance to money than education. I can’t accept the idea. To tell the truth, the economy in Zhejiang is more advanced than in Sichuan. But they are usually proud of it and show their advantage before us. I’m angry at it but I had be admit the backward in economy in our Sichuan.

BEFORE THE FREE-MARKET
reforms, it was rare for average Chinese to travel, and few people personally experienced their nation’s diversity. China was unified, and the Han Chinese were supposedly a single ethnic group—
these seemed to be fundamental truths. But as people gained mobility, they began to experience the irregularities that lay beneath the surface of national unity. For William Jefferson Foster, every trip back to Sichuan was hard, because he passed through all the inequalities and prejudices that lay between Wenzhou and home. One year, after the winter holiday, he wrote:

During the Spring Festival I went back to Sichuan province. My experience in the trip back to school is very sad. I could hardly sleep well in the first few days, so far I am still thinking of that. On the boat, there were so many sichuan people who were going to coastal cities some of them slept in the toilet. At the railway station, the sichuan people were just like refugees or beggars. They slept on the ground in cold weather. I was overcharged everywhere I went. In Jiangxi province, the bus driver drove us into a motohotel where the shop-keeper drove us out of the bus with the night-stick. We were forced to use 40 yuan to buy fast-food which was just like swill. Two sichuan young men were beaten to the ground just for they did not have money to buy something with them. The driver said that they will beat you to death if you dare to quarrel with them.

Most migrants quietly endured the unfairness, believing their new life was only temporary. They worked hard jobs—construction crews, factory assembly lines—and it was too bleak to imagine doing those things for the rest of your life in a place where you couldn’t speak the language. And the economic divide between the coast and the interior was wide enough that you could hope to save money abroad and then spend it slowly at home. Almost everybody planned to return after their prime working years were finished; people talked about opening small shops or restaurants in cities near their home villages. In that sense, it was similar to many Mexicans and Central Americans who emigrate illegally to the United States but maintain homes and families in their native countries. They work in one economy and spend their earnings in another.

But Willy’s parents lived with his brothers, who had done well enough in local construction to build a big two-story compound for the extended family. Willy didn’t have to send money home, and it was feasible that he and Nancy could settle permanently in the east. He felt himself pulled by two opposing forces: the economic promise of Zhejiang, and the cultural familiarity of Sichuan. Someday it was a decision that he would have to make, but in the meantime he preferred to belong to neither place. He never tried to learn the Wenzhou dialect—that was impossible, especially given all the time that he devoted to English and the Voice of America. Instead, he concentrated on per
fecting his Mandarin. By his second year, he spoke without a trace of a Sichuanese accent. When people asked him where he was from, he usually lied, telling them some city in neighboring Jiangsu province, which had a good economy. But it was harder to pull this off when Nancy was around. She still spoke like a Sichuanese, and she resisted Willy’s attempts to improve her Mandarin. In her opinion, he was being pretentious.

To Willy, though, it was a matter of self-respect. His first boss in Zhejiang, the terrible Mr. Wang, had often told Willy about a trip he had made to northern Sichuan in the 1980s. Mr. Wang’s journey had been eye-opening: the poverty of northern Sichuan had touched him so deeply that he had wept. Years later, he still became visibly moved whenever he spoke of the trip, which was often; he liked giving Willy the opportunity to feel grateful for having escaped such awful conditions. Of all the things that Willy hated about Mr. Wang—his Sun Yat-sen suits, his stinginess, his birtch of a wife—the man’s sympathy was the worst.

Little remarks nagged at Willy, even after he moved to the better job in Yueqing. In that town, people sometimes stole manhole covers and sold them for scrap metal; residents had to be careful while walking at night. Once, Willy and a fellow teacher passed a gaping hole in the street, and the man shook his head in disgust. “The Sichuanese migrants steal those,” he said. Willy didn’t respond, but he never forgot the man’s remark. Willy also noticed that Yueqing parents scolded their children by threatening them with stories of migrants. During Willy’s childhood, adults in his village had often told children that if they misbehaved, the foreigners would come and eat them. But in Yueqing the foreigners weren’t bogeymen anymore. The parents said, “If you keep crying, the people from Jiangxi or Sichuan will come and steal you.”

I completely understand what’s your feeling when you were treated differently in China. Obviously sichuan people were treated differently by other people, for sichuan is very famous for its being poor and backward. Here the same thing happen. People from sichuan and Jiangxi are always looked down by the natives. I don’t care too much about that, I know that China is not their China only. Each citizen in China has the equal right to go anywhere in China. I am awefully joyful to hear that your writing goal is to write about average people in China, that’s good. In my opinion, you will get success just like William Shakespears who always took access to common people and reached the literatural zenith in his life.

In fact, I think it’s the most difficult thing for one to find his own mistake. So China always says all is ok in China. Everything in China is correctly and perfectly treated, America sometimes like China. So that’s why China says America is a world police. America says China is a country full of problems.

DURING THE 1980S,
government slogans praised the “Wenzhou Model” of development. The city’s tradition of bootstraps capitalism naturally appealed to officials, who liked the idea of investing nothing and watching families build factories on their own. But in fact few places could replicate the model, which had limitations even in Wenzhou. Successful factories expanded, but there was only so much money that people could make from buttons, cigarette lighters, shoe soles, and low-voltage electronic parts. These were low-margin commodities; it was hard to create a valuable brand or add value through research and development. Logically, the next step might have been a shift to high-tech products or multinational investment; these were common development strategies in places like Shenzhen.

But something about the Wenzhou mindset preferred to keep things simple. It was the same in education, which had also responded quickly to Reform and Opening. By the late 1990s, Wenzhou’s private education sector had become one of the largest in the nation. Nearly 30 percent of the city’s high school students, and roughly one-fifth of its college undergrads, were enrolled in private institutions.

In the city of Yueqing, Willy and Nancy taught at the Educating Talents School (it was only coincidence that this name sounded similar to the fraudulent Hundred Talents High School, where they had first worked). In Yueqing, the new school had nearly two thousand pupils, ranging from kindergarten to eighth grade, and nearly all of the children boarded. In China, the curriculum of all schools, both public and private, was standardized and strictly regulated. Certain courses and texts were mandatory, and all students took standardized exams at the end of middle school and high school. A private institution could hire instructors and attract pupils from the open market, but they were required to teach and study the theories of the Communist Party.

After the founding of the Educating Talents School, the institution distinguished itself by starting the English curriculum in the first grade instead of the third grade. Local public schools eventually followed suit, teaching English to first-graders, but the private school had found its niche. They started courses early, and then they crammed in as many hours as possible. One of the school’s selling points was that preexamination students had class every day
of the week, including Sundays. Eighth-graders attended seventy-five weekly class periods—nearly double that of the average Chinese public school (forty-five). Essentially, they had applied the Wenzhou Model to education: it was the intellectual equivalent of squeezing out a profit on low-margin commodities. Instead of innovating the curriculum or improving texts, they simply taught the same stuff at a higher volume.

The private school thrived until 1998, when the local government founded a new public school. From the beginning, the public school’s headmaster declared openly that he intended to drive the Educating Talents School into bankruptcy. After throwing down the gauntlet, his first tactic was to hire the best teachers that money could buy. He scouted the region for experienced instructors who had been distinguished as “first-rate teachers” by the educational authorities. The teachers arrived with awards and certificates, and they failed miserably. English instructors couldn’t speak English; math teachers couldn’t teach math. Students did poorly; parents became furious. Many suspected that the awards and certificates were
jiade
—you could buy that stuff anywhere. Regardless, the value of experience was basically nil, given how rapidly things changed in China. After a year, the new public school fired its instructors and began to hire only young teachers.

The competition grew more intense every year. This was particularly true with regard to exam preparation, which involved two distinct competitive strategies. The first strategy was based on a simple faith: by studying systematically, efficiently, and diligently, students could improve their odds of success. But the odds were even more in their favor if they knew the examination questions in advance. This was the second competitive strategy, and it was already well developed by the time Willy and Nancy arrived. Each year, teachers and administrators cultivated relationships with powerful people who might leak information about the exams.

One official in the Wenzhou city education bureau was notorious for his subtle hints. Schools across the region invited him to give lectures to their instructors, and he accepted only the ones that made it worth his while. Willy and the other English teachers made an annual ritual of going to downtown Wenzhou and listening to the man speak. Once, Willy described the scene:

“Our principal invited the man to give a lecture, to give so-called information about the high-school entrance examination. The speech was vague. The teachers wanted to get some useful information from him, but sometimes he keeps silent. For two hours we tried to ask some questions. We asked him what would be in the examination. He just said, maybe this will be involved, maybe that. For example, he said that this year maybe your students will be asked
to fill in two words, to make a sentence complete, instead of just one word.

“After that, the school invited him to go to the Red Sun Hotel, in Wenzhou. It’s a very good hotel, and about fifteen teachers had dinner with him. After that, the school gave him two thousand yuan. Later, they invited him to karaoke with a xiaojie. She’s prostitute, I think. A double room for them—what will happen? You can guess. I think this guy is very segui, very lecherous. He is fifty years old. One of his sons went abroad, to U.S.A.”

The man often gave accurate information to the public schools, but his speeches were never helpful to Willy and his colleagues. Nevertheless, the Educating Talents School performed the ritual every year. When I asked Willy why they continued to pay for useless tips, he said, “But what if one year it’s right?”

Every June, when exam season rolled around, I received a disgusted letter:

The same thing happened again in Yueqing. Many other schools got the info about the high school entrance examinations. Our school got a little second-hand or maybe third-hand info. So we are doomed to failure. Again the fucking guy from the eduationl administration let out the secret of examination of English.

THE CHEATING BOTHERED
Willy, but he didn’t know what to do about it. That was part of the migrant’s new environment: when you left home, the basic rules of morality changed. Sometimes, Willy took it in stride, like the shifting marriage traditions. After two years in Zhejiang, Willy and Nancy still hadn’t officially married. It seemed pointless; all of their family and friends were back in Sichuan. Willy noticed that many other migrants in Yueqing waited for years before holding a ceremony, because they wanted to save money and build up their social networks. He attended several weddings in which the couple’s child was already school-age.

To Willy, that made sense: pragmatism trumped tradition. Whenever he and Nancy discussed the possibility of marriage and children, they usually ended up talking about money instead. Finally, Nancy came up with a specific figure. After they had saved at least one hundred thousand yuan—more than twelve thousand dollars—she would agree to have a child. After a year and a half in Yueqing, their combined savings were twenty-five thousand yuan. A quarter of a baby was already in the bank.

But there were some issues, such as the cheating and the prejudice against
migrants, that had no simple solution. Over the years, Willy never asked his parents for advice; he sensed that they couldn’t provide guidance in the new climate. And although he still considered the possibility of someday returning to Sichuan, he knew in his heart that he would never really go home again. That world was gone—not because it had been destroyed like the Beijing courtyards, but rather because the countryside hadn’t changed enough. In a nation on the move, there was no reason for young people to stay in rural regions that couldn’t keep pace. Whenever Willy returned to Number Ten Village, the place felt deserted. After one visit, he wrote: