Oracle Bones (53 page)

In Yueqing, the video shops carried bootlegs of the terrorist attacks. After a couple of days in the city, it became an obsession; whenever I passed a store, I searched it for DVDs and VCDs. Shopkeepers told me that the first bootlegs had appeared only three days after the attacks.

They stocked them on the same racks as the Hollywood movies. Often, the 9/11 videos were located in the cheaper sections, alongside dozens of American films that I didn’t recognize. Many of these obscure movies must have gone straight to video; the credit lines were unfamiliar, and cover blurbs usually promised sex and horror. At one shop, a film called
At First Sight
had a teaser in Chinese: “He Finds a Way to Make Huge Profits with Attractive Women.” Next to that was
Reptilian
: “Tiny Insects Cause a Coming Atrocity for Human Beings.” After that, a 9/11 video:

Several Planes Attack America!
The World Trade Center Totally Destroyed
The Pentagon and Capitol Hill Attacked by Planes
White House Capitol Hill Continuous Explosions
Who is the Murderer? It’s Still Unknown

The back of the package said:

Palestinians: “It Serves America Right!”
US Hegemony and Power Politics Make Too Many Enemies
The USA in Complete Panic

All of the 9/11 videos had been packaged to look like Hollywood movies. I found a DVD entitled “The Century’s Great Catastrophe”; the box front featured photographs of Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush, and the burning Twin Towers. On the back, a small icon noted that it had been rated R, for violence and language. The English credit line was muddled:

TOUCHSTONE PICTURES presentsa JERRY
BRUCKHEIMER

production david TOM HANKS silen TWITNESS DAVID
MORSE PAME
BUSCEMI ving rhames

Chinese bootlegs often featured distorted credits, as well as other text and icons that didn’t make sense. They only worried about the title and the pictures—as long as those basic elements were correct, the rest of the English text only needed to fill space. I found two different 9/11 VCDs that had copied the credit line from
Patton
: “Twentieth Century Fox Presents George C. Scott….” For some reason, that was one of the most common templates in China—it appeared on all sorts of bootleg videos. Once I found the
Patton
credits on the package of a movie about high-school cheerleading.

The boxes of the 9/11 videos also duplicated bits of English summaries from random films. One featured a photograph of the second plane exploding against the World Trade Center, and then the text read:

In an energetic film of two tough brothers who are steelworkers in Newcastle, New South Wales, BOOTMEN shows the way that they eventually go their separate ways. One brother, Sean leaves town in pursuit of a career in tap dancing….

Another package had two pictures—a terrified woman pointing at the sky; a Manhattan cityscape marred by a plume of black smoke—and then a paragraph:

In addition, while economic modernization has in some ways “modernized” thinking about old-fashioned norms and mores, it has not truly “liberalized” men and women’s perceptions of relationships, nor has it been able to brush aside age-old feelings and constraints about loyalty and betrayal.

AFTER THE ATTACKS,
the Chinese government had responded faster than usual. Within hours, President Jiang Zemin sent a message of condolence to President Bush, and by September 12 additional Chinese military police had been posted near the U.S. embassy in Beijing. That day, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said, “The Chinese government has consistently condemned and opposed all manner of terrorist violence.” It was a clear expression of support for the United States, as well a subtle allusion to China’s own attitude toward Xinjiang. For once, the governments of China and the United States seemed to have found common ground, and in the first few days after the attacks, the state-controlled media never implied that the Americans had gotten what they deserved.

But the average citizen said it, even to your face. In Anyang, a cab driver told me that now Americans understood what it was like for the Chinese to have their Belgrade embassy bombed. One morning in Beijing, I stopped by a neighborhood park and was greeted by a man who knew me only casually. “Oh, you’re here!” he said, and then joked: “I thought you might have been killed.” The openness startled me—I could only imagine how people talked when a foreigner wasn’t around.

In Yueqing, the satellite city outside of Wenzhou, I shopped for 9/11 videos with William Jefferson Foster. He told me that most of his colleagues had been pleased by the attacks.

“There’s one teacher who was especially happy,” Willy said. “The next morning he told me that he couldn’t sleep that night, because he was so excited and happy.”

“What was he so happy about?”

“He doesn’t like America,” Willy said. “But mostly I think that he liked watching it.”

“Liked watching what?”

“The buildings falling down,” Willy said. “He thought it was interesting. A lot of people are like that. Everybody says it was like a movie. Another teacher told me, ‘America always makes so many movies, but now they’ve finally made a great one!’”

I asked Willy how he had responded to such remarks.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “The day after it happened, I was very unhappy to be at the school, because everybody was talking about it and laughing. And actually for about a week I tried not to be in the same place as them. When that teacher said that he couldn’t sleep, I felt very uncomfortable; I felt sick. I just wanted to be alone or with Nancy. It’s different for us. The first thing that I thought about was Mr. Meier, because he lives in Washington and he works for the government. I was very worried until you told me that he was fine.”

We stopped in a video shop and found another copy of a 9/11 disk. The store owner told me that the control seemed to be tighter than with regular movies. He remarked that big films like
Pearl Harbor
usually appeared within two days of the American release, and then they were sold everywhere; but the 9/11 videos were becoming hard to find. He sensed that the government was cutting off the distribution channels.

We left the shop and I asked Willy if my impression was accurate—that the state-run news hadn’t used the attacks to criticize America.

“That’s true,” he said. “Many people believe that the government is actually very happy about it, but they can’t say anything. People say that Jiang Zemin is a coward, a chicken. They say that there are too many countries with America right now, so it’s impossible for China to stand alone.”

“What do they think China could do otherwise?” I said. “Support the terrorists?”

“I don’t think they know,” Willy said. “It’s just something people say.”

In part, it seemed to be habit—so many years of anti-American propaganda had settled into people’s minds. But it was also connected to everything that had been left out of the news. In the past, the media had rarely reported on tensions in Xinjiang—like Tibet, it was generally portrayed as a peaceful place whose indigenous people were happy to be a part of China. Few average Chinese knew that their own government was concerned about the spread of Islam in the West. I asked Willy what people thought about bin Laden.

“Some people say he’s a hero,” Willy said. “He comes from a poor country but he was able to cause a great problem for America. I’ve heard people say that now bin Laden is even more famous than Mao Zedong.”

“So they like him?”

“Not really,” he said. “They just say he’s famous.”

It reminded me of the way that Chinese people used the word
lihai
, “terrible, fierce.” So many different things could be
lihai
: a flood, a war, a hero, a criminal, a victorious general, a woman from Shanghai. And you could describe
any influential person as
weida
, or “great”: Mao Zedong, Mahatma Gandhi, Adolf Hitler, George Washington—all
weida
. It was completely amoral, as if the world were moved by massive events and personalities who were so distant that they couldn’t be judged by normal people. If you were fortunate, you could stand back and watch.

We entered another video shop. “You know,” I said. “Bin Laden actually isn’t from a poor country. He’s from Saudi Arabia. His family is rich.”

Willy paused. “I thought he was from Afghanistan.”

“He lives there now, but he’s from Saudi Arabia.”

“I didn’t know that,” he said. “Anyway, many people have this impression. They believe he’s from a poor country but now he made America notice him.”

That shop didn’t carry any 9/11 videos, but they had an eight-disk documentary of the first Gulf War. The package featured an American flag, a photograph of Saddam Hussein, and a Chinese blurb:

The World’s First High-Tech Modern War!
Will There Be Another Conflict in the Gulf?

“That’s not new,” Willy said. “That’s been around for a while. Actually, I wanted to buy it before, because I’m interested in that. But Nancy wouldn’t let me.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too expensive,” he said.

I picked up a set—eight bucks. Later that evening we watched the 9/11 videos in Willy and Nancy’s home.

THEY LIVED ON
the fourth floor of an apartment building near the school. The complex was new but unfinished, in the boomtown style: the stairwell lacked railings, and blotches of dried paint criss-crossed the cement floor. Willy and Nancy’s apartment consisted of a single room, painted in white and furnished with a bed, a color television, and a desk. A few dozen books lined wooden shelves:
Longman’s English Grammar
,
Selected Readings in English and American History
,
A Dictionary of English Euphemisms
. A volume of Saul Bellow short stories sat next to an old hardback that Adam Meier had given to Nancy:
Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys Super Sleuths
. Willy’s three broken dictionaries lined the center of the shelf, like proud old soldiers.

It seemed like only yesterday that the young couple had been students in my Fuling classrooms: Willy in the last row, nose in a dictionary; Nancy following the lesson carefully, hoping that I wouldn’t call on her. In Fuling, she had been
painfully shy, but the years away from home had changed her. When we talked, she looked me in the eye. She was firm with Willy—that was the biggest difference. In Fuling, she had always seemed intimidated by his intelligence, but now they had the easy banter of a couple whose differences have been softened to familiar jokes. Willy said that Nancy criticized him for arrogance, and I asked her if it was true.

“Of course,” she said, dark eyes flashing. “He always thinks he’s right. Always.”

She tried to be patient with his obsessions. Earlier that year, Wenzhou television had started broadcasting China Central Television’s Channel Nine, which is in English. Every night, Willy stayed up late, glued to the television, writing down new words. Nancy’s sleep deteriorated into a haze of flickering light and Special English, and then, just when she thought they might need another room, the broadcasts stopped.

For a few days, Willy assumed that there was a technical problem. After a week, he telephoned the Yueqing Broadcasting and Television Bureau, whose representative told him that Channel Nine had been canceled because of a lack of local interest. After another week, Willy began calling and impersonating a Beijing accent. He claimed that he worked for an international trade company whose foreign representatives often traveled to Yueqing, where they had been deeply disappointed to find no more Channel Nine. The foreigners, who were investing heavily in Yueqing, would be thrilled to see Channel Nine again. For weeks, Willy waited hopefully—nothing. If Nancy was relieved, she was tactful enough to keep it to herself.

Like many Chinese women, she was tough about money. Willy had a tendency to spend freely, but Nancy reined him in. With regard to having a baby, she held a hard line: until they had saved one hundred thousand yuan, she wouldn’t get pregnant (thus far, they had eighty grand). Technically, they were newlyweds—that May, they had finally registered as husband and wife. But they had never held a ceremony, because they were so far from Sichuan. After debating for years, they finally decided to skip the wedding and just get pictures instead. One day that summer, they went alone to a wedding photo studio in downtown Wenzhou.

They returned with an enormous framed portrait, which became the only decoration in their apartment: a soft-lens photo of Willy in a tuxedo and Nancy in a canary-yellow wedding dress with a string of pearls. They also bought an expensive photo album, which included a dozen more pictures, each featuring a different costume and background. It was as if they had had twelve separate weddings instead of none at all. The couple appeared in Wenzhou
parks and on busy city streets; their clothes shifted through different historical periods and international styles. In one photograph, Nancy even wore a Japanese kimono.

“Everybody has a picture taken with that costume,” she explained. “People think Japanese women are very gentle, very kind-hearted. They take care of their men.”

The photo borders were decorated with English terms (“tenderness, chic, charming, smart”) and bits of poetry that sounded a lot like pop song lyrics:

I don’t love diamonds you see through

I want you to hold me I want you to be true…

Another photo featured William Jefferson Foster dressed as a Ming dynasty gentleman, fan in hand.
I wanna tell you baby the changes I’ve been going through
. Another picture showed Nancy Drew in a lovely silk
qipao
.
Missing you listen you
. There was a pastoral shot of the couple in modern formal wear, sprawled on a sunny green field.
Until you come back to me I don’t know what I’m gonna do
.

THE 9/11 VIDEOS
were hard to follow. They had been compiled hastily, and it was impossible to tell who had published them; all of the Chinese credits were fake. The DVD—
The Century’s Great Catastrophe
—consisted mostly of footage taken from ABC News. Occasionally they dubbed in American movie soundtracks; at one point, they played the theme song from
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. Movie gunfire and explosions accompanied the second plane as it crashed into the World Trade Center. The north tower collapsed, in slow motion, to music from
Jaws.