Oracle Bones (7 page)

Adam Meier had been the other Peace Corps instructor who arrived with me in 1996. I was touched, and I thanked D.J. When he spoke again, I could hear his smile. “The student named Peter,” he said, “is possibly the stupidest student in the class.”

LIKE MOST CHINESE
from the countryside, my former students tended to marry early, and that spring I often received letters describing their courtships. Freeman sent notes that had been printed out by computer, which was unusual in rural areas. He had named himself after seeing a photograph of the actor Morgan Freeman in an American magazine. In one of his letters, he described how he had relied on matchmaking relatives to find a wife:

From graduating Fuling Teachers College, my parents and relatives all wanted to introduce girlfriends to me. So they introduced one and one, but the one and one passed me and didn’t become my wife. There were
nearly three dozen girls I knew through theirs introducing. Some were very fat like pigs; some were so thin that they were the same as flag-sticks and fishing-sticks; some were also very beautiful, but when they saw me, they at once went away and left a word, ‘The toad wants to eat the swan’s meat.’ Of course my family had spent a lot of things and money on my girlfriends.

Now I find a girlfriend finally, she will be my wife after 2000
. She isn’t beautiful, there are many black points on her face, but I love her, because she has more money than me, maybe I love her money more….

I am teaching Grade Two, Junior English. I think teaching is very difficult in this place, here is very poor, people don’t still see the importance of the education….

I have many things to say, but I can’t write out. This letter is typed from my girlfriend’s computer. I will write you again.

Yours,

      Freeman

IN THE PAST,
it was rare for Chinese to leave their home regions, and four-fifths of the population was rural. But this began to change after 1978, when Deng Xiaoping decided to institute free-market reforms. Eventually, this policy became known as
Gaige Kaifang,
“Reform and Opening.” In the 1980s, capitalist-style changes first gained momentum in the coastal regions, where factory towns sprang up to serve the new foreign trade. Migrants flooded in from the interior, working construction and assembly-line jobs. By the late 1990s, one of every eleven Chinese was on the move.

It took guts to leave. Migrants tended to be more capable than the ones who stayed behind in the villages, and often the best rural students headed toward the coast after they finished school. Among my own pupils, the decision was particularly difficult, because the government provided stable teaching jobs if they remained in their hometowns. Every spring, the classroom buzzed with talk of going south or east, where salaries were higher but where migrants wouldn’t have the safety net of a traditional
danwei
, or work unit. A lot of my students talked about it; few took the chance. The ones who left tended to share certain characteristics: they were at the top academically, and they were outgoing and lively. They spoke good English. Their ideas were different—usually, their compositions had shined.

William Jefferson Foster was one of the students who stood out. Originally, he had taken the English name “Willy,” but in the spring of his last year, he
suddenly changed it to “William Foster.” I had barely grown accustomed to seeing that signature on his compositions when the “Jefferson” materialized. He always signed his papers with a flourish, all three names stretched in huge script across the top of the page. He never asked for advice about the name changes, although he mentioned that he admired William Jefferson Clinton because the American president, like Willy, had come from a poor part of a big country. It didn’t surprise me that after graduation in 1998, William Jefferson Foster went east to seek his fortune. He was twenty-three years old.

Willy was probably the brightest student in the class; certainly his spoken English was the best. The others preferred using Chinese when they telephoned, but Willy insisted on English—he was determined to learn the language. But I can’t say for certain that his path was the most remarkable; it was simply the story that I came to know best. He was one migrant out of a hundred million.

WILLIAM JEFFERSON FOSTER
was born on August 18th of 1975, in Double Dragon Township, Number Ten Village, Number Three Production Team. Nothing important had ever happened there. No famous people had come from Number Ten Village, and there weren’t any ancient buildings or inscribed tablets. The oldest structure was Victory Bridge, which spanned the Snail River. The stone bridge had been constructed in the 1940s, destroyed almost immediately by a flood, and then half repaired so that it was just wide enough for a single person to cross. No particular victory had been won at the bridge, but that was a popular name for landmarks in New China. The Communists had used numbers to rename the local villages and administrative units, for the sake of simplicity. The population of Number Ten Village was less than one thousand.

Fifty miles away, across the low green hills and the shimmering rice paddies of northeastern Sichuan, was the town of Guang’an, where Deng Xiaoping had been born and raised. In 1975, Guang’an was just another obscure village, and Deng was just another once-promising political figure who had been purged twice during the Cultural Revolution. After 1977, when Deng was rehabilitated, he quickly rose to become the most powerful leader in the country, but he never returned to Guang’an. Probably, he wanted to avoid the sort of personality cult that had developed around Chairman Mao, whose hometown became a mecca for pilgrims. Deng protected the nation in part by allowing his corner of Sichuan to remain poor and forgotten.

Double Dragon Township was poorer than Guang’an, and Number Ten Village was even poorer than Double Dragon. It was a place without formal
history. Most residents, like Willy’s parents, were illiterate, and the local past consisted of things that were remembered and things that were left unspoken. Willy’s father had been born in 1941, and he told his sons that the worst period in his life had been during the Great Leap Forward. That political campaign had spanned the years from 1958 to 1961, when Mao Zedong’s mad push for greater industrial production had resulted in a famine that killed tens of millions of rural Chinese. Some of Willy’s father’s relatives and childhood friends had starved to death during that time, but the man refused to talk about it. The details, as far as he was concerned, should be allowed to fade away.

He was willing to remember subsequent periods, like the Cultural Revolution. Unlike the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution affected primarily the cities and the educated class—this is one reason that the history is much better known today. And although the Cultural Revolution’s political struggles were deadly in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, the movement sometimes softened by the time it reached the countryside. Politics often worked like that—the campaigns were like a code that came from far away, in bits and pieces, and the villagers clung to some fragments while ignoring others. In the years after the Communist victory, one Number Ten resident named Li had three sons whom he proudly named Li Mao, Li Ze, and Li Dong. Whenever he called them to help in the fields, he shouted, “Mao, Ze, Dong, get over here right now!” He claimed that this was his way of expressing love for the Chairman. Nevertheless, the man became an easy target during the Cultural Revolution, when the peasants imitated the “struggle sessions” that they had heard about from the village propaganda loudspeakers. In Number Ten, the peasants hung Li from his wrists, criticized him for misusing the Chairman’s name, and forced him to drink urine from a public latrine.

Willy’s parents were too poor and uneducated to become targets during the Cultural Revolution. Actually, that became a period of relative good fortune for the couple, because during those years Willy’s mother gave birth to three healthy sons. Dai Jianmin, the eldest, was born in 1971, and Dai Heping was born two years later. In 1975, the woman gave birth to their third son. They named the baby Xiaohong, “Little Red,” because of his size and color. Red is an auspicious color in China, and sure enough the baby’s first year coincided with great changes. Before Willy’s tenth month, Chairman Mao passed away.

When the death was announced, Willy’s father happened to be assisting with some construction work at a fertilizer plant in another part of the township. There were three other workers, and all of them stopped to listen when the news came over the loudspeakers. After hearing the announcement, none of the workers said a word about it. For years, they had repeated the chants—
Mao Zhuxi, wan sui!
“Ten thousand years to Chairman Mao!”—and now it seemed unbelievable that he was dead.

That night they did not go home. The workers spent the evening in a shack at the construction site, all of them lying together on a broad rough bed. Willy’s father couldn’t sleep; he knew that this was different from the various political campaigns that had come and gone. It was impossible to predict what would happen, but he felt certain that everything was about to change. For much of the night, he wept quietly. It wasn’t until later that he realized that the other workers had also spent the evening lying awake and weeping.

The Number Ten Village memorial service for Chairman Mao was held in the packed dirt yard of the local school. For seven days, nobody worked; they made white paper memorial wreaths and kowtowed before a poster of the departed leader. On the first day, a woman named Liu Yuqing distinguished herself by crying the hardest. By the second day, the other villagers began to wonder if there was something wrong with her. By the end of the year, she wandered aimlessly around the rice paddies, telling anybody who would listen that she had been Chairman Mao’s secret lover. She claimed that, together with the Chairman and Premier Zhou Enlai, she had designed Victory Bridge. She often cut off conversations by saying that she had to hurry and attend an important Politburo meeting. When Willy was a boy, Liu Yuqing lurked around the Snail River, washing her tangled hair and singing traditional songs about Chairman Mao, to which she added her own lyrics that were full of sexual innuendo. She used the blunt dialect word for the act—I
Chairman Mao. Willy and the other boys would laugh and shout out, “When’s your next meeting with Chairman Mao? Are you going to
him again?” After Liu Yuqing’s sons reached adulthood, they generally locked their mother indoors before going out to work in the fields.

WILLY’S FATHER WAS
right about the changes. Although he was illiterate—he hadn’t attended a single day of school in his life—he was naturally intelligent, and he responded quickly when the economic reforms filtered down to the village. By the early 1980s, he was organizing private construction crews to work in Double Dragon Township. By the time Reform and Opening was five years old, Willy’s family had become one of the most prosperous in Number Three Production Team.

There were other signs that the world was expanding. In 1980, one of Willy’s uncles became the first villager to migrate for work. He traveled to Gansu province, in the far west, where he spent several months on a labor crew. Soon, other villagers began to leave, although they generally went in the opposite
direction, to the east. Another early migrant was Willy’s neighbor, a man in his twenties who was the most literate person in the village. With his fifth-grade education, the man was able to find a job in a shoe factory in Heilongjiang province. After returning to the village, he told stories and wrote poems about his experiences abroad. As a child, Willy was fascinated by the man, and he loved to hear him recite his verses.

The first local television appeared in Number Four Production Team. Every night, Willy and his older brothers made the half-hour hike to Number Four. The owner had constructed a two-story home, and at night he placed the television high on his balcony so that everybody could see it. One evening, Willy and his brothers stared up at the balcony for more than four hours, transfixed by the new machine. Afterward, all of them felt the exact same pain in their necks, and that was when their father decided to take action.