Oracle Bones (72 page)

22

Encapsulate Prime

June 2002

IN THE MONTHS AFTER 9/11, WILLIAM JEFFERSON FOSTER CONTINUED
to follow the news closely. Sometimes he telephoned me in Beijing, often with a question about the situation in Afghanistan or some other development in the war on terror. At night, he listened to the Voice of America, writing in his journal:

US fighter-jet resumes it’s mission on Afganistan

More anthrax cases surface in U.S.A.

Pakistani police clash with anti-protestant

Peaceful anti-war demonstration in New York, Berlin

God Bless George W. Bush

He also translated commentaries from the local press:

It’s interesting that the two brother cities, Ningbo and Wenzhou, are both aimed at becoming the China’s Milan. There must be fierce competition between the two cities. Wenzhou wants to be the capital of clothes as well of leather shoes. “Dressing in Wenzhou” is a quite eye-catching slogan in downtown Wenzhou.

And occasionally he wrote English “news” stories in his journal, based on his own experiences:

Last year this school achieved great success. Some 25 students were recruited to the only key high school in this city. This year the school is facing fierce challenge from the outside society—a public newly-built school which is aimed at making our school go bankrupt….

Competition was everywhere. Willy and Nancy’s school competed with the public school; their city competed with Ningbo; China competed with the outside world. One of Willy’s most powerful childhood memories was watching his father initially succeed and then fail with his contracting work, a victim of his own illiteracy. That was the story of Willy and Nancy’s generation: they had grown up with China’s reforms, children of the market economy.

At the start of the 2001-2002 academic year, Willy’s headmaster gathered all the instructors together and gave a motivational speech. He exhorted them to battle the public school on three fronts, just as the Communists had fought the Kuomintang during the civil war. Later, when Willy told me about the speech, he couldn’t remember exactly what the school’s three fronts were. Over the years, there had been so many Chinese slogans with numbers—the three this, the five that—and inevitably they blurred. The important point was that the struggle between the schools had become a war. In one letter, Willy wrote:

Hi yagao [toothpaste]:

I am sure that this Spring Festival I will stay in Zhejiang. We are required to give so-called extra lessons to the Yahoo students…. The year 2002 this school will have fierce competition and challenges from the fucking Public Boarding school that I hoped will be bombed by Osama Bin Laden. By the way, how is your family? And what’s new in there?

I want to bye to you now. Right now I have to coach my top students who are my money and hope in the new year of 2002.

A couple of months later, after Willy and Nancy’s bank account finally cleared one hundred thousand yuan, the stakes became even higher:

Hi peter

How is it going with you in Beijing? First I wil tell that possibably in one year I will be a yahoo’s father. That’s to say Nancy is in the family way here in Wenzhou.

These days I am quite busy with the coming High School Examination. This year rather crucial for me. I was told that if we can let more students go to the only key school, I can get a decent bonus for this.

Willy and Nancy had decided to return to Sichuan eventually. They weren’t certain when, and it was possible that Nancy and the child would go back to
gether, leaving Willy to work for a while longer in the better economy of Zhejiang. Divided families were common in China, especially among migrants. Most people believed that it was better to raise a child near their hometown, where the culture was familiar and parents and other relatives could help if necessary. Willy and Nancy liked the idea of settling in the small city of Nanchong, which wasn’t far from Willy’s native village. As teachers, they could find work anywhere, and they’d return with plenty of savings, especially if the exam bonus panned out.

The tests were scheduled for two days in June. Over the final weeks, Willy held extra classes, drilling his students, and he kept an ear out for tips about the exam material. Once again, his school bribed the Wenzhou education official, and once again the man gave them nothing but elliptical comments. Willy hated this part of the routine—the leaks invariably favored the public schools, especially the ones in downtown Wenzhou and the bigger cities. But he couldn’t do anything about it, other than become cynical about the system and the nation. In early June, after watching the World Cup, he sent me an e-mail:

I am very glad that China Soccer Team was defeated by Costa Rica. During the two halves I cheered for Costa Rica it was just because I was once a spanish learner. Chinese players will be ashamed of it’s shitting performance on the court.

After the first day of exams, the father of a student approached Willy. The man seemed nervous, and he asked to speak privately. Once they were alone, he revealed his tip: a reliable source had told him that Beethoven and Bill Gates would appear on tomorrow’s English test.

Willy walked a safe distance from the school and found a photocopy shop. From his students’ textbook, he copied two passages, each of which profiled a famous foreigner. That afternoon, he gave his students strict instructions: study this, and don’t breathe a word to anybody else.

The following day, the exam’s reading comprehension section included a direct excerpt from Lesson 90, in the distinctive cadence of Special English:

Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1955. He grew up in Seattle, Washington. Bill Gates was named William Henry after his father and grandfather. He was a very clever boy….

When he was 13 years old, Bill started to play with computers. At that time, computers were very large machines. Once he was interested in a very old computer. He and some friends spent lots of time doing unusual things with it. In the end, they worked out a software program with the old machine. Bill sold it for 4,200 dollars when he was only 17….

Bill married Melinda French on January 1, 1994. They have two children, a daughter and a son. Bill enjoys reading very much. He also enjo
ys
playing golf and bridge.

Do you want to be a person like Bill Gates? Why or why not?

Later that summer, when the examination results came out, Willy’s students scored the highest of any class in the school. The headmaster rewarded Willy with a bonus of six thousand yuan—roughly two months’ salary. He might have done even better, but it turned out that Beethoven had been a false lead.

IN THE SPRING
of 2002, Emily decided to spend a semester outside of Shenzhen. She came to Beijing, where she enrolled in a private English course in the university district. During the weekends, she sometimes visited me downtown, and we had lunch and went sightseeing. One afternoon, she stopped by my apartment to pick up a copy of the article that I had written about her for the
New Yorker
. She had read an early draft, to help me fact-check, but this was the first time she had seen the published version. Of course, like anything written about China, certain details had already become historical. Nowadays, citizens could enter Shenzhen without the special border passes, and the government was discussing the possibility of tearing down the city’s fence. Another era had passed for the Overnight City.

Emily sat on my couch and opened to the first page, which featured an artist’s sketch of her. Laughing, she covered her mouth: “The face is so big!”

The artist had worked closely from a photograph: the high cheekbones, the rounded mouth. A vague outline of factory dormitories rose in the background. She turned to the next page, where there was a typical
New Yorker
cartoon: a couple arrived at a dinner party; the caption read: “
‘Please forgive us for being so late—we had parking issues.’”

She leafed through the magazine, pausing every once in a while to study something: a detail in the article, a cartoon, a poem. After she finished, we went out to a park, and I asked her if there had been anything in the article that she disagreed with.

“I think you were too critical of the boss,” she said.

I replied that she had never spoken positively of him, especially after all of his attempts to sleep with the young women in his factory.

“I know,” she said. “I didn’t like him. But I knew there was nothing he
could do to me. The more I think about it, the more I feel sorry for him. He was pathetic.”

IN FULING, EMILY
had been one of my most motivated students, the kind of person who was full of questions about American culture. Back then, she had always seemed to be searching for something: once, she sent a letter to the Country Music Association, in Nashville, Tennessee, because she was curious to know what country music was like. (They never responded.) Her journal entries were usually the most thoughtful in the class. As a teacher, I had hoped that she could find some way to continue her education.

In Beijing, though, she seemed distracted, and I sensed that she wasn’t particularly engaged in her English studies. It reminded me of something she had written for my class back in 1996, a story about her sister’s decision to move to Shenzhen:

Now my sister has been in that prosperous city for five months. I wonder if she still remembers that conversation, and if she is still full of energy.

Several times, she told me that the emptiness of the future depressed her. In the Overnight City, she had succeeded—she had a good teaching job at the private school, and her boyfriend was doing well at the appliance factory. At twenty-five, she had reached the age when most of her friends were marrying, buying apartments, and raising their only child. But for some reason she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She had trouble explaining herself; whenever we talked about it, she could say only that normal life seemed bleak and petty—a steady accumulation of possessions. She hated the way that people in Shenzhen thought constantly about real estate, buying an apartment and then trading up, and then doing it all over again. It was the worst of both worlds: trapped in these little spaces that you owned, but with the insecurity of constantly trying to move into the next one.

Her younger brother had never been able to hold down a regular job, because of his psychological troubles, and this weighed heavily on her. A while back, she had asked me for the phone number of Hu Xiaomei, the Shenzhen radio show host. Emily promised that she’d use it only in an emergency. In Beijing, she told me that she had finally called the woman last year, when her brother was going through a particularly bad spell.

“Was she helpful?” I asked.

“Yes,” Emily said. “We talked about it and she made me feel better.”

“Did she give you any advice?”

“She told me to have confidence in myself,” Emily said.

In Emily’s opinion, her brother would have been fine if others had been more accepting of his differences. In high school, people had labeled him as strange, and the teachers had allowed the other students to bully him. She asked me how disabilities were handled in the United States, and I gave her some articles about the issue. But mostly I felt helpless; her world had become far more complicated than the one we had known in Fuling.

I thought that it might help for her to talk with other foreigners, and in Beijing I introduced her to a Chinese-American friend named Mimi Kuo. That June, while I was on a trip to the States, Mimi sent me an e-mail: “I saw Emily the other day and she seemed to be doing ok. We had a nice afternoon—she came over for lunch and we hung out for a while, talking and listening to music (she wanted to know what country music was like).”

A couple of days later, Emily wrote:

Mr. Hessler,

How’s everything going?

I visited Mimi on Sunday and had a very good time talking with her. She has the nature of putting people at ease, I think. We chatted about a lot of things, including “Country Music,” which I found quite different from what I had imagined. I had literally taken it for granted that Country Music was about flowers, grass, brooks, sunshine, country people and their plain love, and everything beautiful and happy.

That summer, she returned to Shenzhen, but she didn’t marry and she didn’t buy an apartment. She worked for another year, studied in her spare time, and tested into graduate school in Chongqing. It was a new program that trained teachers to work with disabled children. When Emily called to tell me that she had been accepted, it was the happiest she had sounded in years.

ONCE, WHILE SHE
was still working in Shenzhen, Emily had written a letter that mentioned my research for the magazine article:

Your appearance lightened up my college life. It’s you that let me know that a teacher could get along with his students that way. You never know how much fun I took in reading your feedback in my journal book. It could ease my worries and make me think.

I always enjoy talking with you, you are the one who knows my everything…. But everytime you went back to Beijing [after reporting in Shenzhen], I felt the panic of hollowness. As if I had given everything out but gotten nothing in return.