Oracle Bones (73 page)

When I had first arrived in Beijing, the transition from teacher to writer hadn’t seemed so difficult. The basic role was similar: I was the outsider who sifted information between worlds. But over the years, as I thought about what Emily had written, I realized that there would always be something unnatural about being a foreign correspondent. As a teacher, I had taken information from far away—American culture, English literature—and introduced it to a classroom of living Chinese students.

But a writer’s work moved in the opposite direction. I started with living people and then created stories that were published in a distant country. Often, the human subjects of my articles couldn’t even understand the language in which they were written. From my perspective, the publishing world was so remote that it seemed half real. Once a year, I visited editors in New York, and I rarely heard anything from readers of the magazine. Usually, I wrote only two or three articles a year, which was adequate to live simply in a country like China. The fee for a single published word in the
New Yorker
—more than two dollars—was enough to buy lunch in Beijing. With one long sentence, I could eat for a week. Those were the exchanges of a freelance foreign correspondent: people and places were distilled into words, and the words were sold.

Whenever I received copies of my
New Yorker
articles, I found myself flipping through the pages, thinking about the gap between the world where I lived and the world where I published. I traded on that gap—that was my margin, and the advertisements reflected the breadth of the divide. In one published story, anecdotes about Fuling students were interspersed with ads for Orb Silversmiths, the Tribeca Grand Hotel, and Wildflower Log Homes (“lots starting at 49k”). The article about Polat was entitled “The Middleman,” and it began with the sentence, “You can buy anything in Yabaolu.” On the facing page, an ad said:

Every year the world’s leaders join 400 of the brightest
business students at the Yale School of Management to
discuss the challenges and opportunities
facing business and society today.
Be a part of it.

More than a year after Beijing won the right to host the 2008 Olympics, I received an e-mail from the daughter of Driver Yang. I had written about him in the
New Yorker
, too. His daughter went by the English name Cindy, and she was enrolled in a graduate program in engineering at the National University of Singapore. She wrote: “Do you know Sinapore English is difficult to understand. We call it Senglish. when I talk with Sinaporean I always can not
understand enough them. I hope can improve my English via communicating with you.”

It was hard to believe that the simple man in his surplus military uniform had a daughter who had gone abroad to study. When I asked about her work with computer languages, she responded:

All my work is under Linux, because under Linux the graph is more stable. Now I am doing my project about mixed reality. The meaning is virtual reality and augmented reality mixed together. I work in a special room. On the top of this room have the tracking system. They can send ultrasonics, and same time if take a wand the tracking system can find track your position. Because the wand can receive the ultrasonics….

So in my project I and my friend will to go virtual world from augmented world to rescue our friend. We will have a fight with the enemy in the virtual world. If we win we can take our friend to come back the augmented world. I am very interested in my research work.

EVERY SEMESTER, I
sent off one hundred letters to my former students, and every year I made at least one trip back to Fuling. Sometimes I visited former students in the schools where they now taught—remote places where the schoolchildren gathered around, wide-eyed and laughing, amazed at the visitor. Often they had studied English for four or five years without setting eyes on a foreigner.

I wrote the letters and made the trips because I enjoyed going back, but it was also a way of reminding myself of the limitations of a foreign correspondent. The distance was unavoidable; that was the nature of writing and you had to find ways to balance it. And I always remembered that there was at least one faith that connected the teacher and the writer. Whenever a person studied another language, and went to another place—or even imagined it—there was a chance that he would gain a new perspective. He might misinterpret information, and the material might confuse him; I had seen that happen time and time again. But if there were patience and determination and honesty, then a glimpse outside might help somebody become more comfortable with his place in the world.

In 2001, the Chinese Ministry of Education published a plan to expand the study of English. The subject would become compulsory from the third grade on; eventually, more than two hundred million Chinese children would be studying English, as well as every Chinese college student. (In contrast,
less than 9 percent of American undergrads are enrolled in a foreign-language course.) In the new Chinese curriculum, the ministry emphasized the usual reasons for studying English, namely to prepare young people for interacting with the outside world. But the curriculum also noted that teaching the foreign language would “develop individuality.”

In Beijing, I met with a ministry official named Zhang Lianzhong to talk about the new plan. He had attended graduate school in England, and he spoke fondly about his years abroad. When I asked him about that word—“individuality”—he acknowledged that it was a new concept in Chinese education. “It’s like the French idea of humanism,” he said. “In the document, we never use the word ‘individualism,’ because that has negative connotations in China. So we go around it. We say that learning a foreign language can help develop independent people. We want to emphasize the uniqueness of each person.”

Over the years, I received hundreds of letters from Sichuan and Chongqing. Former students wrote, but it was even more common to receive letters from their own students. The postmarks came from all over, a blur of tiny villages and forgotten townships, but each child used the language in her own distinct way:

I have made some progress in English. But I find some idioms and useful expressions hard to learn. For example “have a cold” and “catch a cold.” “Have a cold” is something you have and “catch a cold” is something you do. First you must catch a cold. Could you give me some advice? Please?

My aunt even told me that I must study English hard. If I study it well, I can go to the capital of Norway—Olso. I want to learn English better in order to go to Olso. But I’m worrying about if I can learn it well. I hope you hepe me. And give me some advices.

I’m a Chinese girl and studing in No. 1 Middle School of Xiushan in ChongQing. Your student Zeng Bing is my English teacher. I’m sixteen years old, but I only 1.45 metres tall. Some classmats laughed at me, but I didn’t angry. I’ll say to them, I’m encapsulate prime. I think this is self-confidence. I need it, because self-confidence is first cecret of success!

IN OCTOBER OF
2002, William Jefferson Foster purchased a new notebook for his Voice of America journal. The entries became longer and more detailed, and then, in November, they gained a new element:

November 2, 2002

“And in the name of freedom, the United States of America will lead a coalition to disarm him.”

An American worker can make 25 cars a year compared to 1.5 cars by a Chinese counterpart.

November 10, 2002

My daughter was born at 2:25 PM in Yueqing. I am too excited.

Phillipphines. A small plane crashed today early before it took off killing at least 14 people on board….

November 14, 2002

My daughter is fine today. Mum told me she cried for a short time last night. She enjoyed milk very much and had much. She is lovely.

…. The announcement came during the closing session of the 16th communist party congress…. Chinese officials in Xinhua News Agency confirmed that Chinese president Jiang Zemin is retiring….

UN Secretary general Koffi Anna says Iraq’s cooperations with weapons inspectors on the ground is a big issue.

November 19, 2002

Today I don’t have many classes. My daughter is pretty fine. Nancy and I have finally decided her name in Chinese—Dai Yuecan. Which means that she was born on a Sunday. She will have a promising future and she will be happy all her life. Several of my collegues come to see my daughter. They speak highly of her. I’m very happy.

President Bush is on his way to po where he will take part in the NATO summit and ceremony inviting several central East European Countries to join the alliance….

December 15, 2002

Today we took a pedi-cab to the local hospital to get my daughter vaccicated against hepatitis. But the fucking doctors were off work on weekends.

December 19, 2002

Tomorrow marks the 40th day’s anniversary of my daughter’s birth, we will go to the photography shop to take pictures of our daughter. These pictures are very important. Because these pictures will be the first one since Yuecan was born….

Bush is expected to make his first public comments on Iraq’s weapon declaration today.

During one of my visits to Wenzhou, Willy showed me the journal, and I asked why he combined the diary of fatherhood with the VOA notes. He told me that when his daughter got older, she might find it interesting. “It will help her recall many things that happened in the past,” he said. “Maybe the world will be very different by then. It’s a real history book for her, about herself as well as the world.”

AT THE END
of that school year, before the exams, one of Willy’s colleagues received the best tip yet. It was an actual government document—something that had been leaked from the Wenzhou educational authorities. The paper clearly outlined one section of the examination.

Once again, Willy took the document and walked some distance from the school. But this time he faxed it to a Wenzhou cable television station, which ran an exposé program called
Zero Distance
. Such programs were becoming popular across China. The journalists weren’t allowed to directly attack the Party or the highest levels of government, but they often exposed local corruption.

Willy followed up the fax with a phone call. He was careful to use a public telephone, and he refused to give his name. He identified himself only as “a teacher from the countryside.” He recommended that the station send a reporter to interview students as they left the examination halls. With the document in hand, they could prove that there had been a leak.

After
Zero Distance
exposed the cheating, a number of regional newspapers picked up the story.
Nanjing Weekend
ran an article:

INVESTIGATION OF LEAKS AT THE WENZHOU
HIGH SCHOOL ENTRANCE EXAMINATION

AT 2:34 IN THE AFTERNOON OF JUNE
12, the office of Wenzhou cable television’s “Zero Distance” program received a telephone call from a middle-school English teacher who did not want to mention his name but provided some unusual facts….

During the reporter’s investigation, she understood that the mysterious man who had sent the fax was very careful. The fax and telephone calls were both made from public telephones. The reporter was unable to find the man.

Willy didn’t tell me about what he had done until many months later. He said that after the story broke, security officials appeared in the local schools, asking questions. But it was clear that they were trying to trace the original leak, not the anonymous fax, and he hadn’t been particularly worried. When I asked why he had taken the risk, he said, “I did it because of the countryside students. Whenever this happens, it’s only the cities that get the information. It’s not fair for the students who come from the countryside.”

ARTIFACT L

The Misprinted Character

ONLY ONE OF CHEN MENGJIA’S SIBLINGS IS ALIVE. FOR SOME REASON,
Old Mr. Zhao never mentioned that there was another relative, but the curator of the Shanghai Museum tells me that a younger brother still lives in Beijing. His name is Chen Mengxiong—all five Chen brothers had that same character,
meng
, or
, in the first part of their given names. It means “dream.”