Oracle Bones (8 page)

One of Willy’s most vivid childhood memories was from that day in 1982, when his family became the first in Number Three Production Team to own a television. Years later, he remembered the scene:

“I was very proud, very happy. When the TV was put inside, nobody knew how to use it. Everybody tried, but it didn’t work; maybe it took about five or six hours. There were more than one hundred people at my home, mostly in the big room. It was just like a lobby, people sit in lines, one after another. Some of them sat outside. After they learned how to use it, there was only one channel, Sichuan TV station. The Hong Kong shows were popular, and we always watched one about Huo Yuanjia, a character from history. In the Qing dynasty, he mastered the
gong fu
and fought many Japanese who were good at Japanese
gong fu
. They came to China to challenge Huo Yuanjia, and he defeated them. It was near the end of the Qing dynasty. I can still remember the song:

China is like a dragon that has slept for hundreds of years

Now it has woken up,

Open your eyes, look carefully,

Who wants to be a slave of fate?

History has shown that evils from outside will be defeated.”

The show about Huo Yuanjia was followed by a Mexican soap opera, which proved to be equally intriguing to the residents of Number Three Production Team. The Mexican soap was called, in Chinese,
Slander
, and its characters engaged in extramarital affairs at a dizzying pace. Invariably, the mistresses were wicked and conniving, while the wives were so unknowing that it was painful to watch. In Willy’s home, the villagers often shouted out their unani
mous allegiances: sympathy for the wives, contempt for the mistresses.
Slander
provided Number Three Production Team with its first introduction to the private lives of foreigners.

It often rains in Sichuan, and when the weather turned bad, the spectators who couldn’t fit in Willy’s house stood outside the window, holding umbrellas. The television screen measured fourteen inches. It wasn’t long before another channel appeared:

“People would shout and say, ‘Change the channel!’ And I would say, ‘No, it’s up to me to decide!’ I was just like a boss, very arrogant. I decided what we would watch. One night we were watching and suddenly the voice disappeared. There wasn’t any sound. Some people were upset and went away. I went in front of the TV and turned it off. The people shouted, ‘Don’t do that!’ But when I turned it back on, the voice came back. Later, it happened again, and I did the same thing. Sometimes once wasn’t enough, and I’d have to do it twenty times, thirty times. We were likely to break the TV. Sometimes the picture was not good, so I held the antenna. Many people took turns holding it so that others could watch.”

WHEN WILLY WAS
small, he saw his older brothers go off to school every day. In the early morning, Dai Jianmin and Dai Heping walked south along the dirt road, carrying a simple wooden bench between them. They disappeared for a period of several hours and then returned with the bench. From Willy’s perspective, that was school: a ritual involving brothers and benches.

The village school had mud walls, and the teachers were poorly trained local peasants whose first priority was farming. If an instructor had something to do in the fields, the kids ran free, and everything shut down during peak agricultural periods. Neither of Willy’s brothers went beyond the fifth grade, and both became farmers and laborers.

By the time Willy was ten years old, Reform and Opening had already begun to leave his father behind. The new economy changed so fast that windows of opportunity were brief—sometimes a certain product or a particular set of skills were valuable for only a year or two. In the early 1980s, native intelligence and diligence were adequate for small-scale construction work, and Willy’s father flourished. But soon there was more competition, and bidding for projects required shrewd calculation. Sometimes Willy’s father organized a long job and actually lost money. He often warned Willy about the disadvantages of being uneducated: “My father said it was too bad to work without education; he said you would be cheated by anybody who is literate, who
knows something. If you don’t study, you will just be a coolie.”

The man decided to be more careful with the schooling of his youngest son. He paid extra to send Willy to the township school, which had a better reputation. Nevertheless, the key moment in Willy’s education was a “miracle”—or at least that was how he remembered it, years later:

“When I was in primary school, the first four years I was not so good. The subjects were hard for me. But I think it was a miracle—from the fifth year, I was very, very good at math. I can’t understand how the situation changed so fast. The teacher would write many questions on the blackboard and ask us to do it as quickly as possible, and I was always the first. In the examination to go to middle school, I got the second prize out of more than seventy students.”

Soon, Willy’s parents no longer required him to help out on their farm, which consisted of about a quarter of an acre. His brothers complained, but Willy’s father sensed that the youngest child had better prospects. Willy often assisted with calculations for his father’s construction work, but in middle school the boy discovered that he no longer liked math. Fortunately, there was a second flash of light:

“In sixth grade, we got the book for English class. I think this was another miracle. I studied very, very badly. We had a countryside teacher who had just graduated from high school; he had no college diploma. Tan Xingguo—‘Tan Prosperous Nation.’ I could not understand anything he said, and I always failed the examination. I never got sixty points. But at the end of that term, I studied by myself. I stole some chalks and I wrote words on the door at my home. I pretended it was a blackboard. I wrote words, and I read them. I liked that: I am the teacher, I am the student. That was the best way for me.

“At the end of the term, I was very astonished to find that when the test papers were sent to us, the problems were very, very easy for me. I got eighty points. At that time, I had confidence in myself.”

In the spring of 1995, at the end of high school, Willy took the national exam and qualified to study in the English department at Fuling. He and two other boys were the first people from Number Three Production Team to enter college.

WILLY WAS THE
kid in the back of the class with the open dictionary. He always scored well on my exams, and if I called on him, he answered questions quickly. But he wasn’t one of the students who raised his hand at every opportunity. Class moved too slowly for him; if I walked along the back row
during a lecture, he’d quickly shuffle some papers so I wouldn’t see that he had been studying his dictionary. He was short, stocky, and dark-skinned. He wore glasses. He dressed neatly, but his clothes—shirts with frayed collars, suit coats with the tailor’s label still attached to the sleeve—were cheap. Like many of my students, his appearance could be described in Chinese as
tu
: “earthy, uncouth.” He looked like a peasant, and he had the peasant’s crude sense of humor. Once, after class was over and the other students had filed out into the hall, Willy sidled over to me and said, with carefully studied pronunciation, “How is your premature ejaculation?”

He was always trying out some new phrase, often obscene. Language obsessed him—he loved the word “yahoo,” gleaned from
Gulliver’s Travels,
and he often used “tonto,” which had been acquired in Adam Meier’s Spanish class. He was fascinated when I gave a lesson about foreign words that had been adopted into English, and after that he made “coolie” a regular part of his vocabulary. He liked the cynicism of the phrase “so-called”: China’s “so-called patriotism,” the college’s “so-called morning exercises.” And he had a special affection for the dialect of Sichuan province. During my last year at the college, Willy and some of his classmates taught me various bits of
tuhua—
“earth speak,” a Chinese phrase for local slang. In Sichuan, you could insult somebody by calling him a “son of a melon” or a “son of a turtle”; the local pronunciation of “hammer” meant “penis.”
Yashua
—“toothbrush”—was for some obscure reason degrading when used as an adjective (“You are very toothbrush!”). In basketball games, if an athlete shot an air ball or made a bad play, the Sichuanese fans chanted
yangwei, yangwei, yangwei
—impotent, impotent, impotent. After I played basketball with Willy’s classmates, he would often say, in mock earnestness, “I see that you still have a big problem with impotence.”

But much of the crudeness was bluster, at least when it came to real life instead of language. During Willy’s second year at the college, he began to notice another English student called Nancy. She was a tiny girl, dark-eyed and fine-featured; Nancy was so shy that if a boy spoke to her outside of class she simply froze. Willy was almost as hesitant, and it took him weeks to work up the courage to write Nancy a formal letter, in Chinese, that praised her beauty, quietness, and character. The letter requested permission to spend time alone with her.

The college was controlled by conservative cadres who criticized romance among students as an unnecessary distraction. Young people who engaged in courtship could be punished by an official demerit that would remain in their political dossier, subject to inspection by future employers. Nancy never re
sponded to Willy’s note, but the next weekend she silently joined him on a walk around the campus:

“Later we went to the cinema. We did not talk. We kept silent. It was embarrassed, I feel very embarrassed. I can’t remember the movie now. I think it was a very big film from the U.S.A. I sent her home to her dormitory. This went on for a couple of weeks. She did not speak so much.

“One night, we went to the athletic field, and just sat on the stairs, and it was dark. We talked there; we talked happily. Suddenly the security guard came, and he asked why we were there. He wrote down our names. Nancy was frightened and said it was fate. She was very sad after that. I tried to date her out, but she refused. Maybe a month or more.”

Unlike Willy, Nancy was a pessimist. She had inherited it from her father, a peasant from northern Sichuan who had never found his niche in the changing economy. Nancy’s father dreamed of becoming rich, and he was always finding a new scheme to ride the reforms. In the mid-1990s, there was a boom in the Sichuanese pork industry, and feed mills sprang up all across the province. A town near Guang’an—Deng Xiaoping’s birthplace—became known for its pig feed, and Nancy’s father decided that he had to be the first from his village to use a new brand. He traveled more than seven hours by bus specifically to purchase the feed. Over the following weeks, all twenty of his piglets died, one by one. Probably, he had been tricked into buying a knockoff brand. In China’s new economy, somebody produced a counterfeit of everything; there were fake cell phones and fake Pierre Cardin bras and even fake pig feed. A common trick was to dilute the feed with rapeseed hulls, which can’t be digested.

There was always a logical explanation, but it didn’t appear that way in the isolated villages. Miracles blessed Willy; fate cursed Nancy’s father. One year, he bought a motorbike to transport goods, but the motorbike crashed. Then he tried to raise rabbits, but the animals caught a disease and died. Bad luck was everywhere.

By their last year of college, Willy had finally eased Nancy’s fear of the anti-dating regulations. But the prospect of graduation posed an even greater threat. If they accepted the government-assigned teaching jobs, they would end up in their hometowns, separated by hundreds of miles.

That spring, a private-school headmaster from Zhejiang province arrived in Fuling to scout for new teachers. It was a yearly ritual—recruiters always showed up in April, hoping to exploit the income gap between the coastal re
gions and the interior. In a place like Fuling, they could attract top talent for a fraction of the salary that would be expected back east.

The recruiting headmaster was named Mr. Wang. He wore a traditional Sun Yat-sen suit with brass buttons and a short stiff collar (foreigners sometimes call this a “Mao suit”). Mr. Wang told the students that he had joined the Communist Party at the age of sixteen. He had devoted his life to Chinese education, and in recent years he had founded the Hundred Talents High School on the island of Yuhuan. According to Mr. Wang, Yuhuan had a well-developed economy, and young people from all across China came there to find new lives in the island’s factories and trade companies. For incoming teachers, Mr. Wang promised to provide free housing and a monthly salary of eight hundred yuan—nearly one hundred American dollars. It was more than twice as much as Willy and Nancy could earn if they taught in their hometowns. But in order for them to leave, the Party officials in the Fuling English Department had to agree to transfer the young couple’s dossiers.

Willy and Nancy submitted their requests. Politically, their applications were weak: neither student had joined the Communist Party, and they had never been particularly well liked by the cadres. Both had been criticized for their romance, among other minor transgressions. As graduation approached, there still was no word on the dossiers.

Finally, Willy took action. He didn’t ask anybody for advice—years later, he explained that he simply followed his “sixth sense.” One evening, he escorted Nancy to the home of the English Department’s Communist Party Secretary. The Party Secretary was not particularly friendly, and Willy had never liked him; but now the cadre smiled and invited the young couple inside. He remarked that Yuhuan sounded like a good place with a promising economy. But Zhejiang province was far away and transferring documents was not simple.