Oracle Bones (9 page)

Willy explained that, more than anything in the world, he wanted to go east. He took out an envelope, placed it on the low tea table in front of him, and said, “Please do me a favor.”

“I’ll try,” said the Party Secretary, and then he escorted the young couple to the door. Nobody said a word about the envelope.

Another official handled graduates’ work assignments, and Willy and Nancy visited the man’s apartment and performed the same ritual. Each envelope contained five hundred yuan; the total represented half a year’s income for Willy’s father. It was the first time in his life that Willy had bribed an official.

Shortly before graduation, the college informed Willy and Nancy that their dossiers were being sent east.

Peter Hessler

The Wall Street Journal

7-2-63 Jianguomenwai Diplomatic Apartments

March 12, 1999

Dear Pete,

I was perfectly glad to hear from you this time. In my view, it should be great news for China since there is an extra foreign Yashua [toothbrush] from the other side of the pacific ocean. Probably you are beding a Chinese birtch when my letter arrives. Anyway, please read it, it can be used as “viagra.”…

The job in the school isn’t so good. I feel too tired, in fact we are coolies in the school. We are discriminated. For there is an old birtch who is in charge of salary, she is undersexed and mean, she can never get any pleasure from anything except money. Half a year passed. I am feeling better and better, anyway I am glad that I can come to Zhejiang Province. After all, there are more opportunities here. While I am still working hard at English for I have Zealotry in this language, I have confidence in myself that one day I will be a VIP, not like toothbrush any more. Meanwhile my teaching here is extremely successful. You and Adam are somewhat my icoms in the teaching….

Pete, I hope that you will seize a chance to visit me in Yuhuan. My yahoo students have itching desire to see you.

By the way, I have several questions for you.

I: what does “KTV” stand for?

II: what’s the term (the proper Englihs) for the people who to go other

city to earn living (especially farmers from sichuan)?

III: What’s the full form of “DVD” “VCD”?

IV: Do you want to be Chinese-American?

V: How many wives do you want to have?

VI: Are you still impotent? (YOUR BIRD CAN NOT ERECT)?

Yours,

       
Willy

AFTER THEIR ARRIVAL
in Yuhuan, Willy and Nancy realized that Mr. Wang’s description of the island had not been accurate. First of all, the place was relatively undeveloped; the city of Wenzhou, thirty miles away on the Ou River, was the region’s boomtown. Second, there had been a problem with Willy and Nancy’s jobs. In fact, the high-paying jobs did not exist. Mr. Wang apolo
gized for the misunderstanding, and then he gave them teaching positions that paid roughly half of the promised salary. The guaranteed free housing also did not materialize. Willy and Nancy had to pay for private rooms in a building whose conditions were so bad that Willy referred to the place as “my so-called apartment.”

Mr. Wang wore the Sun Yat-sen suit every day, buttoned all the way to the collar. He was in his mid-sixties, with short white hair, a bright red face, and a distinct limp. He intimated that this injury had been sustained in service to the Communist Revolution. His wife wore old-fashioned cloth “Liberation shoes,” and she clutched a silk money bag so tightly that it had turned black and greasy. The woman handled the school’s finances; whenever she paid Willy and Nancy’s salaries, she deducted mysterious fees and penalties. She was the biggest birtch that Willy had ever met.

The Hundred Talents High School also did not exist, at least in any particular place. The campus location changed almost every year. Mr. Wang arranged short-term leases on buildings that were half-constructed, or old public-school facilities that had been abandoned. Most students came from outlying islands; their parents sent them to the private school out of desperation, because the children had failed the entrance examination for public high school. In China, compulsory education was only nine years.

The Wang economic empire was transitory but diversified: one of Mr. Wang’s adult sons had a business nearby, raising attack dogs for the local police. Mr. Wang’s office, like the rest of the school, was unfinished, and there were no furnishings, apart from a desk and a few books. The most substantial volume was entitled
A Record of the World’s Famous People
, which featured biographies of successful individuals in a wide range of fields. The book sat prominently on Mr. Wang’s desk, and he encouraged visitors to browse freely. When Willy scanned it, the only name that he recognized was Mr. Wang’s. The biography detailed Mr. Wang’s love for China, as well as his decorated career as a member of the Communist Party. The book described the many instances in which Mr. Wang had used his own money to help poor students who couldn’t afford school fees.

Within two months, Nancy quit and returned to Sichuan. She found a teaching job in her hometown, where a neighbor, in the patient but determined manner of the countryside, began to court her.

WILLIAM JEFFERSON FOSTER
lost weight that first year. He missed Nancy, and his hatred for the Hundred Talents High School deepened every day. The institution depended heavily on migrant teachers, who were paid a third as
much as the locals, because Mr. Wang knew that it was difficult for outsiders to search for new jobs. Meanwhile, students often dropped out once they realized the school was a fraud, and Willy’s salary was docked for every kid who quit. He could barely save any money.

In the evenings, he distracted himself by listening to the Voice of America on his shortwave radio. Originally, the station had been a wartime creation of the American government; the first broadcast had been in German in 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Since then, the station had expanded to provide programming in fifty-five languages. According to its charter, the Voice was dedicated to providing reliable and authoritative news, and it described itself as “American” in a general, nonpolitical sense. But relatively few Americans had ever actually listened to it. U.S. law forbade the station from broadcasting domestically, because of a fear that any government-funded news source would become propaganda. It seemed a distinctly American paradox: create a Voice and then protect your own citizens from hearing it.

Overseas, however, there were an estimated ninety million weekly listeners. In China, the Voice of America had always been hugely popular—during the pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989, the station claimed that as many as sixty million Chinese tuned in every week. A decade later, Chinese in the big cities often had access to the Internet and cable television, but the Voice remained an important source of information in smaller places such as Yuhuan. It broadcast in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Tibetan.

The Voice of America also provided programming in English, including a form of the language known as “Special English.” The best description of the tongue can be found on the Voice Web site, which is also Special:

Three elements make Special English unique. It has a limited vocabulary of 1,500 words. Most are simple words that describe objects, actions or emotions. Some are more difficult. They are used for reporting world events and describing discoveries in medicine and science. Special English is written in short, simple sentences that contain only one idea. No idioms are used. And Special English is spoken at a slower pace, about two-thirds the speed of standard English.

Special English was a product of the cold war. In the late 1950s, when the Soviet Union frequently jammed the Voice of America, broadcasters decided that a simpler form of the language would be easier to understand through the static. It wasn’t intended as a teaching tool, but that’s what it quickly became. Millions of people around the world studied English through the Special broadcasts.

In Fuling, my students listened religiously, mimicking the rhythms, and
soon Adam and I learned to talk the same way whenever we needed to make ourselves understood. We were the only native English speakers in the city, and after a couple of months we began holding routine conversations in Special English without realizing it. During my first year in the Peace Corps, a friend from New York visited and wondered if Adam and I were losing our native tongue. He kept telling us to stop talking to him as if he were a child.

Sometimes I wondered if Special English was the linguistic equivalent of McDonald’s—a slow-paced fast-food language. But I was studying Chinese myself, and soon I realized that I was developing my own Special Chinese. It was a natural method for picking up a new language: First, you established basic sentence structures and vocabulary, the way a painter might initially outline a portrait’s fundamental elements. Over time, you acquired more sophisticated words and phrases, attaching them to the existing foundation. It felt like living in a rough sketch of the world where new details appeared day by day.

In Yuhuan, Willy listened to the Special English broadcasts almost every night. In a lined notebook, he jotted down words and phrases from various programs, all jumbled together:

Most Americans like to sleep late on Saturday morning.

Special English

VOA

Washington

President end Kosovo

present might fly to Belgrade

depend on the meeting

Usually, the topic was news, but occasionally an entry was sparked by some program about American culture, politics, or history:

First floor: Congress Library

By the fireplace: George Washington

132 rooms 20 bedrooms

move on 34 bathrooms

privacy = a-way from public

rooms owned by presidents and their families are not allowed to visit but they never think that this rooms are theirs, thy don’t own it.

American people own the White House.

One of Willy’s favorite Voice of America programs was called
American Idioms
, which introduced new phrases that were too obscure or complicated for Special English. In his journal, Willy made lists:

turn over a new leaf

see beyond one’s nose

turn up one’s nose at

on spin and needles

Unfortunately,
American Idioms
was obscenity-free, but Willy tracked down supplementary materials. He found a Chinese-published book called
American Colloquialisms
, but his most valuable discovery, in a used-book store in Hangzhou, was
A Dictionary of English Euphemisms
. The volume was dedicated almost exclusively to the sexual, the scatological, the graphic. Once, when I visited Willy, I opened the book to a random page, whose first word leaped out at me:

Dominatrix
n.
(American) 1. A female dictator. 2. A female sadist. 3. A female commander-in-chief for activities of sexual sadism.

DURING THE CHINESE
New Year’s holiday of 1999, William Jefferson Foster made the long trip home. In Number Ten Village, most of his former elementary-school classmates had also migrated; the men usually worked construction, while the women found jobs in restaurants or factories. With his education, Willy had expected to do better than his peers, but he had barely saved enough to cover his trip. Across the province, Nancy wasn’t finding life any easier. In the village school, she earned about twenty-five dollars a month. The peasant who was courting her was completely bald.

Nancy’s perspective on destiny had changed dramatically since her return home. Now she sensed that fate was what happened when you stayed in the village: the dead-end job, the lifeless marriage. During the holiday, she traveled alone across Sichuan to visit Willy. Before Nancy’s parents allowed her to make the trip, they forced her to promise that she would return once the vacation was finished. They believed that life in Zhejiang province was too unstable for an unmarried couple.

But once Nancy was reunited with Willy, it didn’t take him long to persuade her to get back on the east-bound train. He promised that they wouldn’t stay in Yuhuan for long; at most, they would finish out the semester at the Hundred Talents High School. Willy knew that there had to be better opportunities in Zhejiang.

After a week, Nancy’s parents realized what had happened. They telephoned the so-called apartment in Yuhuan and shouted at Willy; if Nancy picked up the line, they wept and asked her who would care for them when they
grew old. After a while, they enlisted relatives to call and browbeat the young couple. Nancy’s older cousin was the most persistent—the woman called daily for more than a week. Every time, she screamed at Willy, and then suddenly she would grow calm. “You will be responsible,” she said. “You will be responsible for what you have done.”

April 18th, 1999

Dear Pete,