Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.)

by Peter Hessler

  Over the next year, Emily’s letters and phone calls became less cheerful. She complained of headaches; the job had become more tedious; the boss was insufferable. Her sister had moved away after marrying a man from Fujian Province. Emily’s coworkers came and went; she was still the oldest woman in her office. By now, she had adopted a protective role, guarding new women employees against the boss’s advances. For Christmas, she sent me samples from her factory: bracelets made of pink and purple plastic beads. She told me that I could give them to my sisters in America.

  I sent her a story that I had written about her and her classmates, and she responded, “I’m not confident that I’m as admirable as I seem to you. It’s true that I like to be alone. But partly it’s because I don’t know how to join the people; I can’t share their joys and sorrows and cares. Although I really wish to.” Another time she wrote about her job, “My head aches sometimes. And mistakes often happen. . . . Do you know of any kind of jobs that are interesting and benefit the whole society?”

  I encouraged her to find something that required English skills, but I knew that my advice wouldn’t help much. There was something elusive about her unhappiness—I had glimpsed a similar quality in some of my brightest students, most of whom were girls. The best freshman student in the English department had been a quiet girl who kept apart from her peers. After class, she often came to see the foreign teachers for extra practice with her English, which was excellent. During summer vacation, she returned to her hometown and killed herself by jumping off a bridge. I never learned anything else about her death; nobody in the class had been close to her. In China, more women killed themselves than men, and the suicide rate for females was nearly five times the world average—the highest of any country in the world. Many of them were women from rural areas who were in the process of becoming urban, middle-class citizens. There was something traumatic about this transition, even when it seemed to involve a better material life in places like Shenzhen.

  One of Shenzhen’s economic innovations was the establishment of “talent markets,” or employment centers, which replaced the Communist-style system in which jobs were assigned by the government. Although these markets encouraged independence, they also subscribed to traditional notions of how a woman should look. Emily complained that prospective employers often thought that she was too short. She stood 1.53 meters tall—just over five feet—and the talent markets generally advertised jobs that required women to be at least 1.6 meters tall, especially if they wanted to be employed as receptionists, secretaries, or waitresses at expensive restaurants. Emily also said that her small eyes and big lips made it harder to find jobs that required female applicants to be blessed with wuguan duanzheng, meaning that “the five senses”—the ears, the eyes, the lips, the nose, and the tongue—were regular. In the first letter she wrote to me after starting work at the jewelry factory, she introduced her coworkers by carefully describing their appearance:

  Lijia is the most beautiful, able and shortest girl, who is liked by everyone. Huahui is a classical beauty, most private telephone calls from boys are for her. But I don’t like her very much, for her word sometimes hurtful. Lily is the other secretary, who came two days earlier than me. She leaves us an impression of stupid and irresponsible. So she is not very popular in the office. Xinghao is the fattest girl concerning much about losing weight.

  Although conventional notions of beauty could make things uncomfortable for women in the Shenzhen job market, they also enjoyed a degree of freedom in the city that wasn’t possible for women in other parts of the mainland. In Shenzhen, it wasn’t uncommon for young people to live together before marriage. Divorce was more acceptable, and many women were in no hurry to get married. During my wanderings around the city, I picked up two copies of a women’s magazine entitled Window to the Special Economic Zone. Its articles carried such headlines as “One Night’s Love,” “I Am Not a Lady,” “A Trap Set by an Old Man,” and “Why Have an Abortion?”

  Whenever Emily talked about difficult personal issues, she mentioned a radio call-in show, At Night You’re Not Lonely, and its host, Hu Xiaomei, who was an idol to the young women of Shenzhen. In 1992, when she was twenty, Hu Xiaomei had left her home in a remote coal-mining region of the Chinese interior and moved to Shenzhen, where she found a seventy-dollar-a-month job in a mineral-water plant. One night, she telephoned a call-in show. Unlike most callers, she didn’t want advice—she just wanted to tell listeners about her long-held dream of becoming a radio-show host. Hu Xiaomei was a good talker, and after she was finished she gave the listeners her work address and phone number.

  “The next week, I got stacks of letters and more than a hundred phone calls,” Hu Xiaomei told me when I met her during one of my trips to Shenzhen. “But the mineral-water plant fired me for using their phone for personal reasons, so I had no job. I took all the letters, bundled them together, and brought them to the radio station.”

  Hu Xiaomei paused and took a long drag on her Capri menthol superslim. We were sitting in a private room in a downtown Shenzhen restaurant. A pretty, petite woman with small features and long black hair, she was the type of Chinese smoker who could eat and smoke simultaneously. She exhaled a thin menthol stream and continued: “They said I was too young—I was only twenty years old and I had no experience. But one official decided to give me a chance. I told him that I was only twenty and that I didn’t understand many things, but that many listeners were the same as me, so maybe I’d understand them.”

  A decade later, a million people tuned in to Hu Xiaomei’s show every weeknight, and many of them were young factory women who worked outside the fence. Even though the Shenzhen radio station was government-owned, like all media in China, Hu Xiaomei often gave blunt advice that rankled tradition-minded officials—for example, recommending that young people not be afraid of living together before marriage. When I met her, she had written one book and was working on another. She often appeared on television, and despite her lack of formal education, she had an air of sophistication. When I asked her which writers she admired, she mentioned the stories of Raymond Carver. (“You can tell so much from a very small detail.”) Like many women I met in Shenzhen, she was worldly, self-made, and confident. She had once broken off a long-term romantic relationship partly because, she said, “he didn’t like it that people knew him as Hu Xiaomei’s boyfriend.”

  All the women at Emily’s factory listened to Hu Xiaomei’s show religiously, and the next day they discussed the callers whom they had heard the night before: the wives who were having affairs, the mistresses who wanted a way out, the women who couldn’t decide whether or not to move in with their boyfriends. Emily was most impressed by the individuality of Hu Xiaomei’s responses. “She doesn’t make blanket judgments,” Emily told me. “She looks at each caller’s specific situation and then decides.”

  But even with the help of Hu Xiaomei, Emily didn’t find it easy to adapt to Shenzhen’s freedom. She said that she thought it was acceptable for young people to live together before marriage but not to tell anybody about it. Hu Xiaomei had once told a caller the same thing, and Emily agreed that this decision should remain completely unspoken. “It could influence the way people see you, especially if you break up later,” she said. “It’s better if you just don’t say anything about it.” One day, when she remarked that sex was more open in Shenzhen than in other parts of China, I asked her whether this was good or bad. She thought for a moment and then said, “It’s better than it was in the past. But it shouldn’t cross a certain line.”

  “What line?”

  “It has to do with traditional morality.”

  I asked her what she meant, and she rested her chin on her hand, thinking hard. “Traditional morality,” she said again. But she couldn’t define what it meant.

  One day, I gave Emily a copy of a popular Shenzhen novel, You Can’t Control My Life. The book, which was published in 1998, follows the fortunes of its migrant heroine in Shenzhen from h
er first job as a secretary to a life of luxury as the mistress of a wealthy Hong Kong businessman. The author, a twenty-nine-year-old woman named Miao Yong, grew up in remote Gansu Province, in the far west, and migrated to Shenzhen after graduating from a teachers college. She found a job as a secretary, wrote fiction on the side, and became rich when You Can’t Control My Life, her first novel, became a best-seller. The government banned the book because of its portrayal of drugs, gambling, and casual sex. Like many book bannings in China, this actually boosted sales—although all of the copies were bootlegs. Vendors sold black-market versions all around downtown Shenzhen. In front of the Stock Exchange, I saw one man selling You Can’t Control My Life alongside Chinese translations of Mein Kampf.

  “When I say ‘you,’ I mean society,” Miao Yong told me when I asked about her book’s title. “I’m saying that my life is controlled by me; it’s not something for other people to take charge of.” She explained that materialism was a key force in the novel. “Everything has to do with money; it’s the first thing for everybody. In Shenzhen, it’s always a question of exchange—you can exchange love for money, sex for money, emotion for money.”

  I met Miao Yong at a trendy Western-style café near her apartment in a Shenzhen luxury high-rise. She chain-smoked Capri menthol superslims throughout our meal, and she explained that her writing had been influenced by the novels of Henry Miller. (“His books were banned, too.”) Despite the ban and the bootlegs, writing had made Miao Yong rich, because she had turned her novel into a popular television series. In order to get past the censors, she had purged the book of its most sensitive material, and she had also given it a happier title, for good measure. In the future she planned to be less explicit about the fact that Shenzhen was her setting. She believed that the cadres had banned her book because it gave the experimental city a bad name.

  The first detail on the author’s bio of Miao Yong’s book was her blood type. Like many hip young Chinese, she believed that blood type helps determine character. She was twenty-nine years old, and she had recently purchased her first automobile. The politically correct title of her television series was There’s No Winter Here. Miao Yong was type O. She told me that individualism was what interested her the most about Shenzhen. “In the past, China was very collective,” she said. “It was all about group thought. But now, in places like Shenzhen, you can decide exactly what kind of person you want to be.”

  Self-invention was a core principle of Shenzhen, and some figures had become legendary because of their transformation: the girl from a coal-mining town who became a radio star, the secretary from Gansu who struck it rich from writing. Private lessons in subjects like English were popular, because people hoped to rise in the factory world, and there were also plenty of shortcuts. In front of the local Walmart, vendors sold bogus bachelor’s degrees and transcripts for less than $100. Some migrants found other illegal ways to make money fast. I interviewed one Sichuanese prostitute who was hoping to limit the job to an eight-month run; she was making $740 a month, and she figured that soon she’d have enough saved up to return home and start a small business before anybody knew what she’d been up to. She had been a virgin when she first arrived in Shenzhen. She was twenty years old and obsessed with the notion of getting her old life back. I talked with another young woman who was working as a “three-accompany girl,” a nightclub job in which women accompanied men as they eat, drink, and sing karaoke. It was a notoriously vague profession, and many three-accompany girls were willing to perform additional services. The woman I met claimed that she hadn’t accepted money for sex, but she spoke nostalgically about her old job at a shoe factory, where she had earned $100 a month and slept in a dorm room with seven other workers. “My heart was more open in those days,” she said. Now she earned $35 a night and slept all day; she had lost contact with all of her old friends. On her evenings off she liked to get drunk and go dancing in night clubs, entirely by herself.

  After reading Miao Yong’s novel, Emily said that she felt no connection with the world it depicted. The heroine had no heart—all she cared about was money—and she went from one man’s bed to another. “It’s too chaotic,” Emily said. “You need to control this part of your life.”

  I asked her where she thought these new notions of morality had come from. She shrugged. “Most people say that they came from the West, after Reform and Opening. I think that there’s probably some truth to this.”

  “What do you think the book’s philosophy is?”

  “It’s saying that Shenzhen is a new city without any soul,” she replied. “Everybody in the book is in turmoil—they can’t find calmness.”

  After dating for a year, Emily and Zhu Yunfeng started living together. They rented a three-room apartment in a small factory town about thirty miles beyond the Shenzhen fence, near the household appliance plant where Zhu Yunfeng worked. The apartment building was closer to being finished than most of the neighboring structures. The concrete stairways were cracked, but everything worked, and the kitchen was well equipped. It was the first decent home that Emily had had since coming to Shenzhen.

  Another young Sichuanese couple also lived in the apartment. Each of the couples had their own bedroom, but they shared the living room, which was furnished with a color television, a VCR, a low table, and a bed that doubled as a couch. All four of them got along well. One of the bedrooms had a laminated poster of a topless foreign couple making out. Such posters were popular in China; they were considered romantic, and they were inoffensive because they portrayed a non-Chinese couple.

  Back home in Fuling, Emily never would have moved in with a man before marriage, and she didn’t tell her parents about the apartment. But one day, during a phone conversation, her mother asked if she and Zhu Yunfeng were living together. “I didn’t say anything,” Emily told me. “She knew from my silence that it was true.” After that, neither of them said anything more about it.

  Emily still spent weekday nights in the jewelry-factory dormitory, but on weekends she stayed at the new apartment. Zhu Yunfeng had been promoted to a supervisory position in his factory, and he was earning $360 a month, an excellent wage. Emily’s salary had risen to $240 a month, but she was sick of the job. She didn’t like the way the boss occasionally asked her to work overtime, and she didn’t like being restricted to the dormitory at night.

  One weekday evening, Emily broke curfew and spent the night with Zhu Yunfeng. The next morning, the boss called her into his office.

  “He asked me what time I came back last night,” she said. “That’s the way he was—it was never direct. He didn’t ask me whether or not I had come back—he just asked what time. I said, ‘I came back this morning.’ I didn’t make any excuse or explanation. He didn’t know what to say. I don’t think he knew whether to get angry or laugh. He looked at me, and finally he just walked away.”

  A few weeks later, another young woman at the factory started breaking curfew.

  Not long after that, the boss took a pretty worker off the production floor and made her his personal secretary. The worker was from Hunan Province, and she was eighteen years old. Emily spent a lot of time telling the girl stories about the boss, and one day he confronted Emily. He asked her what people said about him behind his back, and then he finally got to the point.

  “Do you tell the other workers that I’m lecherous?” he said.

  Emily said, “Yes.”

  He tried to laugh it off, but it was clear that he no longer liked having her around. Emily started spending her free time searching for work. A few weeks later, she found a position as a nursery-school teacher. Like the jewelry factory, the school was outside the fence, but there were no Taiwanese bosses, no factory dormitories, and no evening shifts. The salary was roughly the same as what Emily had been making at the plant. She was going to teach English.

  When she told her boss that she was quitting, he tried to give her a dressing-down.

  “You’ve changed,” he said. “You use
d to be obedient. Everything changed after you got a boyfriend.”

  “I didn’t change,” Emily said. “I just got to know you better.”

  On my last night in Shenzhen, Emily and I went outside to listen to the radio. She thought it was best if we left the apartment, because Zhu Yunfeng had come home late and he was in a bad mood. It was a warm, clear night and the stars were bright above the dormitory lights of the factories.

  Earlier that day, a young man had been injured while working under Zhu Yunfeng’s supervision at the factory. Zhu Yunfeng didn’t say much about it to Emily, other than that he wanted to be alone. The factory had been working overtime in hopes of meeting orders for a new product line, and the combination of time pressure and unfamiliar production equipment was always bad for accidents. The new product was a metal thermos bottle.

  Emily and I climbed a nearby hill where we could look out over the town. It was a typical factory settlement beyond the Shenzhen fence: a cluster of shops and apartment buildings wedged into a dusty cut in the hills, and then, fanning out along the two main roads, long strips of factories and their dormitories. There were shoe plants, clothes factories, and a computer-accessory factory whose top story had been gutted in a recent fire. The smoke had left the plant’s white tile walls streaked with black. Emily said that nobody had been hurt in the fire, but down the road there was another factory where several workers had died a few years ago in a massive blaze. That factory had been producing Christmas decorations and lawn furniture.

  Emily was about to start her teaching job, and she was a little apprehensive. She worried about her English, which had slipped during the years at the factory, and she wondered whether she would be able to discipline the children. But she liked the school campus, and she smiled whenever she talked about the new job. She kept her hair short now, her bangs pinned back with plastic barrettes. Around her neck she wore a simple necklace that Zhu Yunfeng had given her—a jade dragon, her birth sign.