Oracle Bones

by Peter Hessler

  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 responded 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 priva
te-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 regions 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.

  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 apologized 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 describ
ed 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.