Oracle Bones

by Peter Hessler

  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,

  How is it going with you at present?

  I hope that you are not feeling lonely while in the city of Peking. Some chinese xiaojie will be sure to have hots for you. But better be careful that some Chinese girls always blow hot and cold.

  It has been raining all these days here, my feeling is just like the raining days…. Actually, I am a little bit bored and annoyed by the things around me in the school. For long I have no mood for teaching. As soon as I stand on the platform of the classroom, I hope that the bell rings. All the students are yahoos. Some of them are brutal and uneducated. Many of the students want to drop out of the school while I failed to block the way out for some students…. many yahoos notice that they have been had, surely more students will escape from the school….

  What interests me most is that I can learn English via VOA and a dictionary of American Colloquialism. I hope that in a short time I could put them into use correctly and freely. Afraid that my strong will be damaged, I wish myself a way out….

  Yuhuan is a very small place. In other word, it is somewhat isolated from wonderful outside world. I am afraid I will not be able to use English well as long as I stay here. You see, I have zealtry about the English language which is considered to be my better half all my life….

  By the way, is your pager number 6491-1166 — 56599 ? Need I dial the zone code (010)? How do you think of the military from NATO against Yugoslavian Union?

  Take care!

  Yours,

  William Foster [printed]

  William Jefferson Foster [signed]

  AT THE BEGINNING of the May Day holiday, Willy purchased a new notebook and carefully inscribed a title on the first page:

  Listening Journal

  William Jefferson Foster

  Spouse: Nancy Drew

  May 1st, Nineteen Ninety-9

  Nancy’s last name had been suggested by Adam Meier, during their final year at Fuling. In fact, the couple hadn’t married, and they hadn’t yet made formal plans to do so. In the past, their situation would have been scandalous: a young unmarried couple sharing an apartment. Occasionally, they ran into trouble; once, they were refused a room in a Wenzhou guesthouse because they couldn’t produce a marriage certificate. But such problems were rare, and nobody at the Hundred Talents High School caused a fuss. One of the first things that migrants learned was that locals didn’t want to think about them at all.

  That spring, Willy continued to study English every night, maintaining his Voice of America journal:

  Summit of NATO

  (1) Regard Milosovic as Hitler who wanted to make a people die away

  (2) Japanese

  Tibet issue Xinjiang issue

  objection to interference in internal affairs

  Tibet is just like Kosovo

  Research shows that homosexuality is not caused by gene

  Bill Clinton Colorado Denver

  After the NATO bombing, Willy’s journal entries became even more chaotic:

  May 8th, 1999

  We have no other intention

  military site

  express it’s deep sorry

  war crime

  The missile attack on Chinese Ambassy in Yugoslavia has deeply intensified the Sino-American relation

  May 9th, 1999

  It is said Belgrade transferred weapons into Chinese ambassy

  Chinese give intelligence to Belgrade—collaboration.

  humantiaratity community

  mission access—cooperate

  CIA

  “Down with USA” “Down with NATO”

  WILLY CALLED ME frequently that week. He was concerned about my safety in Beijing, and after the situation had calmed down
, we continued to talk regularly. At one point, he mentioned the possibility of looking for work in the capital, and I told him I’d do my best to help if he came.

  But he decided to try again in Wenzhou. He attended job fairs in the city, but nobody wanted to hire a young Sichuanese teacher with a degree from an obscure college on the Yangtze. One day, he happened to see an ad in the newspaper for a teaching position at a private school in Yueqing, a satellite city outside of Wenzhou. He visited the school, where a woman administrator asked him to teach a mock lesson. He was always good in such situations: he spoke English easily, and he felt comfortable in front of a classroom. After his performance, the woman offered him a job starting in September.

  The administrator made a good impression on Willy, but the experiences of the past year had taught him to be wary of promises. Nevertheless, the school existed: it was fixed, with a campus that stayed in the same place every year. He figured that was a good sign. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that he couldn’t do worse than the Hundred Talents High School.

  Near the end of summer, William Jefferson Foster and Nancy Drew packed in secret. Mr. Wang expected them to teach the new semester, and Willy liked the idea of the headmaster having to find two substitute instructors at the last minute. Between them, Willy and Nancy possessed two bags, a television, a pile of old blankets, and a total savings of about two hundred dollars. They left Yuhuan without saying goodbye.

  3

  The Broken Bridge

  June 4, 1999

  THAT SUMMER MARKED THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEMONSTRATIONS in Tiananmen Square. During the latter part of May, the foreign newspapers ran commemorative articles. In the bureau, I clipped the stories and filed them under T:

  TEA

  THINK TANKS

  TIANANMEN SQUARE

  TRADE FAIRS

  TRANSPORTATION

  One of the problems with the anniversary was that it was hard to name an event that Chinese people couldn’t talk about openly. While clipping, I kept an informal list of terms used by the foreign press:

  the Tiananmen Square crackdown

  the Tiananmen Square massacre

  the Tiananmen Square clampdown

  the bloody suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square

  the June 4 crackdown

  the bloody crackdown in and around Tiananmen Square

  the June 4, 1989, military crackdown on the demonstrations

  the crackdown on student protestors near Tiananmen Square

  There weren’t any stories in the Beijing papers; since 1989, the state-controlled media had rarely acknowledged the event. The average Chinese simply called it Liu Si: June Fourth. In the provinces, impressions of the incident were particularly hazy; when I had lived in Fuling, some of my good friends asked me earnestly if students had actually died in the crackdown. In Beijing, where many citizens had been in the streets that year, there weren’t any illusions about whether it had occurred. People vividly remembered specific scenes, but the big picture remained a mystery. Nobody knew exactly how the crackdown had developed or what the death toll had been. Most foreign publications estimated that at least hundreds had died.

  There was just enough information to know that the most commonly used names for the incident were slightly flawed. The vast majority of casualties had been sustained outside of Tiananmen Square, in various streets around the city, particularly to the west. And the crackdown had actually started on the evening of June 3, not the fourth. In 1989, after violence had descended on the city, a brave Chinese journalist had broadcast a message over the state media’s official English radio service: “This is Radio Beijing International. Please remember June 3, 1989. The most tragic event happened in the Chinese capital, Beijing. Thousands of people, most of them innocent civilians, were killed by fully armed soldiers…”

  A decade later, most memorials had shifted the date slightly, and the location had become focused onto the Square. Even if the details had blurred, the basic memory was probably as much as the journalist had hoped for. Reportedly he had been punished by several years of reeducation outside the capital.

  ON THE DAY of the fourth, the Wall Street Journal correspondents and I took turns going out to Tiananmen, to see if there were any commemorations. We missed the two most prominent demonstrations, each of which involved exactly one person and lasted only a few seconds. A middle-aged man opened a white umbrella decorated with handwritten slogans:

  REMEMBER THE STUDENT MOVEMENT

  DISTRIBUTE STATE ASSETS TO THE PEOPLE

  Plainclothes officers quickly hustled the man away, but an Associated Press photographer captured the moment. A while later, a male university student threw leaflets into the air and was immediately detained. The leaflets contained antigovernment slogans, as well as the phrase DOWN WITH AMERICAN IMPERIALISM.

  I took the late-afternoon shift. The Square itself had been cordoned off—conveniently, it was being refurbished for the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. But there was still an open area in front of Tiananmen, the “Gate of Heavenly Peace.” It was a sunny day, and tourists from the provinces chattered and took photographs with the Chairman Mao portrait in the background.

  After a while, I began to notice that some people in the crowd didn’t look like tourists. They were men, usually in their thirties and forties, and many of them had crew cuts. They were not well dressed: worn trousers, cheap windbreakers. They did not look educated. They did not look like they were enjoying themselves—they weren’t smiling, or taking pictures, or buying souvenirs. They loitered and lingered; they lurked and looked. They dawdled. Sometimes, a man would stand directly behind a group of talking tourists, as if trying to overhear the conversation. Periodically, one of the crew-cut men sauntered over to another crew-cut man, said something, and then sauntered away. Several held rolled up newspapers. I saw one man raise his newspaper, hold it next to his face, and speak to it. Curious, I walked past and took a furtive look. Inside the rolled paper, I caught a glimpse of black plastic—walkie-talkie.

  I watched the plainclothes men work for most of an hour, and that was the only visible commemoration of the anniversary. Afterward, I biked over to the Muslim dumpling joint in Yabaolu for an early dinner. While I was eating, a pedicab driver pulled over and asked if he could share my street-side table, which would allow him to keep an eye on his bike. He ordered a bottle of baijiu and a bowl of peanuts. He poured vinegar onto the peanuts and ate them while he drank. He drank the baijiu quickly and he did not make that face. His bare legs looked tough and knotted, as if they had been carved from some slab of ancient hardwood.

  It was still early for dinner and we were the only customers. The boss, a Beijing native, dozed nearby, his arms crossed on a dirty tabletop. The pedicab driver told me that he could earn more than ten dollars a day during the summer. He was ethnic Manchurian and proud of it. He told me how the Manchurians had founded the Qing dynasty and ruled China for nearly three hundred years. They were a warlike people and the Han Chinese couldn’t compare; even the Qing emperors had known how to fight. It was a hell of a thing, being Manchurian.

  After finishing the peanuts, the pedicab driver woke up the boss and ordered a huge bowl of dumplings. He dipped the dumplings into the vinegar, just like the peanuts. I hadn’t seen anybody eat that much in a long time. Out of curiosity, I asked the man what the date was. He didn’t know, so he turned to the restaurant owner.

  “June Fourth,” the boss said immediately. He crossed two fingers, forming the Chinese character for ten: . His face was completely expressionless. He said, “Tenth anniversary.”

  IN YABAOLU, I learned to get information from Polat. He seemed to know everybody in the neighborhood, and his connections were excellent; in early July, when Heineken sponsored a foreign music festival in the local park, Polat acquired a stack of workers’ passes. During a jazz set, a half dozen of us stood around the stage, the least convincing group of
maintenance men that had ever been assembled in the capital: one American clipper, two Uighur middlemen, a Chinese clothes dealer, and two other Chinese who were employed as security guards at the Workers Stadium. By introducing the security guards to jazz, Polat was guaranteed free entrance to any upcoming soccer matches.

  Often, the two of us spent hours on the platform of the Uighur restaurant, drinking beers from the manhole and watching people walk past. If a trader caught my eye, I’d ask Polat and usually he knew the person’s story: which distant country, which unlikely product. It was always a bad sign if he didn’t know somebody. The bearded Afghans were a mystery; there were rumors that they dealt in gems and opium, but Polat didn’t know for certain. And the North Koreans were another puzzle. Their embassy was just down the street from the Uighur restaurant, a huge complex whose front gate was decorated with propaganda photographs: happy Korean children singing, happy Korean troops being inspected by Kim Jong Il.

  Occasionally, North Korean diplomats walked past the Uighur restaurant. I never saw one alone; they always moved in pairs, dark-suited men who seemed stiff and foreign amid the steady stream of traders and wholesalers and prostitutes. Polat always pointed out the telltale Kim Il Sung badges that were pinned to their lapels, and he also picked out the North Korean embassy vehicles by the initial numbers on their diplomatic plates (133). The North Koreans drove black Chinese-made Audis and it was impossible to see anything through the tinted windows. The embassy was even more secretive—no sign of life behind the propaganda photographs. The big front gate was always closed.