Oracle Bones

by Peter Hessler

  Before leaving the city, we stopped by the Deng Xiaoping billboard. The animal park had left me numb, and the visit to the billboard felt like a cleansing ritual—absolution for our trip within the gates. It was a hazy afternoon, and I photographed Emily. In the Chinese way, she didn’t smile, striking a somber pose with the Great Leader’s image in the background.

  THE RIDE HOME felt long. Our bus cruised away from the downtown skyscrapers: the glistening blue-green glass of the Stock Exchange, the twin-spired Land King Tower. Heading north, we passed through a few miles of brand-new apartment blocks, and then the neighborhoods started to thin out. The road cut through empty green hills just before the border—the long, low line of the chain-link fence. A billboard stood near the checkpoint: MISSION HILLS GOLF CLUB, THE FIRST 72-HOLE GOLF CLUB IN CHINA.

  Beyond the gates rose a rough cluster of unfinished concrete buildings, with piles of dirt standing beside enormous foundation holes. We passed a sign for a low-security prison: THE SECOND LABOR CAMP. Our bus continued north, the factory towns coming one after another: dormitories surrounded by fences, smokestacks sprouting in dirty clumps. The urban landscape was marked by the type of premature aging that was characteristic of Chinese boomtowns. New sidewalks were already overrun by patches of weeds, and unfinished apartment blocks had been so cheaply constructed that their walls immediately became stained and cracked. Almost nothing was finished, and everything was of such low quality that it immediately looked old.

  Roadside billboards advertised factory products, and most were aimed at wholesalers who purchased parts in bulk: alternators, air compressors, heat pumps. These weren’t objects that you bought for daily use, and they would have posed a challenge for even a good advertising agency. But the billboard design, like everything else, had been rushed, and often the ads consisted of nothing more than a photograph of some obscure part—a widget, a wonket—superimposed atop a sunny green field. Beneath the pastoral sprocket, there was a company name, often in awkward English: Professional Manufacture Various Hydraulic Machinery. Friendly Metal Working Lubricants. Good Luck Paper Products.

  That night, we ate dinner at an outdoor restaurant near Emily’s factory. In Chinese cities, evening was often the most pleasant time of the day, and this was especially true beyond the gates, where dusk finally made the place seem human. The monotony of the factory towns was brutal in daylight, and the streets seemed abandoned during working hours. But in the evenings, when most work shifts ended, there was a sudden rush of young people outside the factory walls. They moved in excited groups, like schoolchildren after the final bell. Sitting at the restaurant, I watched them walk past on the sidewalk, talking, laughing, flirting. Apart from their jobs, they had few obligations in this place—no families, no traditions. In that sense, they were free.

  During dinner, Emily regaled me with stories about the factory owners. One of her boss’s colleagues was a Chinese-American who, after recently arriving from San Francisco on business, had gone to Emily’s office, faxed his wife a love letter, and then immediately gone out and hired a prostitute. Emily’s own boss was always leering at the young women in his factory, and most of his friends were the same. In a nearby plant, another Taiwanese owner had become so distracted by his two Sichuanese mistresses that his company had gone bankrupt.

  Emily laughed as she told the stories, and I imagined how quickly they circulated among young women who lived ten to a dorm room. Before coming to Shenzhen, Emily had never imagined that people acted this way. She told me that one of her biggest surprises had been receiving an update about her Fuling neighbor, the young woman who had always been portrayed as a great Shenzhen success. Emily’s sister had learned that in fact the woman was a “second wife” to a factory owner from Hong Kong.

  Emily had little respect for the businessmen who came to Shenzhen, especially the Taiwanese. Her boyfriend, Zhu Yunfeng, had recently left the jewelry factory for a new job, where he worked under a Taiwanese who treated employees fairly. But in Emily’s opinion, that kind of boss was the exception, and most of the others were exploitative and sex-crazed. “All of them have failed somewhere else,” she scoffed, explaining that her boss’s old company in Taiwan had gone bankrupt years ago.

  When I asked about the political climate, she said that Shenzhen had fewer government restrictions than her hometown. But she pointed out that labor practices could be just as limiting. “Here it’s not the government but the bosses who control everything,” she said. “Maybe it amounts to the same thing.”

  She became particularly animated when talking about a Taiwanese-owned purse factory in a nearby city. Like most plants beyond the gates, the purse factory had a six-day workweek, but the owner kept his doors locked all week. Except on Sundays, the workers couldn’t leave the complex.

  “That can’t be legal,” I said.

  “Many of the factories do that,” she said. “All of them have good connections with the government.”

  One of Emily’s friends had worked at the purse factory, where the Taiwanese boss often ordered everyone to stay on the production line until midnight, yelling when they got tired. One worker complained and got fired; when he demanded his last paycheck, the boss had him beaten up. The story made Emily so angry that she decided she had to do something about it. I asked if she had gone to the police, or another government bureau, or if she had told a journalist.

  “No,” she said. “I wrote a letter to the boss that said, ‘This day next year will be your memorial day.’ And I drew a picture of a guge.”

  I didn’t understand the word, so she traced the characters on her palm, the way the Chinese often did when clarifying a phrase:. But I didn’t get that either. Finally she pushed aside her plate and sketched an outline on the table:

  “A skeleton?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “A skeleton. But I didn’t write my name. I wrote, ‘An unhappy worker.’”

  She giggled and put her hand over her mouth. The waitress cleared the table. I didn’t know how to respond—back in Fuling, my writing class hadn’t covered death threats. Finally, I said, “Did the letter work?”

  “I think it helped,” she said. “Workers at the factory said that the boss was very worried about it. Afterward, he was a little better.”

  “Why didn’t you complain to the police?”

  “It doesn’t do any good,” she said. “All of them have connections. In Shenzhen, you have to take care of everything yourself.”

  After finishing the meal, Emily said, “Do you want to see something interesting?”

  We walked to a small street near the middle of town. Below the road, a creek flowed sluggishly in the shadows. The street was unlighted, but dozens of men stood along the curb. The orange glow of their cigarettes hung like fireflies in the darkness. I asked Emily what was going on.

  “They’re looking for prostitutes,” she whispered. A moment later, a woman passed through—walking slowly, glancing around, until a man came up and spoke to her. They talked for a few seconds, and then the man returned to the shadows. The woman kept walking. Emily said, “Do you want to see what happens if I leave you here alone?”

  “No,” I said. “We can leave now.”

  I SPENT THE night with Zhu Yunfeng in his one-room apartment. His new job allowed him to live in private housing, which was another reason he had left the jewelry factory. He earned more than Emily, but he was careful with money and the apartment was simple. Neighborhood buildings were covered with bold-faced flyers advertising private venereal disease clinics; we followed a trail of notices up the stairwell to Zhu Yunfeng’s apartment, on the fourth floor. Unfinished walls, chipped plaster, incomplete plumbing. The water heater hadn’t been installed yet. Like so many things beyond the gates, the building seemed to have been abandoned before it was completed. There was too much to build; contractors moved on once the bare essentials were in place. It occurred to me that the only things in this region that were actually finished were the factory products, which were
promptly exported.

  Zhu Yunfeng’s apartment was furnished with two simple wooden beds covered with rattan mats. Nothing hung on the walls. Apart from a thermos and a few books, he didn’t have many possessions. His current job involved making molds for a factory that produced household appliances to be sold overseas.

  After Emily left for the evening, he talked about his new job. He told me that he wished he had studied English, like his girlfriend. I could tell that he admired Emily, and I knew that something about him made her feel secure. Once, she had bluntly told me that he wasn’t handsome, and this was true—acne had badly scarred his face. But his plainness was attractive to her. She had a theory that handsome men weren’t reliable.

  MY SECOND VISA run was scheduled for October, which was an important month that year: October 1 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. Traditionally, major anniversaries had been celebrated by a military parade in the capital, with the nation’s leader overseeing the ceremonies—Mao in the fifteenth year, Deng in the thirty-fifth. The fortieth had passed without a procession; Beijing residents had already seen enough of the military in 1989. But a peaceful decade had gone by, and now it was President Jiang Zemin’s turn to review the troops.

  The capital prepared all summer. Tiananmen Square was fenced off, for refurbishing, and some of the buildings along Chang’an Avenue improved their façades. On the evening of August 16, at 10:30 P.M., as my boss, Ian, and I were taking a cab back to the bureau after a late dinner, Chang’an Avenue was suddenly filled with the sweet strains of “Ave Maria.” Traffic slowed to a crawl: drivers rolled down their windows; bicyclists pulled over. Everybody looked confused. By the time they played the second track—“The Christmas Song: Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”—we realized that they were testing the new speaker system that had been installed for the parade.

  The following afternoon, a stream of tanks, troop carriers, and self-propelled missile launchers suddenly appeared, heading west on Chang’an toward Tiananmen Square. There had been virtually no warning. That day, small notices in the Beijing morning newspapers had informed readers that parts of the downtown would be closed to traffic between the hours of 4:30 P.M. and 2:00 A.M., but they didn’t mention the military hardware. I was in the bureau, doing some clipping, and I ran outside once I heard the roar from the street. Soldiers lined the sidewalks, keeping the gawkers back. Parents hoisted children onto their shoulders so they could see better.

  The next evening, I met Polat for dinner in Yabaolu. He grinned and said, “It’s been a while since there were tanks in Beijing.” When I asked how he intended to celebrate the anniversary, he said that he was going to stay indoors as much as possible that week. He had heard rumors that the police would be hassling Uighurs, for fear that some separatist would set off a bomb and disrupt the festivities.

  In Beijing, the government commanded the temporary closing of factories, to cut down on pollution, and they sent up cloud-seeding planes right before the anniversary. It rained hard on the last day of September. On October 1, the day dawned a brilliant blue, and the parade proceeded without a hitch. Jiang Zemin wore a Sun Yat-sen suit, buttoned to the top, and while reviewing the troops he repeatedly shouted, “Comrades, you are hardworking!” Nothing was new—the emperor’s old clothes, the same wooden phrase that had been used by leaders in the past. They played the national anthem instead of “Ave Maria.” After an hour of watching the parade on television, I got bored and went to eat in Yabaolu. Polat had kept his word; he was nowhere to be seen. Except for me, the Uighur restaurant was empty.

  The government had declared that all citizens would celebrate with a week’s vacation. In Zhejiang province, William Jefferson Foster and Nancy Drew hadn’t saved enough money to travel, so they spent a quiet week together in Yueqing. On the day of the anniversary, they visited the homes of four of Willy’s students. It was a good way for a new migrant teacher to solidify his local relationships. One of the parents ran a shoe factory, and he gave Willy a new pair of leather loafers. Later, Willy wrote, half-jokingly, “Interesting enough, it was the first time for me to be corrupt getting something from the students’ families.”

  Farther south, outside of Shenzhen, Emily’s factory gave the workers only one day off. Within the gates, most companies granted the full week vacation, but production schedules were always more demanding outside the fence. And the workers at Emily’s plant believed that their owner was particularly stingy about National Day vacations because he was a Taiwanese who hated the Communist Party.

  Later that week, the seasons in my own private calendar shifted. I caught the train down to Shenzhen, crossed the Hong Kong border, and bought a new visa.

  FOR OUR SECOND journey within the gates, Emily chose the Land King Tower. We followed the same routine: the meeting at McDonald’s, the bus to the fence, the border check. After the low green hills and the rows of apartment blocks, the Shenzhen downtown appeared like a mirage: flashing towers of glass and steel, capped by the tallest of them all, the Land King.

  We purchased tickets to the top. Glass elevators whisked us up; from the sixty-ninth floor, we looked out over the expanse of the Special Economic Zone. In other big Chinese cities, the congestion seemed more impressive the higher you went, until at last you gazed over a jumbled sea of concrete: so many buildings, so many years of haphazard development. But from the air Shenzhen looked different. Roads were broad and straight; generous patches of green were sprinkled throughout downtown. Westward, the flooded fish ponds of rural neighborhoods shimmered skyward like enormous mirrors. The city had been planned; it wasn’t just a place where years and decades and centuries had piled atop each other.

  Inside the skyscraper, an exhibit celebrated the history of Shenzhen and Hong Kong. The brief Shenzhen section was headed by the phrase “The Overnight City.”

  The Hong Kong exhibit included life-size figures of Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher, the leaders who had negotiated the terms of the colony’s return. The display ended with the British handover of 1997. There was a photograph of the last British governor, Christopher Patten, who had been despised by the Communist government for instituting tentative democratic reforms in the final years of British rule. The Land King’s displays never mentioned these reforms, or even Patten’s name. His photograph was accompanied by the simplest of captions: “End of Colonialism.”

  PART TWO

  5

  Starch

  March 2000

  DURING MY FIRST YEAR AS A FREELANCER, AFTER STRUGGLING THROUGH some initial dry months, I published stories in the Hong Kong Standard, the South China Morning Post, the Asian Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Newark Star-Ledger, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Junior Scholastic Magazine, and a Web site called ChinaNow. When the wizards from the World Economic Forum flew in from Geneva for their annual China conference, I wrote summaries of panel discussions, to be used in brochures. Every organization had its own rules and regulations, stipends and payments. The World Economic Forum required that I wear a suit and tie, but they paid three hundred dollars a day. Newspapers usually paid between three and four hundred for a story, and more if I could provide a publishable photograph. Nobody covered expenses. I signed any contract that was sent to me.

  Of all these publications, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times were the most prestigious, but neither newspaper paid as well as Junior Scholastic Magazine, which gave me nine hundred dollars for a single feature. Junior Scholastic asked me to write about three school-age children in Beijing, and the story had to include some basic background in Chinese history. It was intended for American junior high students; the editor requested that I limit my sentences to eighteen words or less. After finishing, I reread my draft and suddenly recognized Special English:

  China’s history is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. For much of its past, China was far more advanced than Western countries. The Chinese were the first to pr
oduce paper, printed books, gunpowder, porcelain, cast iron, silk, and the magnetic compass.

  But the last two centuries have often been tragic, especially with regard to China’s relations with the outside world. The result is that today’s China is still a developing country with many problems.

  The key to freelancing is separating yourself from the stories that bear your name, until you see them from a distance, like a person who suddenly faints and feels as if he is watching his body prone on the floor. Any writing is like that, to some degree, but it’s especially true for a foreign freelancer living in a place like China. It felt strange to write for publications that were so far away; editors seemed to be nothing more than voices on the phone. Also, it was technically illegal—the People’s Republic forbade any journalist from working without official accreditation. Nevertheless, there was a small cadre of young writers in Beijing and Shanghai, buying six-month business visas and hoping to get picked up by a bureau as a full-time correspondent. The odds of trouble weren’t high, but occasionally something happened. Not long before I arrived in Beijing, ABC had broadcast a sensitive story about China, and the police responded by hassling the bureau’s unaccredited foreign assistants until they finally quit.

  Nevertheless, I published as widely as possible. It was a calculated risk: the stories might be noticed by the authorities, but they also might be noticed by editors. I sent off query letters every week, and I learned to take an experience like the trip along the North Korean border and break it down into multiple stories. (That journey produced five separate publications.) Meanwhile, I kept my eye out for any kind of regular work. Matt Forney at the Wall Street Journal gave me one of his old gigs, a weekly feature for the Hong Kong Standard. Every Tuesday, I submitted a story of six hundred words, for which I received one hundred and fifty dollars, as well as a clipped copy of the published article. That was the extent of my interaction with the newspaper: during the two years that I wrote the stories, I never met an editor or received a single note from a reader. I never visited the Standard offices during my visa runs to Hong Kong. There was absolutely no evidence that anybody ever read my stories.