“She said that she had an elementary-school education, and she had come to Shenzhen to work in a factory. Then she had a job as a maid. She felt that other people looked down on her because she came from the countryside, and she began to study on her own. Eventually, she took the self-study examination for a junior college diploma. But she didn’t finish the exam series because of some problem, and so she bought a fake diploma—you can buy them here on the street. That’s what she did, but it was true that she had studied hard. Her level was really that high.
“With the new diploma, she found a better job, and she worked hard, and her status got higher and higher. But she did things to make sure that others didn’t threaten her. If a lower worker started to rise, she’d find a way to keep her down. She described this very honestly. And she did it only if she felt threatened. Otherwise, she was nice to everybody else at the company, and they all liked her. They didn’t know what her heart was really like.
“She also talked about her family, and how she sent money home to her parents and often wrote them letters. She did all of these things, but in her heart she didn’t like them. She cared nothing for her parents.
“She had telephoned the program only because she wanted to talk. It wasn’t for advice, like the other callers. She just wanted to describe her experience. After she was finished, Hu Xiaomei asked, ‘Aren’t you afraid of other people knowing your true heart?’ The girl answered that they would never understand, because she was very good at hiding things. And she said that she had no regrets about acting like this.
“After she hung up, Hu Xiaomei said that this kind of person is wuke jiuyao, somebody who can’t be cured by any medicine. She said that the woman’s heart was too hard and cold, and nothing could be done about that.”
IN TRUTH, EMILY wasn’t as close to her own parents as she would have liked. Her father was an accomplished mathematician, one of the highest-ranking professors at Fuling Teachers College. He had made two trips to the United States, to deliver papers at conferences, an experience that was extremely rare in a place like Fuling. But even this success was but a shadow of what might have been. Once, when she was still an undergraduate, Emily had written an English paper that described her father’s background:
When my parents were of my age, the whole country was in a great confusion: politics went first, intellectuals were said to have the tendency to follow Capitalism, so they were assigned to basic units to accept reformation. My father was one of them. In the following eight years after he graduated from Sichuan university, he worked in a small coal mine.
The mine was located south of Fuling, in the remote mountains near the border of Guizhou province. Many intellectuals would have despaired, but Emily’s father had grown up in the countryside, and he tried to make the best of the situation. At the coal mine, he repeatedly applied to join the Communist Party, which always rejected him. Like Emily, he had a broad face, high cheekbones, and friendly eyes. His quiet calmness put people at ease, whether they were educated or not:
I’d say that it hadn’t been too difficult for him working in the coal mine. As people there respected him and ordered him an easy job as an accountant. Even now his story is still spreading as a miracle among the workers that he calculated the balance just by looking through an account book.
Emily was born in 1976, while her parents were still at the mine. That year, Mao Zedong died, and the Cultural Revolution ended. When Emily was small, her family was allowed to return to Fuling. The children—two girls and a boy who had been born two years after Emily—grew up in a home that was decorated with pictures and statues of the Chairman. In the mid-1980s, Emily’s father finally joined the Minmeng Party, one of the nation’s nine authorized political parties. In Fuling, the Minmeng Party tended to attract intellectuals, but the organization, like all legal parties, answered to the Communist Party. “In truth they don’t have any effect,” Emily once told me. “My father says that once the Communist Party says something, the Minmeng Party immediately agrees. But in the meetings they can talk about their own ideas. They can’t say these things openly, but at least they can talk about them with each other.”
When Emily was a child, her father never spoke to her about politics, and she believed everything that was printed in her textbooks. She learned the Communist Party version of history, politics, and current events. Even the blank exercise tablets that she used in school weren’t truly blank. On the back cover of every notebook, two phrases were printed:
Taiwan, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam
broadcast rumors and lies on their radio stations.
We urge everybody not to receive
the voice of the enemies.
Over time, the Chairman Mao portraits and statues disappeared from Emily’s home. Occasionally, her father made a remark that suggested he didn’t agree with the nation’s politics, but he didn’t speak at length. For Emily, college was the turning point. She was disgusted by the corruption of some of the English department cadres, and she believed that many policies were designed to prevent students from thinking or asking questions. She disliked the structure of dormitory life; during her first year at the college, she requested permission to live at home. She was the only student in her class who didn’t stay in the dorm. After graduation, she wrote in one letter:
I hate political cant because I used to believe in it. The fact that too many people in an influential position speak in one way and do in another has been revealed to me with time. I think my father was far more sad than I was when he came to realize this at last in his fifties.
THE PARENTS AND the daughters moved in opposite directions, across time. When Emily’s father and mother had been young, the shift had been to the countryside, as part of the Communist Party’s massive experiment in ideology. Twenty years later, Emily and her sister moved to the city—and not just any city, but Shenzhen, the “economic laboratory.” The experiments of the two generations were completely different: one was political, the other economic; one happened on a national level, whereas the other took root person by person, decision by decision.
As a result, the experiences of the parents didn’t provide a guide for the children. When Emily thought about her father, she realized that his professional life had been shaped primarily by decisions that had been made by others. “I think he has some regrets. Some of his classmates went overseas or did other things that are successful. He knows that he lost some opportunities.” To the parents, Emily and her sister often seemed willful. In college, when Emily began dating Anry, her mother didn’t approve. “She said that I was too young to have a boyfriend. I said, you got married even earlier than this! She said that wasn’t the same.”
But the generation gap seemed hardest on Emily’s brother. He was brilliant—he had inherited his father’s mathematical mind—but he was also painfully shy. The young man entered college to study computers but didn’t finish. He preferred reading about philosophy and religion; for a spell, he was intrigued by Falun Gong. He often remarked that he loathed the concept of money. By the age of twenty-one, he had never held a job, and he still lived with his parents. Much of his time was spent playing xiangqi, Chinese chess, and he was a genius at this game—the logical harmony of the checkered board. After giving up on Falun Gong, he studied the ancient philosophies of Confucius and Mencius. Once, he told Emily that if she read Mencius, she would become more beautiful, because the truth would shine through in her face. She didn’t know how to respond to that. The family was considering the possibility of psychological help. When asked about her brother, Emily once said, “He is a victim of modernization.”
During Emily’s first year in Shenzhen, her sister moved again, finding work in Zhejiang province. Soon she married, and then the parents began to worry about Emily. Emily found this funny: “When I was with Anry, they said that I was too young to have a boyfriend. Now they think I’m getting too old!” In August of 1999, Emily’s father visited Shenzhen, and for the first time he met her new boyf
riend, Zhu Yunfeng. Zhu Yunfeng had attended only one year of trade school, and now he was a floor-level supervisor at a plant that made hot plates, pressure cookers, rice cookers, and other kitchen appliances.
Emily’s father let her know that he had hoped for a better match, but he didn’t try to change her mind. He was not the bullying sort, and life had prepared him to accept circumstances that weren’t ideal. In fact, his daughter hadn’t decided about marriage to Zhu, or even about the concept of marriage: “I don’t like the idea of having a wedding. There are always a lot of people who don’t really care about you. They just want to see what the food is like, and how everything is prepared. They only go to the wedding to see what kind of wedding you have.” In any case, she had no intention of seeking her parents’ advice about such matters. When it came to personal issues, she listened far more closely to Hu Xiaomei.
The radio show host was the patron saint of Emily’s Shenzhen. Whenever Emily talked about moral issues, she invoked Hu Xiaomei’s advice as if it were infallible. Once, when we discussed the issue of unmarried people living together in Shenzhen, Emily gently told me not to question anybody directly about their situation. “Here we don’t ask openly about that,” she said. “For example, Hu Xiaomei usually recommends that you shouldn’t tell others if you’re living with a man. It could influence the way people see you, especially if you break up later. It’s better if you just don’t say anything about it.”
Finally, after dozens of conversations—Hu Xiaomei, Hu Xiaomei, Hu Xiaomei—I contacted the radio station and arranged for an interview. Emily carefully prepped me, describing the most interesting callers, the ones who had touched her deeply in the dormitory. And she reminded me that Hu Xiaomei had once loved a rich man, but something had gone wrong.
THE RADIO SHOW host was petite, with small features and long black hair. She chain-smoked Capri menthol Superslims. We met in the private room of a Sichuanese restaurant in downtown Shenzhen. She brought another guest, introducing him as a friend who was interested in American journalism. The young man was slightly overweight, and he had longish hair—in China, a sure sign of an artistic temperament. He sat quietly, listening to the interview.
Hu Xiaomei described herself as a ye maozi, a “night cat.” We had a late dinner; her day had just begun; she was scheduled to go on air at eleven. She told me that she was interested in American culture, even though she couldn’t speak English. She admired the stories of Raymond Carver, which she had read in translation (“you can tell so much from a very small detail”). At the restaurant, she told the story of how she had come to the Overnight City.
She had grown up in a coal-mining town in Jiangxi province, where her parents worked as low-level engineers. They weren’t poor, but they didn’t make much money. From the time she was small, the girl wanted to leave. “I was always introverted. I used to talk to myself and pretend that I was on the radio. There were a lot of things that I wanted to say if I got the chance.”
In 1992, at the age of twenty, she migrated to Shenzhen. Her first job was at a mineral water factory, where she earned seventy dollars a month. At night, she often listened to a local call-in show; such programs had become popular all across China in the early years of Reform and Opening. One evening, she finally called and got on the air. Unlike most people, she didn’t want advice—she just wanted to tell listeners about her dream of becoming a radio show host. She was a good talker, and after she had finished she mentioned her work address and phone number.
“The next week, I got stacks of letters and more than a hundred phone calls,” she remembered. “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. They asked me what I wanted to do, and I said I wanted to be the host of this show. They said that 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, and maybe I’d understand them.”
She remembered the date of that first show: December 22, 1992. Less than eight years later, At Night You’re Not Lonely was the most popular radio program in Shenzhen, and Hu Xiaomei had recently published a book. She believed that the show had aged her—listening to the stories every night—and she said that Shenzhen was a hard place for women. Divorce rates were higher than in the interior; life was less stable. “The pressure is higher here, because of the freedom,” she said. “Your individual ideas are more important, because people don’t know about your private life. It’s not like the interior, where your family will tell you what to do. It’s freedom, but that kind of freedom creates pressure.”
She remarked that she was marrying late, by Chinese standards—a wedding was planned for the next year, when she would be thirty. After she mentioned the marriage, I asked about her fiancé, and the woman suddenly grew quiet. “He likes to write,” she said softly. “He might not be so successful yet, but he cares about it, and that’s all that matters. We care about each other.” There was a pause, and then she continued:
“I don’t want society’s standards to be my standards. I used to date a very wealthy man, a developer in Shenzhen. All he cared about was business. Once, he installed some impressive stone lions, as part of an entrance to a new building, and he was able to charge them eight hundred thousand yuan instead of two hundred thousand. Is that supposed to be success? Selling something for four times the value?”
She lit another Superslim and inhaled deeply. “Anyway,” she said, “he didn’t like it that sometimes people knew him as Hu Xiaomei’s boyfriend.”
More than a year later, when I happened to pass through Shenzhen again, we met once more for dinner. On the telephone, she told me that this time she would bring her new husband.
I walked in the restaurant and saw the same young man who had accompanied her during our first interview: slightly overweight, longish hair. Hu Xiaomei smiled shyly and said, “I just didn’t want to tell you the first time we met.”
OVER THE WINTER of 1999, Emily often called and wrote. Before Christmas, she mailed me some samples from her factory: plastic beads of white, blue, and purple strung into bracelets and packaged in ziplock bags. She told me that I could give them to my sisters back at home.
But her letters grew steadily darker: “I’m afraid that I can’t write more, as I have a headache from bad sleep recently.” She complained that the routines of work had become numbing, and she feared that her unhappiness would hurt Zhu Yunfeng. She wrote: “Frankly, my boyfriend is smart and very good to me. Problem doesn’t lie in him, but in myself. I just need time to recover from some kind of unexplicable depression. I’m trying.”
She was always hard on herself. When I sent her something that I had written about her Fuling class, she responded:
Speaking of myself, I find it’s the most difficult part to figure out. It seems you understand me more than most of my friends do—I’m just a good tempered or amiable girl in their eyes. But I’m not confident if I’m as respectable as it seems 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.
During my time as a teacher, I noticed that the top female students often seemed haunted by a sense of isolation that was rare among the boys. For the most part, the male students were less mature, and even the brightest ones enjoyed clowning around or making crude jokes. A student like Willy seemed to grow up quickly after graduating, but many of the women were already thoughtful during their student years.
One of the best freshman students in the English department had been a quiet girl who kept apart from her peers. Adam had taught her section, and after class she sometimes visited him for extra practice with her English. During the summer vacation, she returned to her hometown and jumped off a bridge. Adam and I never learned much about her death; nobod
y in the class had been close to her. In China, more women killed themselves than men, and the female suicide rate was nearly five times the world average—the highest of any country in the world. The suicides tended to be women from rural areas who had had some education. They weren’t poor; if anything, the glimpse of a better life seemed to depress them.
Emily had always been well liked by her classmates—she was popular despite her sense of solitude. But I worried about her in Shenzhen, and at the beginning of 2000 her complaints seemed more insistent. For a while, she talked about going into business with Zhu Yunfeng, selling lathe-cutting machinery, but finally they had to abandon the idea; the initial investment was too high. She felt trapped in the factory and the dormitory. In one letter, she reported that she now earned $230 a month, more than double her starting salary. But the money didn’t change anything:
I’m not happy with my job. My head aches sometimes, and mistakes happen often. Although my salary keeps raising, I have no interest in the job any more….
Do you know any kind of jobs that are interesting and do benefit to the whole sociaty? I hope to find one.
EVERY TIME I visited Shenzhen, I tried to spend time on both sides of the city’s fence. The structure had been erected as a political boundary, but it also served as a cultural divide: frames of reference changed dramatically once you crossed the barrier. In the world “beyond the gates,” Emily and other factory workers often talked about Hu Xiaomei, but the middle- and upper-class residents of downtown Shenzhen rarely mentioned the radio show. A number of them told me that their world was better captured by a novelist named Miao Yong. She had also caught the attention of government censors, who banned her most recent book.
When I telephoned the writer, she suggested that we meet in a trendy Western-style café near her apartment in a downtown high-rise. She was twenty-nine years old, and she was unmarried. She chain-smoked Capri menthol Superslims. She was petite, with medium-length black hair, and she wore heavy makeup around her mouth and eyes. She told me that she admired the translated novels of Henry Miller (“his books were banned, too”).
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