Miao Yong had grown up in Gansu province, in the west of China. Her parents were doctors from the east coast who had been sent to Gansu in the 1960s, during one of the Communist Party’s campaigns to develop western China. Miao Yong attended a teachers’ college in Gansu, and then migrated to Shenzhen, where she found a job as a secretary and wrote fiction on the side. In 1998, she published her first novel, You Can’t Control My Life, which became a best seller. The book was set in Shenzhen, and it followed its migrant heroine from her first job, as a secretary, to a life of luxury and dissolution as the mistress of a wealthy Hong Kong businessman. After the book sold seventy thousand copies, it was banned by the government, which was concerned about the portrayal of drugs, gambling, and casual sex. Like many book bannings in China, this only sparked interest and boosted sales—although by then all the copies were bootlegs. In downtown Shenzhen, on street corners and pedestrian overpasses, vendors sold black-market versions. Along the sidewalk in front of the Stock Exchange, I saw one street vendor selling You Can’t Control My Life next to 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.”
Despite the ban, writing had made Miao Yong rich. After her royalties had been cut off, she turned her novel into a popular television series, purging the most sensitive material. For good measure, she changed You Can’t Control My Life into a happier title: There’s No Winter Here. Currently, she was writing other screenplays, both for television and film. In her next novel, she intended to be more careful about the setting—she wasn’t going to identify it as Shenzhen or any other specific place. She believed that her first novel had been banned because cadres feared it gave the experimental city a bad name.
In the book jacket’s author bio, the first detail was Miao Yong’s blood type. Like many hip young Chinese, Miao believed that blood type helped determine character. She told me that individualism was what interested her the most about Shenzhen: “In the past, China was very collective. It was all about group thought. But now, in places like Shenzhen, you can decide exactly what kind of person you want to be.” Miao Yong was type O. When I asked about Shenzhen’s notorious hostess bars, she introduced me to her current boyfriend, who gallantly spent an evening escorting me to various establishments where, for a few hundred yuan, men could rent a private room, sing karaoke, and hire young women in miniskirts to chat, pour drinks, and place fruit directly into their mouths.
EMILY DIDN’T LIKE the novel. When I gave her a copy, she told me that it was aimed at the “white-collar” people who lived in the city center, within the gates. As far as Emily was concerned, that was a world apart from her Shenzhen. She told me that the book’s 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.”
Her judgment echoed that of Hu Xiaomei, who had told me bluntly that she disliked Miao Yong’s writing because it was immoral. The novelist had been equally dismissive of the radio show host—in the writer’s eyes, the radio program was of interest only to poorly educated women who lived in factory dorms. Despite their apparent similarities—young, independent women who had captured the spirit of the boomtown—it was clear that Hu Xiaomei and Miao Yong had nothing to say to each other. Each occupied her own separate world within the Overnight City.
Emily described herself as belonging to the realm of the factories. She lived beyond the gates, and her life was structured by the dorm; the freedom of Shenzhen repelled her as much as it attracted. She often talked about issues of morality, although she had difficulty articulating her values. Once, she told me that she had been deeply bothered by watching a Hollywood movie in which the heroine slept with multiple men. But when I asked her how Shenzhen’s openness compared with the restrictions of her hometown, she said that the new city was an improvement. “It’s better than it was in the past,” she said. “But it shouldn’t cross a certain line.”
“What line?”
“It has to do with morality.”
I asked her what she meant, and she rested her chin on her hand, thinking hard. “Traditional morality,” she said. “Like when two people marry, they should be faithful to each other.”
When we talked about You Can’t Control My Life, I asked Emily where she thought the book’s notions of morality had come from. “Most people say they came from the West, after Reform and Opening,” she said. “I think there’s probably some truth to this. Most people here in Shenzhen think that Western countries are better and Chinese traditions are backward.” But in Emily’s opinion, the book’s philosophy was too dark. “It’s saying that Shenzhen is a new city without any soul. Everybody in the book is in turmoil—they can’t find calmness.”
IN FEBRUARY, AFTER the Chinese New Year, Emily and Zhu Yunfeng started living together. They rented a three-room apartment in a small factory town about thirty miles beyond the gates, near the plant where Zhu Yunfeng worked. The concrete stairways were cracked, because of the hurried construction, but everything worked and the kitchen was well equipped. It was Emily’s first non-dormitory home since arriving in Shenzhen.
Another young Sichuanese couple also lived in the apartment. Each couple had their own bedroom, but they shared the living room, which was furnished with a color television, a video disc player, a low table, and a bed that served as a couch. One bedroom featured a laminated poster of a topless foreign couple making out. A previous tenant had left the poster, and nobody had bothered to take it down. In China, such pictures were common; the fact that the featured couple was foreign seemed to make it romantic instead of offensive.
Emily didn’t tell her parents about the apartment. During the week, she still stayed in the factory dormitory, but she spent her weekends with Zhu Yunfeng. One day, during a telephone conversation, her mother asked directly if the young couple was living together. “I didn’t say anything. She knew from my silence that it was true.” After that, neither mother nor daughter mentioned it again.
Zhu Yunfeng had been promoted once more, and now he earned $360 a month. Combined with Emily’s salary, it came to about $600 a month, and they were able to save at least half their income.
That April, on a weekday evening, Emily broke curfew for the first time. She left after work and didn’t return until starting time the next morning. The boss called her into his office.
“He asked me what time I came back last night,” Emily told me later. “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 to break curfew.
Not long after that, the boss took a pretty worker off the production floor and made her his “personal secretary.” The woman was from Hunan, and she was eighteen years old. Emily warned the girl about the boss, telling stories about his indiscretions, and finally the man confronted Emily. First, he tried the indirect approach, asking her what people were saying about him. When that didn’t work, he got to the point.
“Do you tell the other workers that I’m lecherous?” he asked.
Emily said, “Yes.”
He tried to laugh it off, but it was clear that he no longer liked having Emily around. She spent her free time searching for another job, and it didn’t take long for her to find a position as a nursery-school teacher. The school was also beyond the
gates, but it involved no Taiwanese bosses, no factory dormitories, and no evening shifts. She was going to teach English.
In June, when she quit the factory job, the boss criticized her. “You’ve changed,” he said. “You used to be obedient. Everything changed after you got a boyfriend.”
“I didn’t change,” Emily said. “I just got to know you better.”
THAT SUMMER, SHENZHEN turned twenty years old. The city had been designated as a Special Economic Zone on August 26 of 1980, and now it had reached a critical stage in its development. China was preparing to enter the World Trade Organization, which would mean the end of some of the corporate tax privileges that had been granted to companies in Shenzhen. And there had always been powerful enemies in the central government who believed that the special benefits contributed to corruption. In 2000, the Shenzhen vice-mayor had been arrested for his role in a real estate scam.
The local economy was still strong, but it had slowed in recent years. In the past, Asian countries such as South Korea and Taiwan had developed similar “special” cities and regions, generally known as export processing zones. These tended to follow a brief life cycle: initially, there was a boom of labor-intensive light industry, but then factories steadily moved to the country’s interior, where wages were lower. Eventually, the zones shifted to high-tech industries, losing their status as a primary engine for the national economy. The cities were designed to flourish and then fade, like a flower that blooms only once.
But Shenzhen’s experiment ran deeper than the economy; it also affected so many social issues. During the weeks before the anniversary, I traveled to Shenzhen and interviewed residents there about the history and culture of the Overnight City:
“Shenzhen people are brave. The Chinese are usually afraid of new things, but the Shenzhen people aren’t like that. They’re willing to experiment and take a risk.”
“Shenzhen has no culture. The people here only care about money.”
“The young people here are optimistic, but the middle-aged ones are pessimistic. That’s because this is a young person’s city.”
“Shenzhen has a lot of similarities to America. America always offers opportunity, and Shenzhen is like that. Here you have a very free life. People don’t put their nose into your personal affairs. Since I came here, I feel so happy and liberated. If I had stayed in the interior, I would never have gotten divorced.”
“People say it’s like the American West, but that’s not really accurate. The American West was just waiting to be exploited, and it became successful because of the railroad. Shenzhen is successful because of politics. It’s all because of Deng Xiaoping. If he had wanted Yunnan to be the Special Economic Zone, then Yunnan would have succeeded.”
“I’m also an experimental object. Look at how young I went out on my own!”
“In Shenzhen nobody cares about your past or your background. They only care about your ability. Can you do it or not? That’s the only question that matters.”
I had never been in a Chinese city that felt as divided as Shenzhen. The fence split the factory world, but the social partitions were even more dramatic. Different generations rarely interacted, because most people’s families had stayed in the interior. Emily, like other residents, frequently talked about the differences between “white-collar” and “blue-collar” people (she classified herself in the second category). Hu Xiaomei was a blue-collar heroine; Miao Yong belonged to white-collar life. In a country controlled by a single political party, and in a city where almost everybody considered themselves members of one ethnic group, it was remarkable how segregated the society could become in only two decades.
Some divides, though, were as artificial and as porous as the fence itself. Across China, Reform and Opening had introduced an entirely new framework of social class and upward mobility, but the system still felt incomplete. Even in America, which prided itself on egalitarianism, there were old families, old schools, old ways to succeed. China hadn’t yet developed this, at least not in the new climate. It was hard to define how education, experience, and determination added up; success was a murky concept. The climate was perfect for impostors—even a politically sensitive city such as Beijing had plenty of bogus ID dealers. In Shenzhen, this particular trade had achieved industrial proportions. At the factory, Emily had handled worker registration, and she said that many of the employees used identity cards that were obviously false. In front of the local Wal-Mart, venders sold bogus bachelor’s degrees for less than a hundred dollars. One Shenzhen ID dealer told me that he had used five different names during the past five years.
Despite the city’s powerful sense of structure—the dorms and the assembly lines, the city wall and the class divisions—Shenzhen was full of people who didn’t quite fit in. The Overnight City promised opportunity, but it was also true that many migrants left their hometowns out of restlessness (“there was something in the heart,” as Emily once told me). In Shenzhen, a young woman might enter a factory, turn out cheap jewelry for a few months, and then move on to another job. Another migrant took her place, and on the surface, nothing changed—the factory kept producing cheap jewelry. But it was impossible to guess how the individual’s ideas might change in the new environment.
It was equally hard to define what twenty years had meant in the life of this city. In the end, the government hardly tried to mark the anniversary—no parades for the leaders, no holiday for the workers. Not a single member of the Politburo showed up to make a speech. Reportedly, an internal Communist Party directive had called for officials to downplay the anniversary.
On the day itself, the Shenzhen Special Zone Daily issued a commemorative edition of the newspaper. The top headline read, in huge characters
TREMENDOUS SOLICITUDE,
GREAT EXPERIMENT
The front page featured a reproduction of Deng Xiaoping’s calligraphy, as well as a long proclamation from Jiang Zemin, who described Shenzhen as “a miniature of historic reforms being carried out during the last two decades.” At the newsstand, I picked up two popular women’s monthly magazines. The article titles didn’t make a single reference to the anniversary:
ONE HUNDRED SHENZHEN FEMALE BOSSES’
EXPERIENCES IN STARTING THEIR OWN
BUSINESSES
THE END OF FIRST LOVE
WHY DO PEOPLE DECIDE TO LIVE TOGETHER
BEFORE MARRIAGE?
WHY DO PEOPLE DECIDE TO HAVE ABORTIONS?
A TRAP SET BY AN OLD MAN
ONE NIGHT’S BRIDE
INTERVIEWS WITH SHENZHEN WOMAN BOSSES
I AM NOT A LADY
ON MY LAST night in Shenzhen, Zhu Yunfeng returned home depressed after a bad day at work. That afternoon, a laborer under his supervision had been injured. The factory was working overtime on a new product, trying to fill orders, and such periods were always bad for accidents. The new product was a metal thermos. The injury hadn’t been serious, but Zhu Yunfeng told Emily that he wanted to be alone for a while.
Sometimes Zhu Yunfeng talked to me about his factory, and he asked questions about life in Beijing, but for the most part he kept out of my conversations with Emily. In China, it was unusual for a young woman to have male friends apart from her boyfriend, and Zhu Yunfeng had been exceptionally tolerant of my being around. He was a calm man, without the bullying insecurity that seemed common to many Chinese males. It helped that I was a foreigner, as well as a former teacher, but I knew that the situation was unusual. I expected that in the future I would hear less from Emily. That was a common pattern among my female students: Right after marriage, there was usually a period when they didn’t make much contact. Once their lives settled—usually, after they had a baby—they got back in touch.
During my last night, Emily and I left Zhu Yunfeng in the apartment. We climbed a hill to a park that overlooked the town. It was a small factory settlement, the type of place that was common beyond the Shenzhen gates: a cluster of shops and apartment buildings wedged into a dusty
cut in the hills, and then, fanning out along two main roads, strips of factories and dormitories. A number of local plants produced shoes and clothing, and there was one computer accessory factory whose top story had been gutted in a recent fire. The white-tiled walls were still streaked with black from the smoke. Emily said that nobody had been hurt in that fire, but down the road there was another plant where, a few years ago, some workers had died in a massive blaze. That factory had been producing plastic Christmas decorations and lawn furniture.
In two weeks, Emily would start her new teaching job. She worried that her English had slipped during the years at the jewelry factory, and she wondered if she would be able to discipline the children. But she liked the school campus, and she smiled whenever she talked about the new position. 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.
It was a warm, clear night, and the stars were bright. From the top of the hill, we could see everything: the rows of blocky dormitories, their windows still glowing in the last hour before curfew. It was after eleven o’clock. I wondered how many people there were in each room, and how many rooms were tuned to the radio. Emily had brought her old battery-powered set, and we sat on top of the hill and listened to At Night You’re Not Lonely. The volume control on the radio was broken, and Hu Xiaomei’s voice crackled thinly in the night air. We strained to hear.
The first caller started crying because she regretted the way she’d treated her old boyfriend, who’d finally left her. Hu Xiaomei told her that the experience should be good for her; maybe next time she’d get it right. The second caller missed his high-school girlfriend, who was far away, working in another part of the country. “Haven’t any girls here smiled at you?” Hu Xiaomei asked. The third caller was upset because her boyfriend had recently asked for some time apart; he was a wonderful man who agreed with her even when she wasn’t right. Hu Xiaomei said, “If a man listens to you when you’re wrong, then there’s something wrong with him.”
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