Another night, Willy and Nancy stayed up long past their usual bedtime, playing the pop song over and over, until finally they had translated the “Twelve Months of Migrant Labor” into English, all the way to the end:
In the twelfth month I returned to my hometown
My parents cried
And together we ate dumplings
How wonderful they tasted.
Dear Peter,
How is it going in Beijing?…I want very much to change my situation here. Nancy and I have both thrown the iron-rice bowls and come here to seek fortune. Situation here is much better than that in my backward and yashua [toothbrush] hometown—Sichuan. However, I can’t see any hope of becoming even a small rich man, making myself and improving myself. Nancy and I both have thought of buying an apartment here. But that’s only a dream. Every cost of the house is 300,000 to 400,000 yuan which we can’t afford to buy. When we are able to buy a new house then we two will have put one foot in the coffin. That’s true. The long-cherished hope of mine is that after we two have enough money, we’ll go back to our hometown and find a stable job for Nancy. And I can do something else but not teaching…. With China’s accession to the WTO and the pending Olympic Games in 2008 I wish that I can have good luck.
In the fall of 2000, Willy entered an English-teaching contest. All across the country, such events had become part of the craze for competition that had swept Chinese education. In Wenzhou, each competitor entered a room full of students, with judges seated in the back. The officials evaluated the lesson plan, as well as the student response.
Willy never became nervous in such situations. After everything else that he had experienced, it seemed easy: The rules were clear, and they were applied to all participants. The judging generally seemed to be fair, and regardless the students were independent. It was impossible to cheat the spontaneous reactions of children.
The Wenzhou competition began with five hundred instructors, and the field was quickly narrowed to sixteen. Willy made the cut. For the finals, everybody traveled to downtown Wenzhou. The other finalists arrived with laptop computers, projection screens, and lesson plans that had been prepared with professional teaching software. Willy was the only competitor who did not have a computer. His materials consisted of things that he had made by hand: a few pictures to illustrate a dialogue, and dozens of little red paper apples. He wrote the English word “poison” on a bottle of water.
“When I taught them the word ‘dangerous,’ I had the bottle of water that I said was poison, and I asked a student to drink it. They thought it was very funny. Then I had them study the dialogue, and I made them very competitive, because they were trying to get red apples. I asked questions, and they got an apple if they were correct. I stood on a chair and shouted the questions. I was just like a commander; they thought that was funny, too.”
It was a stroke of genius—creating a competition within the competition—and Willy walked away with first prize. The tournament awarded him one thousand yuan, which was nearly half of a month’s salary. But he said that the money wasn’t important. His school was proud, and he believed that he had won because nobody else in the competition had cared so deeply about English. In Willy’s mind, he was victorious because of all the lists and transcriptions, the obscure words and the unusual phrases. “It was a good honor,” he said. “I think I won because of my crazy style.”
IN DOUBLE DRAGON Township, Number Ten Village, Number Three Production Team, one of the first migrants was a man named Liu Chengmin. He had completed the fifth grade, which made him the most literate person of his generation in Number Three. In the early 1980s, he migrated to Heilongjiang province. He spent a number of years working on the assembly line of a shoe factory, and then he returned to his farm.
In the village, Liu Chengmin was widely respected for his intelligence. And people knew that something about the experience abroad had changed the man. He never married, and he lived entirely on his own terms. During the mid-1990s, when the local government exorbitantly increased agricultural taxes, he refused to pay. He explained that his status as a single man merited preferential treatment: he had no wife or son; everything depended on his own hands. His reasoning was clear, logical, and completely without precedent.
Periodically, rumors swept through the village: officials planned to detain Liu and have him beaten until he agreed to pay the taxes. This was a common procedure for dealing with extreme stubbornness, but nobody ever did anything. Local cadres seemed intimidated by the man’s unpredictability.
During his years of migration, Liu had composed poems about his travels. As a child, Willy enjoyed listening to the verses, and years later, after the boy had grown to become a migrant himself, he could still recall details of Liu’s writing. The poems had been composed in the style of Chairman Mao; often they described natural scenery. One verse celebrated the power of the Yangtze. And Willy remembered the final couplet of a poem about the Snail River, the local stream that passed beneath Victory Bridge:
The river in my hometown is peaceful,
But my heart is not.
PART THREE
ARTIFACT F
The Book
TODAY, THE ARCHAEOLOGISTS MAP A WALL OF THE UNDERGROUND city. The structure isn’t far beneath the surface—about five feet deep—and the work team makes good progress across the yellow fields. There are seventeen men, armed with shovels and Luoyang spades; they work under Jing Zhichun. The young archaeologist believes that this wall may be part of the underground city’s royal district.
In the early afternoon, Jing takes a break, and I interview him in the library of the Anyang Archaeological Work Station. The book-lined room is cool and quiet; we are the only people here. Jing describes some of the artifacts that have been discovered in Anyang, and then, after we finish, he idly points out an enormous old book that happens to be lying on a table in the library. The book’s cover is torn and faded, but the title is clear:
(“Our Country’s Shang and Zhou Bronzes
Looted by American Imperialists”)
The author’s name is not listed. The book was published in 1962, edited by the Chinese Institute of Archaeology, and it contains more than eight hundred black-and-white photographs of bronze vessels. There are squat three-legged ding, “cauldrons”; and graceful long-necked gu, “chalices”; and spindly-stemmed jue, which may have been used for warming wine. Most of the bronzes date to the Shang, and usually they are marked by that culture’s characteristic taotie design: a stylized animal mask with curling eyes and mouth. In the past, some experts believed that the mysterious pattern portrayed a dragon; others proposed a tiger, or a crocodile, or a serpent. Some theories link the design to shamanism. But nobody knows for certain, and the taotie has slipped free from its meaning—a symbol gone mute.
The back of the book catalogs the American imperialists. The City Art Museum of St. Louis, Missouri, is listed as the owner of a slender Shang gu. In Grass Lake, Michigan, the Roumanian Orthodox Episcopate—the name seems neither American nor imperialist—has both a ding and a gu. Other owners are less surprising: Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt, of New York City; Miss Doris Duke, also of New York City (according to the book, she looted nine bronzes); Avery C. Brundage, Chicago, Illinois (thirty bronzes); Alfred F. Pilsbury, Minneapolis, Minnesota (fifty-eight).
Flipping through the pages, it’s possible to learn something about the archaeological tastes of prominent American imperialists. All nine of Doris Duke’s vessels date to the Shang, and she clearly had an eye for the delicate: a pair of slender gu, an unassuming little jue. Pilsbury, in contrast, had a Midwesterner’s appetite for solid vessels: a bloated square ding from the Three Kingdoms Period, a squat sullen cauldron that dates to the Warring States and looks every bit its age. Brundage is inscrutable. His collection spans the Shang, the Western Zhou, the Spring and Autumn; he has thick sober ding and narrow gu. His most distinctive piece is a whimsical Spring and Autumn wine pot, molded into the shape of a bird—an ancient bronze prepared for fligh
t.
WHEN I ASK Jing about the book, he says that it was researched by Chen Mengjia, a scholar of oracle bones.
“He spent a lot of time in America,” Jing explains. “Chen’s wife was at the University of Chicago, studying American literature. But later they came back to China. Chen was quite a good poet, too.”
I ask if Chen still lives in Anyang or Beijing.
“He’s dead,” Jing says. “He killed himself during the Cultural Revolution.”
Once more, I check the title page: no name. Jing remarks that Chen had tried to kill himself twice. I close the book and ask if anybody here in Anyang had known the scholar.
“Talk with Old Yang,” Jing says. “He’s retired now, but he was with Chen when he killed himself. Old Yang and some others were supposed to be watching him, but it happened anyway. You can find Old Yang just across the courtyard.”
THE ANYANG ARCHAEOLOGICAL Work Station is not far from the underground city. This region is still farmland, and corn fields surround the station; only a handful of people work here full-time, in nearly a dozen buildings. During the day, wind rustles through the parasol trees, and occasionally a train moans in the distance as it rolls toward Beijing, six hours away. Otherwise, the complex is silent. The high cement walls are topped by barbed wire.
Many of the buildings contain artifacts. There are rooms full of bronzes, and workshops strewn with pottery shards, and locked drawers packed with priceless jades. There are plenty of bones. In one exhibition hall, a display features a baby’s skeleton squeezed into a jar—perhaps the relic of some grisly Shang ritual. Another building contains a chariot and four skeletons that were excavated from a neighboring field in 1987. The skeletons are paired: two horses, two humans. They were probably sacrificed in order to serve a lord in the next life; the two men may have been charioteers. One man’s skeleton lies prone behind the vehicle. The other man rests facedown, directly beside the horses, his hands bound behind his back. His skull is turned to the side, as if biting at the dirt.
The chariot is no longer a chariot. Wood does not last when buried in the central plains of China, where rainwater passes quickly through the dry loess soil. Over time, the wood decays and is replaced by an earthen cast that retains the original shape. Thirty centuries slip by. In 1987, the excavation proceeds inch by inch, as archaeologists meticulously separate the exterior soil from the hardened cast, until at last the shape emerges. There are sideboards, an axle, a draft pole, and a chariot box big enough for three kneeling passengers. A curved yoke sits above the paired horse spines. The spoked wheels are over four feet in diameter. The chariot looks complete, as if it were still made of wood; but a few good shoves would reduce it to a pile of dirt. Archaeologists describe the object as a “ghost”—the earth’s memory of something long gone.
NEXT TO THE chariot exhibition building, in a small conference room, I meet Yang Xizhang. He is sixty-six years old, with metal-rimmed glasses and thin white hair. His teeth have been silvered extravagantly and they startle me every time he smiles, like the glint of an unexpected relic.
Old Yang says that Chen Mengjia researched the book about “American imperialists” in the 1940s, before the Communists came to power. Back then, Chen lived in the United States with his wife. She came from a Western-influenced Chinese family; her father was a Christian theologian.
“That’s one reason they had trouble later on,” Old Yang explains. “Her family was closely connected to foreign things. When Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution started, Chen was labeled a ‘capitalist-intellectual.’ That was because he had spent time in America and because of his wife’s family. But he was especially criticized because of his nannu jiaoliu shenghuo.”
The phrase is unfamiliar and I ask Old Yang to jot it down, to make sure I have it right. He pauses, as if regretting having mentioned it, but then he writes. The characters are clear but the phrase remains oblique:
Male-Female Relationship Lifestyle
I ask, “What exactly does that mean?”
He glances away with an uncomfortable smile—a flash of silver. “It means this,” he says reluctantly. “You have a relationship with a woman who’s not your wife.”
“So Chen did this?”
He looks away again. “I don’t know about that,” he says.
An awkward silence lingers for a moment. After we resume the conversation, I realize that Old Yang is far more comfortable discussing Chen’s death. There is no change in his expression when I ask about the suicide.
“It happened in 1966, just as the Cultural Revolution started,” Old Yang says. “When Chen first tried to kill himself, people saved him. After that, the Institute of Archaeology sent me and some other young archaeologists to watch him. We stayed with him in his home, and it was our job to make sure he didn’t kill himself. But we couldn’t be with him twenty-four hours a day. We tried, but it just wasn’t possible. It lasted about a week.”
To illustrate how they had lost track of the man, Old Yang rises and points out the window. It’s a sunny afternoon; light streaks unevenly through the trees that stand outside the building. “Imagine that you’re in Chen’s Beijing home, looking out to the courtyard,” he says. “One day, Chen walked outside, past the window.” Old Yang makes a sweeping gesture, as if following the trail of an imaginary figure moving beyond the range of our vision. “After a few minutes, we realized he was gone. We rushed outside, but it was too late—he had hanged himself.”
Old Yang sits down. “It was a horrible loss,” he says. “He was a great scholar.”
From the man’s expression, though, I can’t tell if he feels guilt, or sadness, or anything at all. He wears a certain blank façade that is common among Chinese when they talk about bad memories—all emotion hidden somewhere far away. I ask what Chen had spoken about during the week that they were together.
“We didn’t talk much. To be honest, I didn’t know what to say. He was obviously very upset and it didn’t seem right for me to speak to him.”
Old Yang explains that Chen’s wife hadn’t been home, because Red Guards had been holding her across town, at Peking University. Later, after the Cultural Revolution was over, she resumed teaching English literature at the university. Old Yang tells me that she died a few years ago.
TOGETHER WE WALK across the courtyard to Old Yang’s simple office, where he has a photograph of Chen. The office is furnished with a desk, a shelf of books, and a bed with a mosquito net. The floor is naked concrete. Old Yang pulls a faded Institute of Archaeology yearbook down from the shelf.
“I have another question about that book on bronzes in America,” I say. “Why wasn’t Chen’s name on the title page?”
“In 1957, Chen had criticized some of the leaders’ ideas,” Old Yang says. “He was labeled a Rightist. Rightists weren’t allowed to publish. But that book was very important, so they published it without his name. Of course, everybody knew who had actually written it.”
Old Yang opens the yearbook to a page of photographs, including one of Chen as a middle-aged man. The inscription notes that he was born in 1911—the final year of the Qing dynasty. In the photograph, Chen has dimples and bright eyes and a shock of jet black hair. He wears a traditional high-collared shirt. He has the biggest smile of anybody on the page.
“He was very handsome,” I say.
Old Yang chuckles, but this time he keeps the silver covered.
In Anyang, I try to learn more about Chen Mengjia, but the other archaeologists are too young to pick up the story’s thread. Back in Beijing, I file the notebook and move on to other projects. It’s part of the writer’s routine, collecting half-told tales and then letting them slip away. But they always leave a mark in my memory, like the ghost of a buried artifact.
IN JANUARY OF 2001, my first book is published in the United States; it describes the time that I spent teaching in Sichuan. Later that year, the Voice of America broadcasts a review, in Chinese. Afterward, the reviewer sends me a letter of introduction, alon
g with a printed copy of his article. The tongue-in-cheek subtitle catches my eye:
(“Reading the Foreign Devil Peter Hessler’s New Book”)
The reviewer is a Chinese-born American citizen named Wu Ningkun. His postmark is Reston, Virginia. He writes in English:
The enclosed article is…based on a talk broadcast in the VOA Mandarin program America Today. If some of your former students happened to tune in to the program, they would have been thrilled…
Wu Ningkun mentions that he studied American literature at the University of Chicago in the 1940s, and then, after the Communist revolution, he returned to his homeland of China to teach English. In the early 1990s, he crossed the Pacific once more, this time for good. Since then, he and his wife have lived near Washington, D.C. I write back, asking if he happened to know Chen Mengjia during his years in Chicago.
The response comes quickly: Chen’s wife actually helped convince Wu Ningkun to return to China after the Revolution. Wu suggests that I read his own English-language memoir, A Single Tear. One section describes Wu’s return to Beijing in the early 1950s, before the start of the disastrous political campaigns:
I was put on the waiting list for a housing assignment, so I stayed as a house guest with Lucy and her husband, Chen Mengjia, who was a professor of Chinese at nearby Tsinghua University and a noted archaeologist. Lean and swarthy, Chen walked with a back bent under an invisible burden, which made him appear older than his forty-odd years. Lucy’s father was Dr. T. C. Chao, an Anglican bishop and dean of the Divinity School…. Moving about gently among her elegant Ming dynasty furniture, choice objets d’art, and Steinway piano, she struck me as a heroine right out of a novel by Henry James (who was the subject of her doctoral dissertation) and thrust into a milieu as ill-fitting as her Mao jacket. I wondered what fine “moral consciousness” might be hidden under her poised presence. Unlike his naturally taciturn wife, Professor Chen was gruff and outspoken. When it was announced that faculty as well as students were to take part in daily collective calisthenics, he paced the floor in circles while complaining loudly, “This is 1984 coming true, and so soon!”
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