In Yueqing, the satellite city outside of Wenzhou, I shopped for 9/11 videos with William Jefferson Foster. He told me that most of his colleagues had been pleased by the attacks.
“There’s one teacher who was especially happy,” Willy said. “The next morning he told me that he couldn’t sleep that night, because he was so excited and happy.”
“What was he so happy about?”
“He doesn’t like America,” Willy said. “But mostly I think that he liked watching it.”
“Liked watching what?”
“The buildings falling down,” Willy said. “He thought it was interesting. A lot of people are like that. Everybody says it was like a movie. Another teacher told me, ‘America always makes so many movies, but now they’ve finally made a great one!’”
I asked Willy how he had responded to such remarks.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “The day after it happened, I was very unhappy to be at the school, because everybody was talking about it and laughing. And actually for about a week I tried not to be in the same place as them. When that teacher said that he couldn’t sleep, I felt very uncomfortable; I felt sick. I just wanted to be alone or with Nancy. It’s different for us. The first thing that I thought about was Mr. Meier, because he lives in Washington and he works for the government. I was very worried until you told me that he was fine.”
We stopped in a video shop and found another copy of a 9/11 disk. The store owner told me that the control seemed to be tighter than with regular movies. He remarked that big films like Pearl Harbor usually appeared within two days of the American release, and then they were sold everywhere; but the 9/11 videos were becoming hard to find. He sensed that the government was cutting off the distribution channels.
We left the shop and I asked Willy if my impression was accurate—that the state-run news hadn’t used the attacks to criticize America.
“That’s true,” he said. “Many people believe that the government is actually very happy about it, but they can’t say anything. People say that Jiang Zemin is a coward, a chicken. They say that there are too many countries with America right now, so it’s impossible for China to stand alone.”
“What do they think China could do otherwise?” I said. “Support the terrorists?”
“I don’t think they know,” Willy said. “It’s just something people say.”
In part, it seemed to be habit—so many years of anti-American propaganda had settled into people’s minds. But it was also connected to everything that had been left out of the news. In the past, the media had rarely reported on tensions in Xinjiang—like Tibet, it was generally portrayed as a peaceful place whose indigenous people were happy to be a part of China. Few average Chinese knew that their own government was concerned about the spread of Islam in the West. I asked Willy what people thought about bin Laden.
“Some people say he’s a hero,” Willy said. “He comes from a poor country but he was able to cause a great problem for America. I’ve heard people say that now bin Laden is even more famous than Mao Zedong.”
“So they like him?”
“Not really,” he said. “They just say he’s famous.”
It reminded me of the way that Chinese people used the word lihai, “terrible, fierce.” So many different things could be lihai: a flood, a war, a hero, a criminal, a victorious general, a woman from Shanghai. And you could describe any influential person as weida, or “great”: Mao Zedong, Mahatma Gandhi, Adolf Hitler, George Washington—all weida. It was completely amoral, as if the world were moved by massive events and personalities who were so distant that they couldn’t be judged by normal people. If you were fortunate, you could stand back and watch.
We entered another video shop. “You know,” I said. “Bin Laden actually isn’t from a poor country. He’s from Saudi Arabia. His family is rich.”
Willy paused. “I thought he was from Afghanistan.”
“He lives there now, but he’s from Saudi Arabia.”
“I didn’t know that,” he said. “Anyway, many people have this impression. They believe he’s from a poor country but now he made America notice him.”
That shop didn’t carry any 9/11 videos, but they had an eight-disk documentary of the first Gulf War. The package featured an American flag, a photograph of Saddam Hussein, and a Chinese blurb:
The World’s First High-Tech Modern War!
Will There Be Another Conflict in the Gulf?
“That’s not new,” Willy said. “That’s been around for a while. Actually, I wanted to buy it before, because I’m interested in that. But Nancy wouldn’t let me.”
“Why not?”
“It’s too expensive,” he said.
I picked up a set—eight bucks. Later that evening we watched the 9/11 videos in Willy and Nancy’s home.
THEY LIVED ON the fourth floor of an apartment building near the school. The complex was new but unfinished, in the boomtown style: the stairwell lacked railings, and blotches of dried paint criss-crossed the cement floor. Willy and Nancy’s apartment consisted of a single room, painted in white and furnished with a bed, a color television, and a desk. A few dozen books lined wooden shelves: Longman’s English Grammar, Selected Readings in English and American History, A Dictionary of English Euphemisms. A volume of Saul Bellow short stories sat next to an old hardback that Adam Meier had given to Nancy: Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys Super Sleuths. Willy’s three broken dictionaries lined the center of the shelf, like proud old soldiers.
It seemed like only yesterday that the young couple had been students in my Fuling classrooms: Willy in the last row, nose in a dictionary; Nancy following the lesson carefully, hoping that I wouldn’t call on her. In Fuling, she had been painfully shy, but the years away from home had changed her. When we talked, she looked me in the eye. She was firm with Willy—that was the biggest difference. In Fuling, she had always seemed intimidated by his intelligence, but now they had the easy banter of a couple whose differences have been softened to familiar jokes. Willy said that Nancy criticized him for arrogance, and I asked her if it was true.
“Of course,” she said, dark eyes flashing. “He always thinks he’s right. Always.”
She tried to be patient with his obsessions. Earlier that year, Wenzhou television had started broadcasting China Central Television’s Channel Nine, which is in English. Every night, Willy stayed up late, glued to the television, writing down new words. Nancy’s sleep deteriorated into a haze of flickering light and Special English, and then, just when she thought they might need another room, the broadcasts stopped.
For a few days, Willy assumed that there was a technical problem. After a week, he telephoned the Yueqing Broadcasting and Television Bureau, whose representative told him that Channel Nine had been canceled because of a lack of local interest. After another week, Willy began calling and impersonating a Beijing accent. He claimed that he worked for an international trade company whose foreign representatives often traveled to Yueqing, where they had been deeply disappointed to find no more Channel Nine. The foreigners, who were investing heavily in Yueqing, would be thrilled to see Channel Nine again. For weeks, Willy waited hopefully—nothing. If Nancy was relieved, she was tactful enough to keep it to herself.
Like many Chinese women, she was tough about money. Willy had a tendency to spend freely, but Nancy reined him in. With regard to having a baby, she held a hard line: until they had saved one hundred thousand yuan, she wouldn’t get pregnant (thus far, they had eighty grand). Technically, they were newlyweds—that May, they had finally registered as husband and wife. But they had never held a ceremony, because they were so far from Sichuan. After debating for years, they finally decided to skip the wedding and just get pictures instead. One day that summer, they went alone to a wedding photo studio in downtown Wenzhou.
They returned with an enormous framed portrait, which became the only decoration in their apartment: a soft-lens photo of Willy in a tuxedo and Nancy in a canary-yellow
wedding dress with a string of pearls. They also bought an expensive photo album, which included a dozen more pictures, each featuring a different costume and background. It was as if they had had twelve separate weddings instead of none at all. The couple appeared in Wenzhou parks and on busy city streets; their clothes shifted through different historical periods and international styles. In one photograph, Nancy even wore a Japanese kimono.
“Everybody has a picture taken with that costume,” she explained. “People think Japanese women are very gentle, very kind-hearted. They take care of their men.”
The photo borders were decorated with English terms (“tenderness, chic, charming, smart”) and bits of poetry that sounded a lot like pop song lyrics:
I don’t love diamonds you see through
I want you to hold me I want you to be true…
Another photo featured William Jefferson Foster dressed as a Ming dynasty gentleman, fan in hand. I wanna tell you baby the changes I’ve been going through. Another picture showed Nancy Drew in a lovely silk qipao. Missing you listen you. There was a pastoral shot of the couple in modern formal wear, sprawled on a sunny green field. Until you come back to me I don’t know what I’m gonna do.
THE 9/11 VIDEOS were hard to follow. They had been compiled hastily, and it was impossible to tell who had published them; all of the Chinese credits were fake. The DVD—The Century’s Great Catastrophe—consisted mostly of footage taken from ABC News. Occasionally they dubbed in American movie soundtracks; at one point, they played the theme song from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Movie gunfire and explosions accompanied the second plane as it crashed into the World Trade Center. The north tower collapsed, in slow motion, to music from Jaws.
Another video was entitled Surprise Attack on America, and the opening adopted a documentary tone. A voiceover introduced Manhattan and the World Trade Center, and there were scenes from daily life in New York. Businessmen in suits crossed streets; rows of traders stared at computer monitors. Suddenly, an image caught my eye: a banker hurrying from one desk to another, carrying a sheaf of papers. For some reason he looked familiar, and I wondered if he was somebody I had known in college.
I turned to Willy: “Can you play that back?” He fiddled with the remote and then the banker reappeared. He was onscreen for only five seconds, but something clicked in my head: it was a splice from the movie Wall Street.
Hollywood movies kept cropping up in Surprise Attack on America. Sometimes the inserts were so short that I couldn’t tell where they had come from, and the effect was unsettling: a flicker of ambiguity between fact and fiction. Other cut-ins weren’t so subtle. The collapse of the towers was followed by a quick scene from Godzilla in which the monster lays waste to Manhattan. A Chinese commentator intoned: “Only in horror films can we see this kind of destruction…” Abruptly, the video segued to a somber President Bush giving a press briefing. None of his words appeared on the soundtrack; the Chinese commentator spoke instead: “The question remains: Is American democracy safe?” After that, the scene merged into a bombing sequence from Pearl Harbor.
The second half of the video described the history of terrorism. The narrator cited incidents from the past, ranging from the Serbian assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand to the activities of the PLO. Quick scenes flashed by: marching rows of Nazi soldiers, the bombed-out Federal Building in Oklahoma City, a protest in Taiwan. The commentary claimed that terrorism was spawned by a mixture of colonialism and capitalism. “Terrorists are not happy with superpowers like America,” the narrator said. “There are many reasons for their dissatisfaction, and the most important one is that the powerful nations push their principles on other countries.” The film described the aftermath of the 1998 attacks on United States embassies in Africa. America’s retaliation—the unsuccessful bombing raid in Afghanistan—was illustrated by a glimpse of missiles whizzing over San Francisco Bay: a scene from The Rock.
AFTER THE ATTACKS, Phoenix Television had cut advertisements and broadcast live for thirty-six hours. That was the only privately owned Chinese-language news station that broadcast on the mainland, and it was also the only network that covered the event so closely. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation owned 40 percent of Phoenix, which was based in Hong Kong but targeted mainland cable subscribers. The station hoped someday to become the CNN of China. Phoenix’s access to the Chinese market depended on a good relationship with the Communist Party, and sometimes the private station’s coverage was even more nationalistic than that of the government stations. Because of better production values and an ability to respond quickly to breaking news, Phoenix had already distinguished itself, and the station reached an estimated forty-two million households on the mainland.
One of the VCDs that I found in Yueqing had been compiled mostly from Phoenix broadcasts. Whereas the government news had avoided any criticism of America, Phoenix’s tone was completely different. In the hours after the attacks, the station featured a man named Cao Jingxing, who was identified only as a “Political Commentator.” He said, “Why aren’t other countries hated like the United States of America? Let’s try to think about that.” He commented on the hijackings: “Why were the hostages taken so easily? The glory of the Americans was lost in just a few seconds.”
The VCD had been poorly cut, and periodically it shifted abruptly between Chinese commentators and footage from the United States. At a press conference, Bush spoke a sentence—“Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward”—and then disappeared. There was a fragment of a statement from Colin Powell: “Once again we see terrorism, terrorists, people who don’t believe in democracy, people who somehow believe that with the murder of people they can—” Bush again: “Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward.” They played that clip three times, and then the Phoenix commentators reappeared.
The Chinese-language station used Fox footage of New York and Washington, D.C., which was almost as disorienting as the Hollywood cut-ins. The Fox logo appeared in the corner, and the images were the same as the ones that Americans watched, but here the shots were joined by the anti-American commentary in Chinese. I remembered Willy’s comment about the Chinese government being unable to express the way that it really felt. That was politics, but this was business; the media gave the people what they wanted. News Corp. used the same footage to sell patriotism in America and in China, and in both places the people bought it.
WILLY’S CLASSROOM WAS decorated with a Chinese flag and a framed quote from Zhou Enlai: STUDY HARD FOR CHINA’S REVIVAL. The campus was small but neat: new six-story buildings, a rubberized sports field that glistened in the light Zhejiang rain. The hallways were lined with framed examples of children’s artwork. That was unusual in China, where public schools usually decorated with stern portraits of the politically correct: Chairman Mao, Sun Yat-sen, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin. When I asked Willy about the children’s artwork, he told me that it was a type of advertising. “They want the parents to know that it’s a good school,” he said.
One morning, I sat in on his seven-thirty class. They were eighth graders: thirty boys and girls in white uniform shirts and blue pants. Willy stood before them and asked a few simple questions; they answered in English. He said, “The students in the next class, their classroom is like a…”
“Pigsty!” the boys and girls called out in unison, laughing.
“Very good,” Willy said. “Now let’s begin.”
The textbook was Junior English for China, and the day’s lesson had been designed for the new economy. It consisted of a short passage in Special English:
Uncle Wang owns a factory. He opened his factory in 1989. The factory makes ladders. One day, I visited Uncle Wang at his factory…
Willy read the passage aloud, and then he jotted some vocabulary onto the board. He shot me a look.
“Nineteen eighty-nine was an interesting year,” he said. “Some very interesting things happened in Beijing that year. Now, repeat after me…”
None of them caught the allusion, which disappeared into the harmony of reciting voices. Willy turned to one boy: “What are they doing at the factory?”
The boy stood up: “They are seeing the machines.”
“Very good. You may sit down.”
Another student rose; Willy gave me another glance.
“Are they making toothbrushes at the factory?”
“No, they are not,” the boy said.
“What are they making?”
“They are making ladders.”
“Very good. You may sit down.”
For half an hour, the class was taught on two levels. The textbook lesson unfolded—Mr. Wang, ladders, factories, the joys of the export economy—but periodically Willy included some remark that was strictly for my benefit. He dropped English translations of Sichuanese slang; he alluded to shared memories from Fuling. When another part of the lesson mentioned 1989, Willy paused once more. “I wonder if Uncle Wang’s factory was opened in June of 1989?” he said, and then moved on. The students had no idea that a private line of English stretched above their heads, going straight to the foreigner in the back of the classroom.
Traditionally, a Chinese teacher remained behind the lectern, but Willy walked freely among the students. He never spoke in Chinese, but the class kept pace; their English was good. When he pulled out a few of them to act out a dialogue, he added a simple prop: a blindfold. The boys picked up on it quickly, and soon they enacted a blind inspection of Uncle Wang’s ladder factory. The classroom rang with laughter; with five minutes left, Willy closed the textbook and walked between the rows.
“What do your parents do?” he asked a girl.
“They own a factory.”
“What does the factory make?”
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