Willy and Nancy had decided to return to Sichuan eventually. They weren’t certain when, and it was possible that Nancy and the child would go back together, leaving Willy to work for a while longer in the better economy of Zhejiang. Divided families were common in China, especially among migrants. Most people believed that it was better to raise a child near their hometown, where the culture was familiar and parents and other relatives could help if necessary. Willy and Nancy liked the idea of settling in the small city of Nanchong, which wasn’t far from Willy’s native village. As teachers, they could find work anywhere, and they’d return with plenty of savings, especially if the exam bonus panned out.
The tests were scheduled for two days in June. Over the final weeks, Willy held extra classes, drilling his students, and he kept an ear out for tips about the exam material. Once again, his school bribed the Wenzhou education official, and once again the man gave them nothing but elliptical comments. Willy hated this part of the routine—the leaks invariably favored the public schools, especially the ones in downtown Wenzhou and the bigger cities. But he couldn’t do anything about it, other than become cynical about the system and the nation. In early June, after watching the World Cup, he sent me an e-mail:
I am very glad that China Soccer Team was defeated by Costa Rica. During the two halves I cheered for Costa Rica it was just because I was once a spanish learner. Chinese players will be ashamed of it’s shitting performance on the court.
After the first day of exams, the father of a student approached Willy. The man seemed nervous, and he asked to speak privately. Once they were alone, he revealed his tip: a reliable source had told him that Beethoven and Bill Gates would appear on tomorrow’s English test.
Willy walked a safe distance from the school and found a photocopy shop. From his students’ textbook, he copied two passages, each of which profiled a famous foreigner. That afternoon, he gave his students strict instructions: study this, and don’t breathe a word to anybody else.
The following day, the exam’s reading comprehension section included a direct excerpt from Lesson 90, in the distinctive cadence of Special English:
Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1955. He grew up in Seattle, Washington. Bill Gates was named William Henry after his father and grandfather. He was a very clever boy….
When he was 13 years old, Bill started to play with computers. At that time, computers were very large machines. Once he was interested in a very old computer. He and some friends spent lots of time doing unusual things with it. In the end, they worked out a software program with the old machine. Bill sold it for 4,200 dollars when he was only 17….
Bill married Melinda French on January 1, 1994. They have two children, a daughter and a son. Bill enjoys reading very much. He also enjoys playing golf and bridge.
Do you want to be a person like Bill Gates? Why or why not?
Later that summer, when the examination results came out, Willy’s students scored the highest of any class in the school. The headmaster rewarded Willy with a bonus of six thousand yuan—roughly two months’ salary. He might have done even better, but it turned out that Beethoven had been a false lead.
IN THE SPRING of 2002, Emily decided to spend a semester outside of Shenzhen. She came to Beijing, where she enrolled in a private English course in the university district. During the weekends, she sometimes visited me downtown, and we had lunch and went sightseeing. One afternoon, she stopped by my apartment to pick up a copy of the article that I had written about her for the New Yorker. She had read an early draft, to help me fact-check, but this was the first time she had seen the published version. Of course, like anything written about China, certain details had already become historical. Nowadays, citizens could enter Shenzhen without the special border passes, and the government was discussing the possibility of tearing down the city’s fence. Another era had passed for the Overnight City.
Emily sat on my couch and opened to the first page, which featured an artist’s sketch of her. Laughing, she covered her mouth: “The face is so big!”
The artist had worked closely from a photograph: the high cheekbones, the rounded mouth. A vague outline of factory dormitories rose in the background. She turned to the next page, where there was a typical New Yorker cartoon: a couple arrived at a dinner party; the caption read: “‘Please forgive us for being so late—we had parking issues.’”
She leafed through the magazine, pausing every once in a while to study something: a detail in the article, a cartoon, a poem. After she finished, we went out to a park, and I asked her if there had been anything in the article that she disagreed with.
“I think you were too critical of the boss,” she said.
I replied that she had never spoken positively of him, especially after all of his attempts to sleep with the young women in his factory.
“I know,” she said. “I didn’t like him. But I knew there was nothing he could do to me. The more I think about it, the more I feel sorry for him. He was pathetic.”
IN FULING, EMILY had been one of my most motivated students, the kind of person who was full of questions about American culture. Back then, she had always seemed to be searching for something: once, she sent a letter to the Country Music Association, in Nashville, Tennessee, because she was curious to know what country music was like. (They never responded.) Her journal entries were usually the most thoughtful in the class. As a teacher, I had hoped that she could find some way to continue her education.
In Beijing, though, she seemed distracted, and I sensed that she wasn’t particularly engaged in her English studies. It reminded me of something she had written for my class back in 1996, a story about her sister’s decision to move to Shenzhen:
Now my sister has been in that prosperous city for five months. I wonder if she still remembers that conversation, and if she is still full of energy.
Several times, she told me that the emptiness of the future depressed her. In the Overnight City, she had succeeded—she had a good teaching job at the private school, and her boyfriend was doing well at the appliance factory. At twenty-five, she had reached the age when most of her friends were marrying, buying apartments, and raising their only child. But for some reason she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She had trouble explaining herself; whenever we talked about it, she could say only that normal life seemed bleak and petty—a steady accumulation of possessions. She hated the way that people in Shenzhen thought constantly about real estate, buying an apartment and then trading up, and then doing it all over again. It was the worst of both worlds: trapped in these little spaces that you owned, but with the insecurity of constantly trying to move into the next one.
Her younger brother had never been able to hold down a regular job, because of his psychological troubles, and this weighed heavily on her. A while back, she had asked me for the phone number of Hu Xiaomei, the Shenzhen radio show host. Emily promised that she’d use it only in an emergency. In Beijing, she told me that she had finally called the woman last year, when her brother was going through a particularly bad spell.
“Was she helpful?” I asked.
“Yes,” Emily said. “We talked about it and she made me feel better.”
“Did she give you any advice?”
“She told me to have confidence in myself,” Emily said.
In Emily’s opinion, her brother would have been fine if others had been more accepting of his differences. In high school, people had labeled him as strange, and the teachers had allowed the other students to bully him. She asked me how disabilities were handled in the United States, and I gave her some articles about the issue. But mostly I felt helpless; her world had become far more complicated than the one we had known in Fuling.
I thought that it might help for her to talk with other foreigners, and in Beijing I introduced her to a Chinese-American friend named Mimi Kuo. That June, while I was on a trip to the States, Mimi sent me an e-mail: “I saw Emily the other day and she seemed to be doing ok. We ha
d a nice afternoon—she came over for lunch and we hung out for a while, talking and listening to music (she wanted to know what country music was like).”
A couple of days later, Emily wrote:
Mr. Hessler,
How’s everything going?
I visited Mimi on Sunday and had a very good time talking with her. She has the nature of putting people at ease, I think. We chatted about a lot of things, including “Country Music,” which I found quite different from what I had imagined. I had literally taken it for granted that Country Music was about flowers, grass, brooks, sunshine, country people and their plain love, and everything beautiful and happy.
That summer, she returned to Shenzhen, but she didn’t marry and she didn’t buy an apartment. She worked for another year, studied in her spare time, and tested into graduate school in Chongqing. It was a new program that trained teachers to work with disabled children. When Emily called to tell me that she had been accepted, it was the happiest she had sounded in years.
ONCE, WHILE SHE was still working in Shenzhen, Emily had written a letter that mentioned my research for the magazine article:
Your appearance lightened up my college life. It’s you that let me know that a teacher could get along with his students that way. You never know how much fun I took in reading your feedback in my journal book. It could ease my worries and make me think.
I always enjoy talking with you, you are the one who knows my everything…. But everytime you went back to Beijing [after reporting in Shenzhen], I felt the panic of hollowness. As if I had given everything out but gotten nothing in return.
When I had first arrived in Beijing, the transition from teacher to writer hadn’t seemed so difficult. The basic role was similar: I was the outsider who sifted information between worlds. But over the years, as I thought about what Emily had written, I realized that there would always be something unnatural about being a foreign correspondent. As a teacher, I had taken information from far away—American culture, English literature—and introduced it to a classroom of living Chinese students.
But a writer’s work moved in the opposite direction. I started with living people and then created stories that were published in a distant country. Often, the human subjects of my articles couldn’t even understand the language in which they were written. From my perspective, the publishing world was so remote that it seemed half real. Once a year, I visited editors in New York, and I rarely heard anything from readers of the magazine. Usually, I wrote only two or three articles a year, which was adequate to live simply in a country like China. The fee for a single published word in the New Yorker—more than two dollars—was enough to buy lunch in Beijing. With one long sentence, I could eat for a week. Those were the exchanges of a freelance foreign correspondent: people and places were distilled into words, and the words were sold.
Whenever I received copies of my New Yorker articles, I found myself flipping through the pages, thinking about the gap between the world where I lived and the world where I published. I traded on that gap—that was my margin, and the advertisements reflected the breadth of the divide. In one published story, anecdotes about Fuling students were interspersed with ads for Orb Silversmiths, the Tribeca Grand Hotel, and Wildflower Log Homes (“lots starting at 49k”). The article about Polat was entitled “The Middleman,” and it began with the sentence, “You can buy anything in Yabaolu.” On the facing page, an ad said:
Every year the world’s leaders join 400 of the brightest
business students at the Yale School of Management to
discuss the challenges and opportunities
facing business and society today.
Be a part of it.
More than a year after Beijing won the right to host the 2008 Olympics, I received an e-mail from the daughter of Driver Yang. I had written about him in the New Yorker, too. His daughter went by the English name Cindy, and she was enrolled in a graduate program in engineering at the National University of Singapore. She wrote: “Do you know Sinapore English is difficult to understand. We call it Senglish. when I talk with Sinaporean I always can not understand enough them. I hope can improve my English via communicating with you.”
It was hard to believe that the simple man in his surplus military uniform had a daughter who had gone abroad to study. When I asked about her work with computer languages, she responded:
All my work is under Linux, because under Linux the graph is more stable. Now I am doing my project about mixed reality. The meaning is virtual reality and augmented reality mixed together. I work in a special room. On the top of this room have the tracking system. They can send ultrasonics, and same time if take a wand the tracking system can find track your position. Because the wand can receive the ultrasonics….
So in my project I and my friend will to go virtual world from augmented world to rescue our friend. We will have a fight with the enemy in the virtual world. If we win we can take our friend to come back the augmented world. I am very interested in my research work.
EVERY SEMESTER, I sent off one hundred letters to my former students, and every year I made at least one trip back to Fuling. Sometimes I visited former students in the schools where they now taught—remote places where the schoolchildren gathered around, wide-eyed and laughing, amazed at the visitor. Often they had studied English for four or five years without setting eyes on a foreigner.
I wrote the letters and made the trips because I enjoyed going back, but it was also a way of reminding myself of the limitations of a foreign correspondent. The distance was unavoidable; that was the nature of writing and you had to find ways to balance it. And I always remembered that there was at least one faith that connected the teacher and the writer. Whenever a person studied another language, and went to another place—or even imagined it—there was a chance that he would gain a new perspective. He might misinterpret information, and the material might confuse him; I had seen that happen time and time again. But if there were patience and determination and honesty, then a glimpse outside might help somebody become more comfortable with his place in the world.
In 2001, the Chinese Ministry of Education published a plan to expand the study of English. The subject would become compulsory from the third grade on; eventually, more than two hundred million Chinese children would be studying English, as well as every Chinese college student. (In contrast, less than 9 percent of American undergrads are enrolled in a foreign-language course.) In the new Chinese curriculum, the ministry emphasized the usual reasons for studying English, namely to prepare young people for interacting with the outside world. But the curriculum also noted that teaching the foreign language would “develop individuality.”
In Beijing, I met with a ministry official named Zhang Lianzhong to talk about the new plan. He had attended graduate school in England, and he spoke fondly about his years abroad. When I asked him about that word—“individuality”—he acknowledged that it was a new concept in Chinese education. “It’s like the French idea of humanism,” he said. “In the document, we never use the word ‘individualism,’ because that has negative connotations in China. So we go around it. We say that learning a foreign language can help develop independent people. We want to emphasize the uniqueness of each person.”
Over the years, I received hundreds of letters from Sichuan and Chongqing. Former students wrote, but it was even more common to receive letters from their own students. The postmarks came from all over, a blur of tiny villages and forgotten townships, but each child used the language in her own distinct way:
I have made some progress in English. But I find some idioms and useful expressions hard to learn. For example “have a cold” and “catch a cold.” “Have a cold” is something you have and “catch a cold” is something you do. First you must catch a cold. Could you give me some advice? Please?
My aunt even told me that I must study English hard. If I study it well, I can go to the capital of Norway—Olso. I want to learn English better in order to g
o to Olso. But I’m worrying about if I can learn it well. I hope you hepe me. And give me some advices.
I’m a Chinese girl and studing in No. 1 Middle School of Xiushan in ChongQing. Your student Zeng Bing is my English teacher. I’m sixteen years old, but I only 1.45 metres tall. Some classmats laughed at me, but I didn’t angry. I’ll say to them, I’m encapsulate prime. I think this is self-confidence. I need it, because self-confidence is first cecret of success!
IN OCTOBER OF 2002, William Jefferson Foster purchased a new notebook for his Voice of America journal. The entries became longer and more detailed, and then, in November, they gained a new element:
November 2, 2002
“And in the name of freedom, the United States of America will lead a coalition to disarm him.”
An American worker can make 25 cars a year compared to 1.5 cars by a Chinese counterpart.
November 10, 2002
My daughter was born at 2:25 PM in Yueqing. I am too excited.
Phillipphines. A small plane crashed today early before it took off killing at least 14 people on board….
November 14, 2002
My daughter is fine today. Mum told me she cried for a short time last night. She enjoyed milk very much and had much. She is lovely.
…. The announcement came during the closing session of the 16th communist party congress…. Chinese officials in Xinhua News Agency confirmed that Chinese president Jiang Zemin is retiring….
UN Secretary general Koffi Anna says Iraq’s cooperations with weapons inspectors on the ground is a big issue.
November 19, 2002
Today I don’t have many classes. My daughter is pretty fine. Nancy and I have finally decided her name in Chinese—Dai Yuecan. Which means that she was born on a Sunday. She will have a promising future and she will be happy all her life. Several of my collegues come to see my daughter. They speak highly of her. I’m very happy.
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