God's Double Agent (5 page)

There was one loud speaker in our whole village, high on a hill, and its sound wafted all the way through the town. It was the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, and every morning I’d skip breakfast, run out into the yard, and lean on a tree to hear the news more clearly. Some days, if the wind was blowing, I’d leave the yard and walk toward the speaker until I no longer had to strain to make out the words. Each morning, I practically memorized all of the news. This made me very popular, because I was able to tell people what was going on.

My headmaster had access to a newspaper called
Cankao Xiaoxi
, or
Reference News
, which was the only legal way for government officials of a certain rank to get a glimpse of foreign media. The paper was a digest of carefully selected articles from the
New York Times
, the Associated Press, and the UPI. The government didn’t want its citizens to read the articles and start getting crazy ideas about things like “democracy” or “liberty.”

One day, I was in my headmaster’s office, which also doubled as his living quarters. We were always supervised closely because the headmaster lived right there in the middle of campus. That’s when I noticed a copy of
Reference News
on his desk.

“What’s that?” I asked casually when he caught me eyeing it.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” he said, snatching it off the table and sticking it under his bed. From that moment on, I thought of nothing more. If I could get my hands on that newspaper, I would know the truth about what was going on in the world—the real details that the Communist mouthpiece would never relay. Now that I knew he had the newspaper and where he hid it, I waited for an opportunity to get the paper for myself. Two days later, I noticed the headmaster leaving his office and grabbed a friend who was walking down the hall.

“Will you do me a favor?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said.

“Okay. Stand right here and keep a lookout. If you see the headmaster, cough really loud.”

I could tell my friend was seriously rethinking his offer to help. I patted him on the back and said, “It’ll be okay!”

Before he could protest, I disappeared into the headmaster’s office. My heart raced as I went straight to his bed. It was made up tightly, and I hoped he wouldn’t be able to tell there’d been a disturbance. I slid my hand under the mattress and felt around until my hand landed on the newspaper.

I pulled it out and read the headlines quickly because I knew I needed to get out of there soon. Who knew if my friend was
even still in the hall keeping watch? However, the idea of getting news—true, unfiltered, honest news—was too much to resist. I scanned the first page, rolled up the newspaper, put it under my jacket, and slipped out the door.

When my friend saw me, he exhaled the breath he’d been holding the entire time.

“What were you doing in there?” he asked.

“The less you know the better off you’ll be.”

Seeing the lump under my jacket, his eyes grew wide. “Did you steal something? What have you gotten me into?”

I opened up my jacket and let him see the
Cankao Xiaoxi
.

“You risked expulsion for that?” he asked.

He rolled his eyes and walked off. I, on the other hand, felt like I’d found a treasure. I ran back to my room, sat on my bed, and read the newspaper cover to cover. I memorized every article and was careful not to smear or soil the pages. I was pretty sure the headmaster didn’t read it, because the papers never lost their crisp crease. However, I didn’t want to take any chances.

The next day, I casually walked the hall outside of the headmaster’s office and slipped in while he was at lunch. Once again, I lifted his carefully made-up mattress and slid the newspaper back into place. It was as if nothing had happened.

Once I had of taste of true news, I was never again satisfied with the Communist propaganda. Every week I was at school, I visited the headmaster’s office, stole his newspaper, memorized it, and returned it. I could name most of the world leaders, where they governed, when they were visiting China, and who they were meeting. I could even regurgitate what was going on in England, America, and Cambodia. Gradually, as I became more and more certain that he never opened his papers, I got more bold. I began cutting out clippings that detailed how other countries ran businesses. I was especially interested in restaurants and the way the West ran them so cleanly and proficiently. One day, I thought, I’d run a restaurant too—American style.

During my second year of high school, one article really got my attention. While sitting on my bed one morning, I read that tens of thousands of Chinese university students were protesting in Hefei City’s main square. They did a sit-in at government offices and carried banners that demanded, “Give Us Freedom” and “Long Live Democracy.” The Chinese government wasn’t sure if they should crack down on the protestors or let them speak.

I stuffed the paper into my jacket and ran to my class. My fellow students were already memorizing English vocabulary when I burst into the room.

“Listen to this,” I said, pulling the headmaster’s paper out. “There are protests in Shanghai!” I read them the whole editorial about this major event. “Can you believe it? Students are demanding freedom and democracy on the streets!”

A girl in the back of the class got up to sharpen her pencil. Someone else sitting in the front row yawned, reopened his book, and went back to his work.

With all of this news bouncing around in my head, I was brimming with ideas—some of which were probably wild and crazy. However, I really wanted a way to host a conversation in our school. There had to be some students who cared about world events who would join me. Over the course of the year, I took notice of people who seemed to care about international issues. When I found enough people, I gathered a group of likeminded students, from both younger and older grades, and made a proposition.

“I want to start a school newspaper,” I said. “All you’ll need to do is write and edit the articles. Leave the rest to me!”

Surprisingly, they did. Within a week, I had several high-quality articles—and absolutely no way to publish them. After all, China wasn’t a hotbed of free speech and my communist school certainly had no reason to permit, let alone facilitate, such a publication. That’s when I remembered that two of my
old friends from elementary school worked for the government township. Every township had a secretary’s office to help process messages from the leader. And every secretary’s office had typewriters.

I practically ran to the township office, carrying my stack of articles.

“Look at all these,” I said to my old friends. “Can you help me get these published?” Perhaps needing to add a little excitement to their jobs, they took on the challenge. Somehow, they convinced the township secretaries to type the articles, format them, and even print them out on some very old-fashioned paper.

I named our school newspaper
The Green Leaf
. I was the executive director, another student was the editor-in-chief, and my friends from elementary school were the “publishers.” I like to joke that
The Green Leaf
was my first nonprofit organization, one that I managed to get completely funded by communists.

However, we weren’t concerned about only politics. Since our school was located in the capital of the county, we had the chance to go to the theater to see movies. One memorable movie was a romance film that, by today’s standards, probably would’ve been rated PG-13. The headmaster didn’t want us thinking about romance, so he absolutely forbade us from seeing it. This, of course, made us want to see it even more. But our history teacher seemed very progressive and modern, so we figured she might be willing to help us.

“This movie ban is a little heavy-handed,” I said aloud in class, hoping she could hear me. When she didn’t correct me, I approached her privately after class.

“A bunch of us want to see that movie,” I whispered. “Are you willing to help us?”

“Next Tuesday night, the headmaster has an off-campus dinner he has to attend.” She smiled as she whispered back. “He won’t even be on campus.”

Consequently, on Tuesday night we wore dark clothes and
headed out. When we got to the school gate, it was locked for the evening, so all of us climbed over the wall, saw the movie, and climbed back over the wall undetected.

Sometimes my extracurricular activities impacted my studies, but I always made excellent grades. My biggest assignment was my senior thesis, which was supposed to detail my future occupational aspirations. Did I want to become an astronaut, an engineer, or a physician? Well, the senior thesis gave me the chance to research various fields of study, explore my options, and ultimately declare my intention. I rode my bicycle through several villages and interviewed all types of people: doctors, farmers, and workers. Ultimately, my thesis was simply a report of my findings of how things worked in the villages. In my hometown village, for example, I discovered that everyone had been experiencing electricity problems. During the day, when they needed electricity, it was off. Before they went to sleep, when they didn’t need power, it was on.

Those are the types of problems I thought should be documented, and hopefully fixed.

“What’s going on with the electricity?” I asked several villagers.

“It’s on one minute and off the next,” a frustrated farmer told me. “But it’s almost always off during the Spring Festival.” This season, of course, is when family members living away from home come back to celebrate. It’s the busiest time for airports, train stations, bus stations, and stores as people bustle to get to their families for the festival.

“That’s the worst time to be without electricity,” I said.

“That’s why it goes out,” he said.

“How long does it take to come back on?” I asked.

“Oh, it comes back on immediately,” he explained, shaking his head. “After we bribe the utility officials.”

I was aghast. Corruption in a state-run industry? As I heard this, it struck me. People who had authority, even a relatively insignificant party secretary or an electricity official, acted like
they were upper class and treated anyone they considered beneath them condescendingly.

“How much does it cost to turn the electricity back on?” I asked incredulously.

“One tractor load of eggs.”

As I child, I hated being despised by everyone above me in the social structure and was on a perpetual search for equality. As I stood there listening to this tale of bribery, I wondered,
Could it be the problem is not poverty, but corruption within the system?

This new information would be great for my thesis, but I wasn’t content to merely get a good grade. I also wanted things to change, to put an end to this injustice. I didn’t know it yet, but bribery was very common in China. Anytime local officials were in charge of permits and approvals, they expected cash or gifts to help speed up the process. But as a naïve high school student, I was convinced the government would be horrified to learn of this corruption.

“Dear Party Secretary,” I wrote. “In our village, we don’t have electricity. I’ve learned the city electricity company turns the power off when the village needs it the most, and then demands one tractor of eggs to turn it back on. Please investigate to find the wrongdoer and put an end to this corruption.”

Of course, this was just one of my findings. By the time it was my turn to present my thesis to the class, I’d talked to people from all walks of life and made policy recommendations for agricultural, medical, and industrial reform. I stood at the front of the class and read from my big stack of papers, which included about thirty proposals for cultural change.

“I know these plans can’t be accomplished now,” I said in closing, much to the relief of my bored classmates. “But these things
can
be accomplished with reform over time. In order for
it to be fulfilled,” I paused for dramatic effect, “I need to be the first democratically elected Prime Minister.”

My friends laughed at my unbridled ambition.

“I mean, in twenty years or so,” I hedged.