Oracle Bones (27 page)

She was always hard on herself. When I sent her something that I had written about her Fuling class, she responded:

Speaking of myself, I find it’s the most difficult part to figure out. It seems you understand me more than most of my friends do—I’m just a good tempered or amiable girl in their eyes. But I’m not confident if I’m as respectable as it seems to you. It’s true that I like to be alone. But partly it’s because I don’t know how to join the people; I can’t share their joys and sorrows and cares.

During my time as a teacher, I noticed that the top female students often seemed haunted by a sense of isolation that was rare among the boys. For the most part, the male students were less mature, and even the brightest ones enjoyed clowning around or making crude jokes. A student like Willy seemed to grow up quickly after graduating, but many of the women were already thoughtful during their student years.

One of the best freshman students in the English department had been a quiet girl who kept apart from her peers. Adam had taught her section, and after class she sometimes visited him for extra practice with her English. During the summer vacation, she returned to her hometown and jumped off a bridge. Adam and I never learned much about her death; nobody in the class had been close to her. In China, more women killed themselves than men, and the female suicide rate was nearly five times the world average—the highest of any country in the world. The suicides tended to be women from rural areas who had had some education. They weren’t poor; if anything, the glimpse of a better life seemed to depress them.

Emily had always been well liked by her classmates—she was popular despite her sense of solitude. But I worried about her in Shenzhen, and at the beginning of 2000 her complaints seemed more insistent. For a while, she talked about going into business with Zhu Yunfeng, selling lathe-cutting machinery, but finally they had to abandon the idea; the initial investment was too high. She felt trapped in the factory and the dormitory. In one letter, she reported that she now earned $230 a month, more than double her starting salary. But the money didn’t change anything:

I’m not happy with my job. My head aches sometimes, and mistakes happen often. Although my salary keeps raising, I have no interest in the job any more….

Do you know any kind of jobs that are interesting and do benefit to the whole sociaty? I hope to find one.

EVERY TIME I
visited Shenzhen, I tried to spend time on both sides of the city’s fence. The structure had been erected as a political boundary, but it also served as a cultural divide: frames of reference changed dramatically once you crossed the barrier. In the world “beyond the gates,” Emily and other factory workers often talked about Hu Xiaomei, but the middle- and upper-class residents of downtown Shenzhen rarely mentioned the radio show. A number of them told me that their world was better captured by a novelist named Miao Yong. She had also caught the attention of government censors, who banned her most recent book.

When I telephoned the writer, she suggested that we meet in a trendy Western-style café near her apartment in a downtown high-rise. She was twenty-nine years old, and she was unmarried. She chain-smoked Capri menthol Superslims. She was petite, with medium-length black hair, and she wore heavy makeup around her mouth and eyes. She told me that she admired the translated novels of Henry Miller (“his books were banned, too”).

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 corpo
rate 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.”