Oracle Bones (35 page)

BY ONE O’CLOCK
it was over. The police had successfully herded the tourists and journalists to the peripheries, and the Square was dead silent—an estimated three hundred people had been arrested. But it’s hard to count with your hands in your pockets.

The last vehicles were the street sweepers. They sprayed water beneath revolving brushes that cleaned up the flyers and the blood. On the side, an English brand name had been painted in blue letters onto steel: China Tianjin Sweeper Special Automobile Company, Ltd. It was a beautiful autumn day; the sky was high and blue and there was not a cloud in sight. That was the first anniversary of China’s anti-cult law.

11

Sichuanese

November 2000

WHENEVER WILLIAM JEFFERSON FOSTER AND NANCY DREW FELT
homesick, they listened to the song together. The tune was familiar from childhood, when it had been known as “Wang Erxiao.” That song’s hero was an eleven-year-old boy who lived in the north of China during the Japanese occupation. One day, Japanese soldiers forced Wang Erxiao to serve as their local guide, but the boy led the enemy straight into an ambush. The Communist Party’s Eighth Route Army slaughtered the invaders. Wang died in the battle, but the boy was immortalized in verses to be sung by millions of Chinese schoolchildren.

During the Reform era, a pop singer named Chi Zhiqiang rewrote the song for the new economy. The Japanese disappeared, and so did the war; the boy-hero became an adult laborer from Sichuan. Migration replaced invasion, and the song received a new title: “Twelve Months of Migrant Labor.”

In the first month I left my hometown

Together with my friend Li Zhiqiang

We spent two days on the train to Guangzhou

And in the second month we met a man from our hometown

He was working in a toy factory…

In the third month, the narrator hears about a migrant who became rich:

And I thought that once he had been just like me

In the fourth month, he loses contact with his friend Li Zhiqiang; in the fifth month, he sweats through hot days of construction work. He gets paid in the sixth month:

My heart was trembling when I got the money

In one month I had made seven hundred yuan

I could see the light at the end of the tunnel

In the seventh month I sent a letter to my parents

And gave them a few hundred yuan

I thought about how happy they’d be…

After Willy and Nancy left Sichuan without telling her parents, they didn’t return home for a long time. They weren’t willing to face the elders until they had some success, which wasn’t going to happen in Mr. Wang’s fraudulent school. Fortunately, Willy’s second job in Yueqing turned out much better. Yueqing was a satellite city of Wenzhou, which was famous for its rapid development. The private school was well run, and eventually the administrators hired Nancy; every month the young couple was able to save most of their salary. But there was still something awful about spending an entire year away from home, especially through the holidays:

During the Mid-Autumn Festival the moon was bright

And the fat foreman sent us a case of beer

He told us not to miss our families

And he said that here was the same as home…

The young couple finally made it back to Sichuan for the second summer vacation. In eighteen months, they had saved more than thirty thousand yuan, or nearly four thousand American dollars. Their combined salary had risen to almost five hundred dollars a month. That was more than enough to inspire forgiveness in the hearts of Nancy’s parents, whose farming income barely exceeded two hundred dollars a year. They welcomed the young couple as warmly as if they had left on the best of terms.

To Willy, it seemed remarkable—people in the countryside adjusted so quickly. In Nancy’s village, virtually everybody from the younger generation had migrated to the factory towns, and the older people depended largely on wages that were sent home. The region was sprinkled with half-finished houses: the first story was complete, and people already lived there, but above them the bare frame for the second or third level rose like a skeleton. If migrants were lucky, they could add a story in a year. And if luck turned bad—well, then their elders waited patiently in half a home.

In the ninth month, disaster struck—

A brick injured my hand

I hadn’t thought the foreman would fire me

But he gave me a little money and let me go….

IN THE PAST,
Sichuan had been the most populous province in China, with a geography that seemed designed for a Malthusian rise and fall. At the heart of Sichuan lay the Chengdu Basin, a fertile region of rivers and plains that naturally sustained a large population. (Sanxingdui is located on the western edge of this basin.) But the basin was ringed by mountains, which meant that conditions quickly deteriorated once the population passed a certain point. The landscape first nurtured and then it punished; success led to competition, and then competition became hopeless. There were millions of Sichuanese who simply needed to go elsewhere. But for decades the Communist Party’s planned economy restricted individual movement, and there weren’t any boomtowns in those days anyway. The rural Sichuanese, like others in the Chinese interior, waited in poverty until Deng Xiaoping finally threw open the economy.

Seven hundred miles to the east, the people in Zhejiang province also waited, but under vastly different natural conditions. Much of their land was poor—in the Wenzhou region, less than a fifth of the soil was arable. Mountains prevented early road links with the rest of China, and the natives had naturally turned to the sea. For centuries, they had been successful merchants, and many of them traveled abroad and established businesses in other countries. But after 1949, the Communist Party put an end to the private trade and the overseas contacts. The government was particularly concerned about Taiwan, which was only two hundred miles off the coast. Wenzhou became part of a buffer zone: Like Shenzhen, it was deliberately left undeveloped, with few state-owned enterprises. As a result, when the Reform period began, there wasn’t much industry in Wenzhou that needed to be restructured, and the human population was like a coiled spring. Their native business skills had been suppressed for almost thirty years.

The people didn’t start with much money, and the government never granted the special economic privileges of cities such as Shenzhen. But that wasn’t necessary in Wenzhou, whose most valuable capital was instinct and overseas connections. In the early 1980s, families opened small-scale workshops, often with less than a dozen workers. They made small things: parts of shoes, pieces of clothes, bits of plastic. Over time, the factories expanded, but
the products stayed small. Wenzhou became one of the largest producers of buttons in the world. Low-voltage electronic parts were a specialty. They made shoe soles and they made pistons. They made cigarette lighters, and then they made more cigarette lighters. By the year 2000, between 60 and 70 percent of the world’s lighters came from Wenzhou.

The city’s economy was almost entirely private, and as living standards rose, Wenzhou and other Zhejiang cities needed laborers, assembly line workers, secretaries, and teachers. Sichuan was a perfect match, and it wasn’t surprising that Zhejiang companies often recruited in places like Fuling. A number of my best students headed east, and one of the first things they noticed were the regional disparities. One former student named Shirley accepted a job in Yuhuan, the island off the Zhejiang coast, and she described her trip in a letter:

It was the longest journey in my passed life. We were told that we were going to the “advanced region” to “do pioneering work.” Reasonably speaking we should be excited. But I didn’t have such feeling. On my whole way to Yuhuan I was unespectedly calm.

We left Chongqing by train in the afternoon of July 5. When the train drove for nearly one day, I found a father with his baby. When I first saw them, I was shocked. It’s because of the baby. It’s such a tiny thing. His father said he was 70 days. But I thought he was not more than 10 days. It was so small, black and thin, I was sure I met the child from the kingdom of dwarfs. I can say it’s a typical example of malnutrition….

The poor little thing cause much interest and care from people. Some kind people gave many help to the helpless father to quiet the child. But it didn’t work. At the same time the child caused many guesses: “Where is the baby’s mother?” Someone said his mother must have run away, leaving the husband with the child. Someone guessed the father and the mother must have quarreled. At last people decided determine that the baby was an illegitimate child. The train was driving ahead with a high speed. The guess and discussions were going on. The baby’s cry was resounding in the train.

Shirley’s journey took three days, by boat and train and bus. On the final leg, she met a young man who was a native of the island. In a letter to Adam, she described her fear of being perceived as yet another poor migrant:

Then he asked me where I was from. I didn’t tell him the truth, because I was told before that people of Yuhuan had strong ideas of excluding outsiders. I made up a story about my identity. I told him that I was borned in Yuhuan, but I lived in Sichuan from childhood. I seldom went home so I was not familiar with Zhejiang. Fancy his believing it! Actually my story was far from perfect. It’s so clumsy that I couldn’t answer, “Which village I was born in,” and I couldn’t understand the dialect. Seeing I have no way to explain these, he helped me, “You lived in Sichuan for so many years. It’s not strange that you can’t remember these things so many years ago.” He warmly introduced many things of Yuhuan to me, and gave me much advice on how to be used the life of Yuhuan, how to work in Yuhuan.

Compared with his honest and enthusiasm I regreted telling lies to an honest person. He was the first native of Yuhuan I met. From him I couldn’t see any bad characteristic that I was told before. I remembered that the people here were told to be unbelievable, but the true story had proved that I was the one who was unbelievable.

In the following weeks, I was busy with another things and didn’t care about this story. But later, when I calmed down I would remember it and blame myself. Many times I wanted to telephone the boy to tell him the truth (He gave me his number). But I never did that because I’m not brave enough. I’m a cowerd.

Adam, these stories are the ones that touch me deepest and make deepest impression on me. All of them are true.

Not long after settling into her new job, she wrote me a letter:

Peter, till now I never get the feeling of living in a completely different place. It’s not good to feel. I can understand now what you and Adam said to us before. You said you are foreigners and that makes difference in people’s heart. For the native, you are a stranger. It’s hurt because they didn’t group you in their group. You can’t understand what they said. So the feeling of home clings to you so naturally.

Here we can’t understand what the natives said. Their dialects are strange to us, because their tone and rhythm are so far different from ours. We can only speak standard Chinese but some natives can’t understand standard Chinese, especially the old and uneducational people.

IT SEEMED THAT
almost every student who left home wrote me a letter like that. The difficulties of adjustment took them by surprise; they had never
imagined that they could feel like foreigners in their own country. But China is enormous, and it has the linguistic diversity of a continent rather than a country. The official spoken language is
putonghua
, or “common speech,” which in English is also known as Mandarin. Mandarin is the native tongue for people in Beijing and other parts of northern China, and it’s the official language for schools, government bureaus, and most television and radio stations.

But hundreds of millions of Chinese grow up speaking something entirely different. The Chinese call these tongues
fangyan
: often the word is translated as “dialect,” although literally it means “speech of a place.” In fact,
fangyan
are often different spoken languages. The
fangyan
spoken in Beijing and Canton, for example, are actually languages as distinct as English and German. Linguists sometimes compare the diversity of spoken Chinese to that of the major Romance tongues. In addition, there are the languages of the other major ethnic groups—Uighurs, Tibetans, Mongolians.

Among the Chinese, Wenzhou is notorious for having some of the most difficult
fangyan
. Within the city, different regions have distinct sub-
fangyan
, and none of these tongues is similar to Mandarin. Even somebody like Shirley—a young woman naturally gifted with languages—could only pick up the basics. Nearly half a year after moving to the Wenzhou area, she wrote:

Coming to Zhejiang for many months, I have been used to many things here. I can understand some of simple sentences the natives say. I can basically deal with the trouble happened when went to the food market.