Oracle Bones (37 page)
Authors: Peter Hessler
When I am home, nothing has changed and the roads are still rough and people are getting older. It makes me sad that I can not find familiar people or friends who I knew well when I was young. Sometimes I think this kind of life, going out to coastal regions without a stable home is the saddest and the most stressful thing in the world.
Every trip home left him depressed. Back in Yueqing, he would find himself thinking about the dying village, even though he knew it was pointless. During such periods, he found solace in his English studies. The language was a distraction, but he also believed that English sources provided the best guidance for the new environment of Reform and Opening. He carefully followed the Web sites of foreign news organizations, and he read any kind of English advice column. Once he telephoned a medical call-in show at the Voice of America’s Beijing bureau, to ask about how to handle sinus problems. Another time, when the Voice broadcast a program about home-schooling in the United States, Willy jotted careful notes in his journal. He was particularly interested in the idea that public schools might not feel threatened by an alternative education system:
Fifty states 150 children stay home study
their parents are their teachers
as excellent as that in school
stable family
1997 50000$
Reasons: to keep in touch with to satify the need of to prevent the students from being influenced by violence sexual and so on problems with educ
Public school provide the family with help—library even courses
Since leaving college, Willy had broken the spines of three English dictionaries. He still kept the old books lined up on his shelf, the way a good infielder never throws away a worn-out glove. In his spare time, he constantly translated and organized information: Voice of America broadcasts, newspaper stories, vocabulary lists. He often telephoned me with questions, usually about some random word or obscure grammar feature. Sometimes he asked about world events. In November of 2000, when the American presidential election failed to produce a clear winner, Willy called nearly every night with questions about the Electoral College.
He was particularly attuned to the world’s irregularities. In Wenzhou city, the government sponsored a campaign to conserve water, with slogans in English and Chinese. The English translation read:
STOP TO WASTE THE WATER RESOURCE
Willy didn’t think that was correct, and he asked me about it. Whenever he called, I did my best to answer his questions, although I often wondered how he could ever process all of this material. When I asked him about his journals, he told me that he just wanted to keep track of everything. He said that he dreamed of someday creating an English dictionary that contained every word in the language.
boozy—drunk
boorish
bookstall
bookrack
bookmark
booby-prize
In 1998 Bill Clinton had an affair with Monikey Lewinsky and created an unprecend—
Liverpool and London Riot (1981). During the early 1980—streets rioting returned to Britain, reminiscent of the 18th and early 19th centuries; and the first time by rising unemployment.
Before the National Day holiday of 2000, Willy happened to be watching television when the anti-crime rally came on. In many Chinese cities, it was an annual event; offenders were sentenced on live television, in part to deter crime during the holiday. In the past, such rituals had often taken place in sports stadiums, and sometimes the executions were also public. Nowadays, though, only the sentencing was televised.
Willy watched as the criminals were marched forward, one by one: handcuffs, shaved heads, blue-and-white-striped prison outfits. A judge read out each individual’s name, hometown, crime, and sentence. In front of the television, Willy wrote compulsively. Later, when he told me about it, he said that he had been “making statistics.”
“Whenever the judge said somebody’s name and hometown, I wrote it down,” he explained. “Jiangxi province, Sichuan, and Hubei were the most. At the end I figured that 40 percent of the criminals were from Sichuan. It was the biggest percentage. That made me ashamed.”
Another night, Willy and Nancy stayed up long past their usual bedtime, playing the pop song over and over, until finally they had translated the “Twelve Months of Migrant Labor” into English, all the way to the end:
In the twelfth month I returned to my hometown
My parents cried
And together we ate dumplings
How wonderful they tasted.
Dear Peter,
How is it going in Beijing?…I want very much to change my situation here. Nancy and I have both thrown the iron-rice bowls and come here to seek fortune. Situation here is much better than that in my backward and yashua [toothbrush] hometown—Sichuan. However, I can’t see any hope of becoming even a small rich man, making myself and improving myself. Nancy and I both have thought of buying an apartment here. But that’s only a dream. Every cost of the house is 300,000 to 400,000 yuan which we can’t afford to buy. When we are able to buy a new house then we two will have put one foot in the coffin. That’s true. The long-cherished hope of mine is that after we two have enough money, we’ll go back to our hometown and find a stable job for Nancy. And I can do something else but not teaching…. With China’s accession to the WTO and the pending Olympic Games in 2008 I wish that I can have good luck.
In the fall of 2000, Willy entered an English-teaching contest. All across the country, such events had become part of the craze for competition that had swept Chinese education. In Wenzhou, each competitor entered a room full of students, with judges seated in the back. The officials evaluated the lesson plan, as well as the student response.
Willy never became nervous in such situations. After everything else that he had experienced, it seemed easy: The rules were clear, and they were applied to all participants. The judging generally seemed to be fair, and regardless the students were independent. It was impossible to cheat the spontaneous reactions of children.
The Wenzhou competition began with five hundred instructors, and the field was quickly narrowed to sixteen. Willy made the cut. For the finals, everybody traveled to downtown Wenzhou. The other finalists arrived with laptop computers, projection screens, and lesson plans that had been prepared with professional teaching software. Willy was the only competitor who did not have a computer. His materials consisted of things that he had made by hand: a few pictures to illustrate a dialogue, and dozens of little red paper apples. He wrote the English word “poison” on a bottle of water.
“When I taught them the word ‘dangerous,’ I had the bottle of water that I said was poison, and I asked a student to drink it. They thought it was very funny. Then I had them study the dialogue, and I made them very competitive, because they were trying to get red apples. I asked questions, and they got an apple if they were correct. I stood on a chair and shouted the questions. I was just like a commander; they thought that was funny, too.”
It was a stroke of genius—creating a competition within the competition—and Willy walked away with first prize. The tournament awarded him one thousand yuan, which was nearly half of a month’s salary. But he said that the money wasn’t important. His school was proud, and he believed that he had won because nobody else in the competition had cared so deeply about English. In Willy’s mind, he was victorious because of all the lists and transcriptions, the obscure words and the unusual phrases. “It was a good honor,” he said. “I think I won because of my crazy style.”
IN DOUBLE DRAGON
Township, Number Ten Village, Number Three Production Team, one of the first migrants was a man named Liu Chengmin. He had completed the fifth grade, which made him the most literate person of his generation in Number Three. In the early 1980s, he migrated to Heilongjiang province. He spent a number of years working on the assembly line of a shoe factory, and then he returned to his farm.
In the village, Liu Chengmin was widely respected for his intelligence. And people knew that something about the experience abroad had changed the man. He never married, and he lived entirely on his own terms. During the mid-1990s, when the local government exorbitantly increased agricultural taxes, he refused to pay. He explained that his status as a single man merited
preferential treatment: he had no wife or son; everything depended on his own hands. His reasoning was clear, logical, and completely without precedent.
Periodically, rumors swept through the village: officials planned to detain Liu and have him beaten until he agreed to pay the taxes. This was a common procedure for dealing with extreme stubbornness, but nobody ever did anything. Local cadres seemed intimidated by the man’s unpredictability.
During his years of migration, Liu had composed poems about his travels. As a child, Willy enjoyed listening to the verses, and years later, after the boy had grown to become a migrant himself, he could still recall details of Liu’s writing. The poems had been composed in the style of Chairman Mao; often they described natural scenery. One verse celebrated the power of the Yangtze. And Willy remembered the final couplet of a poem about the Snail River, the local stream that passed beneath Victory Bridge:
The river in my hometown is peaceful,
But my heart is not.
TODAY, THE ARCHAEOLOGISTS MAP A WALL OF THE UNDERGROUND
city. The structure isn’t far beneath the surface—about five feet deep—and the work team makes good progress across the yellow fields. There are seventeen men, armed with shovels and Luoyang spades; they work under Jing Zhichun. The young archaeologist believes that this wall may be part of the underground city’s royal district.
In the early afternoon, Jing takes a break, and I interview him in the library of the Anyang Archaeological Work Station. The book-lined room is cool and quiet; we are the only people here. Jing describes some of the artifacts that have been discovered in Anyang, and then, after we finish, he idly points out an enormous old book that happens to be lying on a table in the library. The book’s cover is torn and faded, but the title is clear:
(“
Our Country’s Shang and Zhou Bronzes
Looted by American Imperialists
”)
The author’s name is not listed. The book was published in 1962, edited by the Chinese Institute of Archaeology, and it contains more than eight hundred
black-and-white photographs of bronze vessels. There are squat three-legged
ding
, “cauldrons”; and graceful long-necked
gu
, “chalices”; and spindly-stemmed
jue
, which may have been used for warming wine. Most of the bronzes date to the Shang, and usually they are marked by that culture’s characteristic
taotie
design: a stylized animal mask with curling eyes and mouth. In the past, some experts believed that the mysterious pattern portrayed a dragon; others proposed a tiger, or a crocodile, or a serpent. Some theories link the design to shamanism. But nobody knows for certain, and the
taotie
has slipped free from its meaning—a symbol gone mute.
