River Town (38 page)

The going rate for a second child was more than ten thousand yuan, at least in the countryside close to the college. In the city it was rare that anybody got to the point where she paid this fine—if a woman was pregnant with her second child, she would be threatened with the loss of her job. If she didn't work for a state-run
danwei
, there were other ways of applying pressure, and having a second child could result in a woman's being forced to undergo sterilization surgery.

Most of the city residents seemed accustomed to the planned-birth policy, accepting its implications without complaint. After all, they spent every day negotiating Fuling's crowded streets and sidewalks, which made the need for population control easy to understand. But attitudes were different in the countryside. Out there you
could dodge the authorities, and the Chinese had a phrase for this evasion—
Chaosheng Youjidui
, “Guerrilla Birth Team.” A woman might go live with relatives until she had the baby, and then she would return home and pay the fine. It wasn't so common close to the city, where the authorities could control things tightly, but the average family size increased as you went farther into the hills.

Once I was on the bus with a peasant woman who was returning from market, and we had the same simple conversation that I had with so many of the dialect speakers. She asked me how much money I made, and where I was from, and why I had come to such a lousy place as Fuling. This was a common theme in my conversations—people always wondered why a self-respecting
waiguoren
would live in a place like Fuling for one thousand yuan a month. I had no answer for that; I wasn't about to tell them the truth, that Fuling's imperfections were part of why I liked the city so much, and that I felt rich precisely because I made so little money that I didn't have to worry about saving anything.

I told the woman that I had been sent to Fuling by the U.S. government, which was the simplest way to explain my situation—everybody in China understood what it meant when a government decided where you worked. I asked the woman about her family, and she said she had two children, a daughter and a young son.

“But don't you have trouble if you have two children?” I asked.

“Yes, but not too much. We had to pay a fine.”

“How much for your son?”

“Four thousand yuan.”

“That's not as much as people pay now, is it?”

“No. Nowadays they pay more than ten thousand. For us it wasn't so much.”

“That's good,” I said.

“It was cheaper back then,” she said nostalgically. “In those days the fines weren't so bad.”

“Can you save four thousand yuan in a year?”

“Unless it's a bad year.”

“So that's not too much at all.”

“No,” she said. “It wasn't.”

The woman sat there smiling, thinking about the four-thousand-
yuan son who was waiting for her at home. She arranged the things in her bamboo basket and turned to me again.

“Do you have a planned-birth policy in your country?”

“No.”

“So how many children can you have?”

“As many as we want.”

“Really?”

“Really,” I said. “If you want to have ten children, you can have ten. There's no limit. But most people only have two, because that's all they want.”

The woman smiled wistfully, shaking her head. I wondered what amazed her more—that there was a country where birth wasn't limited, or that Americans were so foolish as to want only two children. Many of the peasants I met seemed inclined to go with the second viewpoint, and sometimes they had the same reaction to American farming, which to a Sichuanese peasant seemed to be an incredible combination of luck and incompetence. They found it remarkable that the average farmer in a state like Missouri had 292 acres of land, as well as mechanized equipment and the occasional government subsidy, and yet there were still years when it was difficult to make ends meet. As far as the peasants were concerned, you had to be a particularly bad farmer to ruin a setup like that, just as you had to be particularly foolish to respond to complete procreative freedom by having just two children.

My students were part of the last peasant generation whose fines had been minimal. The second-year speaking class had thirty-five students, of whom only two were single children. Those two were free and the rest had cost very little, if anything at all. Diana cost one hundred yuan. Davy's little brother cost three hundred yuan. Rex had a 650-yuan sister, while Julia's brother was only 190. Jeremy was one hundred yuan. He was the sixth child in his family, and the older five had all been girls. That was a very well spent one hundred yuan if you were a Chinese peasant.

Many of their families were like that—a string of girls punctuated by a boy that marked the end of the children. In those days the fines had been minimal, and the peasants still followed the traditional pattern of having children until there was at least one son. The fines, like
everything else regarding money were not sensitive subjects. Sometimes I teased Jeremy because he had cost only one hundred yuan. I offered to buy Julia's brother for five hundred, so her parents could double their investment, but she only laughed and shook her head.

 

MOST OF MY GRADUATED STUDENTS
were assigned jobs in the countryside, where they made around four hundred yuan a month—less than fifty dollars. It was very little money but the jobs were secure, and they didn't have to search by themselves. Communist China had no tradition of independent job searches, and the thought of relying on themselves terrified most of my students, who generally accepted the assignments. They also took these positions because they were penalized if they refused the government job. If they chose to find work on their own, they had to repay the scholarship they had received, which usually amounted to around five thousand yuan. During my second year, the authorities began to reform these rules, phasing out the automatic assignments, but my first group of graduated students was still in the traditional system.

The more aggressive students often paid the fine or found some other way to avoid the assigned job. Five of the boys took teaching positions in Tibet—all of them were Party Members, and they went for reasons of patriotism as well as money. North, who had been one of the class monitors, took a sales job with the Wu River Hot Pickled Mustard Tuber factory. Two of the best girl students found teaching jobs at a private school in the eastern province of Zhejiang. Anne, the student whose family lived in my building, wandered southward—first she worked as a secretary in Kunming, in Yunnan province, and then she went to Shenzhen, the special economic zone near Hong Kong.

Shenzhen was a sort of promised land for Sichuanese migrants. People made money quickly there, sometimes without
guanxi
or education; all you needed was your wits and some luck. There were Shenzhen legends at all of the Sichuan teachers colleges where my Peace Corps friends taught. Students whispered about classmates who, having been thrown out of school for cheating or failing exams, went south to Shenzhen and were rich within a year, thankful that the college had
tossed them. During my first year, an English department student named Don had been kicked out of Fuling for cheating, after which he followed the standard expelled student route and went straight to Shenzhen. But in the booming city he struck out—no money, no job, no
guanxi
. And there was no face for Don the next year, when, after paying a substantial fine, he returned to the college and resumed his studies. That was the other side of Shenzhen—but there weren't so many legends about the people who failed. Sometimes you heard about nice Sichuanese girls who turned into prostitutes after running out of money, but mostly you heard about the ones who had succeeded.

Anne sent Adam and me vivid letters from Shenzhen, describing the “talent markets” where she had to pay ten yuan to talk with prospective employers. It was a stressful and expensive place to look for a job, and soon Anne, who was there with her sister, had spent all of her savings in the markets. At last they pooled resources to send Anne's sister into the talent markets, where she tracked down an interview for a position that called for English fluency. Anne went to the interview and got the job. She asked for twelve hundred yuan a month; the boss countered with nine hundred; and Anne, who had already been rejected enough times, accepted the offer.

She had never left the Fuling area before graduation, and now suddenly she was working on her own in what was perhaps the most exciting city in China. Not long after she started her job, she wrote me a letter describing her early days at the office:

IF YOU DIDN'T GO TO SHENZHEN
, you could make money quickly in the stock market. The Fuling exchange office was next to South Mountain Gate, a huge room with rows of chairs where people sat and watched the stock listings on an enormous digital screen. For a while I used to go there, hoping to practice Chinese with the people, but none of them ever talked. They simply stared at the money as it raced across the boards.

Many of my friends had invested, despite the expensive registration deposit of thirty thousand yuan. This fee was refundable after a certain period of time, but it was an enormous amount and people usually pooled their resources and registered as a group. Teacher Liao had investments through one of her relatives, and the family at the Students' Home had invested money through Huang Xiaoqiang's sister. One afternoon they took Huang Kai to the exchange, because every night the child became excited and shouted “Stock!” repeatedly when the ticker appeared on television. But when confronted with the market's reality—the crowds of people, the flashing billboard, the noise and lights and energy of the place—he burst into tears and cried inconsolably until they returned home, where the familiar portrait of Chairman Mao decorated the living-room wall.

On January 9 of 1998, which was a Friday, my friend Scott Kramer called from New York and warned me that the Chinese stock market was under serious speculation. He worked in emerging markets on Wall Street, and for my sake he always kept an eye on China.

That day I had class with Teacher Liao, and I told her it might be a good time to take her money out of the market. She shrugged it off—what did I know?

The following Monday, the Shanghai Index fell 9.1 percent and the Shenzhen Index dropped 7.8 percent. It was one of the worst days in the history of the Chinese markets, and Teacher Liao lost a thousand yuan. The family at the Students' Home lost nearly as much. They told me about it while I ate lunch, and Huang Kai picked up one of the words and babbled it over and over again. “
Diele, diele
,” he said. “It fell, it fell.” Within a week the family had sold all their stock.

The next time I had class with Teacher Liao, she grinned sheepishly as she walked into my office.

“You were right,” she said. “I forgot all about what you said until that Monday, when I got home and watched television. But by then it was too late—they had already closed the market. Afterward I told my husband that you had known it would happen.”

“I didn't know anything,” I said. “But my friend in America thought it might fall. That's his job and he understands it very well.”

“We should have listened.”

I asked her how much she had lost, and she told me. She said everybody was losing money; two years ago the stocks went up all the time but now there hadn't been a good month all year. I told her I'd keep her updated on Kramer's tips.

 

ANNE HAD ACCESS TO THE COMPANY PHONES
in Shenzhen, and sometimes at night she called Adam or me. One evening she phoned and reported that she had gotten a raise to one thousand yuan, and I congratulated her. As time passed, I would find this to be one of the most satisfying aspects of teaching, because former students occasionally called to report milestones of adulthood and independence. Often these benchmarks had to do with money: a new raise, a new apartment, a new beeper. Once a student called to tell me that he had acquired a cell phone. He
told me about the cell phone for a few minutes and then he mentioned, in an offhand way, that he had also gotten engaged.