I asked my grad students to write two papers during the semester, one for the midterm and the other for the final. I was unhappy about the first ones they had turned in. They were surprisingly long-winded but too cynical to think hard about real issues. Many indulged in boilerplate, writing pages without saying anything substantial. Few could offer something interesting and original. In discussing the topic of one’s proper relationship with the collective, almost without exception they claimed they had to serve the country and the people heart and soul. As an individual, you could find the meaning of life only in “a harmonious relationship” with the people around you. In other words, the individual had to be subsumed under the collective. Only one young man insisted that he serve his mother first because she’d given birth to him. I couldn’t tell how serious he was, nor could I believe they all meant what they said. Some of them were fond of purple prose. They mistook verbosity for eloquence and ambiguity for beauty, worshiping the evasive and the fuzzy while looking down on lucidity and straightforwardness. I had read enough of their nebulous writings to see the absence of sincerity as the crux of the problem. I told the class, “If you cannot write clearly, that’s because either your head is muddled or you are too afraid to reveal your true feelings and thoughts. To me, clarity is a great virtue of intellect.”
Some of the faculty members auditing my seminar looked doubtful, although they wouldn’t say anything against me openly. I could see, though, that they had their reservations and might think I was too hard on the young people and had neglected the particularity of their conditions.
One grad student said, “We’ve been taught to write like that.”
“We cannot say everything too bluntly,” another chimed in. “That’s not the Chinese way.”
“Nothing’s absolute besides,” said Hongbin, a student Party member. “So we ought to avoid getting too explicit and too excessive.”
I told them, “Your explanations don’t hold water. What I cannot abide are cynicism and intellectual relativism. A punch in the face means pain, to open fire on peaceful demonstrators is a crime, incarceration without charge is a violation of a citizen’s rights, a home torn down without enough compensation is a loss, selling recycled sink grease as cooking oil is profiteering, to borrow others’ ideas without acknowledgment is plagiarism. You must call things what they are. Many of you will teach high school and college after graduation. How can you be good teachers if you have no firm convictions? If you cannot tell right from wrong or good from evil, how can you expect your students to respect and trust you?”
“I totally agree,” Minmin said. “Whether wearing a condom or not, to force a woman to have sex is rape.”
The class exploded into laughter. Just a few days earlier it had been reported that a county official in Guizhou province had assaulted a young schoolteacher after a banquet. The woman pressed charges, but the local police refused to investigate, claiming it was not rape because the man had worn a condom. The incident provoked a national uproar.
I WAS DELIGHTED that my niece Juli came from Guangzhou to see me. She was so svelte, with a narrow waist, that it was hard to imagine her as the sister of the thickset Juya. Already twenty-six, Juli looked as if she was in her late teens, wearing black chinos and plaited leather sandals. She’d been to Beijing several times, so when I offered to take her sightseeing, she said, “I can go to town to see friends by myself. You don’t need to keep me company, Aunt Lilian. You must have a lot to do at school.” So I gave her some cash and asked her to come back for dinner.
The next evening Juli and I chatted over decaf coffee. She was fond of cappuccino, espresso, latte, all the drinks offered at Starbucks, but like me, she couldn’t consume too much caffeine in the evenings for fear of insomnia. Sprawled on a canvas-covered sofa in my living room, she looked like a carefree child, smiling and blinking her brown eyes. She took after her mother, with round cheekbones, a pug nose, but a delicate neck. With her around, my apartment felt warm and cozy, and I enjoyed the homey ambience, in which we could relax. Juli said she worked with a troupe now, acting small parts in plays and singing with its band. Her goal was to break into a movie or TV series. “From the stage to the screen,” she told me. “They might give me a part or two. I know some people in the local TV business.”
“Your parents still think you’re a factory worker,” I said.
“Oh, I was, a long time ago.”
She went on to mention several places where she had worked. She’d left home seven years ago for Dongguan, a boomtown about forty miles southeast of Guangzhou. With a fellow townswoman’s help, she got her first job at a zipper factory, earning four hundred yuan a month. But she couldn’t get along with some roommates in the factory’s dorm, so she jumped ship and found a job at a textile storehouse, where she mostly handled inventory. The work wasn’t heavy, mainly processing paperwork and driving a forklift, but she had to do long shifts, sometimes putting in sixty hours a week, with no overtime pay or benefits, though the food wasn’t bad — there was meat at lunch, usually two dishes plus a soup. She’d eat as much as she could at noon so that she could spend less for dinner, which was on her own. She was homesick and miserable all the time, but everyone said she was lucky because her job was good by comparison and paid almost six hundred yuan a month. Still, she was constantly nagged by the thought of working in a warehouse for the rest of her life, so she moved on again. This time she was hired by Wal-Mart as a cashier, with similar pay but fewer hours.
“For a low-end job, Wal-Mart is as good a place as you can find,” she told me. “People prefer to work for foreign companies. The wages are guaranteed and never delayed, and they also pay you overtime. On top of that, the foremen are not as mean as those in the local companies, and they won’t treat you like you’re shirking if you take a bathroom break for more than ten minutes. Still, it was hard for me to stand at the cash register punching numbers and making change day in and day out. What’s worse, you had to smile at customers no matter how tired and unhappy you were.”
“How long did you work there?”
“Eight months. Then I joined a nightclub because they found I had a good voice. I became a bar singer, but I didn’t stay with them for long. Customers were rude and kept harassing me. They treated a girl like a prostitute, like you were supposed to let them have their way with you if they offered you a price. For most customers a girl was just a piece of meat, like a live fish or chicken available for consumption. It was there that I realized I’d never be happy if I worked only for money. What prompted me to quit was that one night, on her way home, a girl got battered and lost a tooth because she refused to go out with a customer.”
“So you joined the troupe?”
“Yeah, I want to perform onstage or to become an actress in movies or TV no matter how poorly I’m paid. I know I’m not pretty enough to become a star, but I’ll be happy to settle for small parts.”