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9 Assembly-Line English
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In Dongguan, I often went to restaurants alone. While I ate, I would write in my notebook or read an American magazine. Invariably a waitress or a restaurant patron would appear at my shoulder, looking on in reverence as I communed with my native tongue. “Your English must be amazing!” they would say at last.
I would explain that I was born in America.
“Your English is probably Grade Eight, then?”
I would answer that Americans did not get graded on our English ability, as the Chinese did. English was as ordinary to me as Chinese was to them, I would say, but this only compounded their sense of awe.
“Your English must be at least Grade Eight, then!”
People were always disappointed to learn I was a journalist. With my ability, I was told, I could be a highly paid translator at a trading company. English was the path to riches and satisfaction; to them I was like someone who had won the lottery but refused to cash in my ticket.
ALMOST EVERYONE IN CHINA had studied English in school, sometimes for years, but it was the rare person who could speak the language. Lessons emphasized grammar and the memorization of vocabulary lists; teachers were frequently as tongue-tied as their students. The group mentality was a factor—better to remain in anonymous silence than to risk embarrassment by opening your mouth. The ubiquity of English study seemed only to increase the respect for it: Despite many attempts and much effort, the language continued to defy mastery.
English also underlay the working life of Dongguan, where it was the language of business for the thousands of factories catering to foreign clients. This didn’t mean people actually understood English; they learned just enough to function within their specific industry. Often they spoke in abbreviations and acronyms, a truncated language that would have confused any American. On an order form, FOB HK—short for “Free on Board Hong Kong”—indicated at what point a buyer would take ownership of a product he had ordered; L and W and H described its dimensions. Plastic packaging was PP or PE, though few people could have told you what those letters stood for. The machines of the assembly line also functioned in broken English, instructing workers to ROUTE FINDER and KEY-BOARD TEST and PRESS ANY KEY TO SEND LOOPBACK Q TO QUIT.
Almost everyone I knew in Dongguan had gathered herself and made a determined assault on English at some point. For a while, Min spent her evenings studying a dog-eared textbook whose title was Crazy English Crash Course; the first third of the book was liberally marked up from her older sister’s failed attempt on the language sometime earlier. Jiang Haiyan carried around a pocket-size phrasebook, and the last time I saw Chen Ying, the woman from the White-Collar class who had moved into management, she was planning to study English on her own and take the vocational college exam. Even the karaoke girls regarded English as a way out: It could impress a foreign customer into hiring a xiaojie as a clerk or a secretary.
Sometimes aspiring English speakers drew me into conversations as disjointed as the dialogue in a Beckett play.
How old are you?
Very good! How old are you?
Yes.
I was not surprised when Chunming decided to study English. She signed up at a language school that promised students would speak like American fifth-graders after a year of study. “I figure that’s pretty good,” she said. “A fifth-grader can express just about everything.” The school’s chief advertisement was the founder’s nine-year-old son, who was said to speak English fluently. Chunming had her own reasons for learning the language. “If I learned English,” she told me, “I could enter new circles.” By then, I knew her well enough to translate that remark: English might be another way to find a husband.
* * *
The language school was in the Dongguan Science Museum, a haphazard pile of concrete shapes that might have looked futuristic in 1994 when it was built. Chunming took me there one evening after dinner. The museum was closed for renovation; in the darkness within, the scaffolding that clung to the walls looked like some skin disease that was eating away the building. We felt our way up five flights of stairs, as Chunming related the school’s mythology in a whisper. Its founder had spent twenty years perfecting his teaching system; recently, he had patented it. The school had three hundred students. Its average monthly tuition was six hundred yuan, about seventy-five dollars.
On the top floor of the museum was a single office with the light still on. A sign at the entrance read:
ASSEMBLY-LINE LEARNING MACHINES
In a large fluorescent-lit room with low ceilings, half a dozen students sat apart from one another at long tables. On each table squatted an oval metal machine with rotating vertical panels that were fitted with cards; the cards were printed with columns of words that moved past the students in a steady stream. The machines filled the room with a muffled whirring sound, like a deck of cards being shuffled.
A column of words floated past me.
FUCK
CLEAN
RUDE
PIZZA
CREEP
At one end of the room, an older man sat in front of a computer. He handed me his business card without standing up. It said, in Chinese:
MR. WU’S DYNAMIC EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY LTD. WU GUANXI, PRESIDENT
CHIEF DESIGNER OF MR. WU’S DYNAMIC LANGUAGE PROCESSING FACTORY
INVENTOR OF MR. WU’S DYNAMIC EDUCATIONAL AID FACILITIES
FOUNDER OF MR. WU’S DYNAMIC EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE
ORIGINATOR OF MR. WU’S DYNAMIC WORLD LANGUAGE
HEAD COACH OF MR. WU’S DYNAMIC ENGLISH ADVANCED
SIMULTANEOUS INTERPRETATION TRAINING CLASS
Mr. Wu was forty-five years old, with a square face, baggy jowls, and rumpled hair that looked as if it had been slept on recently. He was somewhat overweight. He did not fit the image of a teacher or even a city person—he resembled the kind of government official you might meet in a small Chinese town. More precisely, he resembled the driver of the kind of government official you might meet in a small Chinese town. He did not look very dynamic.
The guiding principle of Mr. Wu’s school was that treating people like machines was the key to mastering English. After learning the alphabet and the phonetic sounds of the language, a student sat at a machine while columns of English words rotated past. The student read aloud each word and wrote it down without knowing what it meant, week after week, until he attained the highest speed. He then proceeded to another machine that showed Chinese definitions of words; next he advanced to short sentences. At each stage, he wrote the word or sentence in English and said it aloud without comprehending its meaning. When a student achieved the top speed—able to write six hundred English sentences in one hour—he graduated to basic grammar. Only then did he learn the meaning of the words, phrases, and sentences he had been repeating for months.
Mr. Wu called this method “guidance-style teaching.” As far as I could see, this meant there were no teachers—the machines imparted everything the students needed to know. His ideal student worked eleven hours a day: Study four hours, eat lunch, nap, study four more hours, eat dinner, study three more hours. That was the exact schedule of the Dongguan factory, down to the three hours’ daily overtime limit mandated by the labor law. “On the assembly line, people can sit and work for eight or ten hours without rest,” Mr. Wu said. “If only we could learn that way, how good it would be!”
His methods contradicted all received wisdom about learning a language—chiefly, that speaking, comprehension, and teachers were crucial to the process. Mr. Wu dismissed all of that. Chinese teaching methods focused too much on memorization, he said; the classroom turned students into passive receptacles. Assembly-Line English forced them into action.
“Your hand, brain, eyes, and mouth must learn to react quickly and automatically,” Mr. Wu explained. “You don’t have time to translate a word into Chinese or to memorize it. You must train yourself to respond instinctively.” By pressing so many body parts into service, he said, Assembly-Line English stimulated different regions of the brain to work harder. Science had shown that human beings used only 5 percent of their cerebrums. Mr. Wu was full of such facts. The average person wrote two hundred sentences an hour. Women could recite ninety sentences a minute, but men could manage only seventy-five. If a person studied English for ten hours every day, he could work as a simultaneous interpreter in three years. In this respect, Mr. Wu resembled a man who had reduced the universe to a string of chemical formulas: No single fact was wrong, but the combination as a whole missed something. Yet he had a point—there was a problem with the way English was taught in Chinese classrooms, and student passivity was a big part of it. You might cram your way into a perfect score on the TOEFL exam—the most widely used test of English proficiency—but you could not memorize your way into fluency no matter how hard you tried.
After Mr. Wu’s lecture, Chunming and I wandered around the classroom. She recognized a student she had met on a past visit to the school. Liu Yixia was twenty-one years old, with a round face, bright eyes, and a bowl haircut that gave her the look of a muppet. She had spent a year studying English here, doing clerical work in return for room and board and free classes. Under Chunming’s watchful eye, Liu Yixia chatted with me in English. She didn’t sound the least bit like an American fifth-grader. But she wasn’t afraid to speak, and she didn’t hide her mouth behind her hand or apologize continuously for her mistakes.
Now Liu Yixia had a job teaching English to factory executives—which surprised me, although it shouldn’t have. In Dongguan, barely knowing something qualified you to teach it to others. I asked her what she planned to do next.
“How do you say ‘international trade’?” she asked me in Chinese. I told her. Her aspirations seemed as wide as the world, and as easy as speaking a word aloud.
Chunming and I walked out of the building and crossed the broad green lawn in front of the science museum. Night had fallen, and floodlights cast giant shadows in our path. “I just have to set my resolve,” Chunming said. “This year I will either learn English or start my own business.”
* * *
In her first year out from home Liu Yixia lived, breathed, and slept Assembly-Line English. She worked in the office during the day, and in the evenings she studied on Mr. Wu’s machines. She shared a small room behind the classroom with two other women; all three were studying English, but Liu Yixia worked the hardest. “I was a year older than the other two,” she told me, “so I felt pressure to do better than them.” She came from the poor, landlocked province of Jiangxi, where her parents farmed and raised ducks. She had always liked languages; at home, her parents spoke different dialects and she was used to switching between them, and when she started learning English in middle school she did well. But she did not test into college, and her family lacked the money to support her studies anyway, so Liu Yixia went out to Dongguan to work.
At Mr. Wu’s school, she worked to improve her pronunciation—how she managed that when there was no one around to correct her mistakes, I don’t know. She was Mr. Wu’s star pupil, but they had a rocky relationship. “He was quite mean to me sometimes,” she told me. “And he wouldn’t let me memorize lists of vocabulary words.”
“He wouldn’t let you memorize vocabulary words?” I asked.
“He insisted I learn English his way. So I had to study my vocabulary lists in secret.”
Liu Yixia had another fight with Mr. Wu when she left. “He wanted to take a picture of me,” she said, “but I wouldn’t let him.” Mr. Wu used photos of his students in the school’s promotional materials, but Liu Yixia was proud of what she had accomplished and she didn’t want anyone else claiming credit. “Everything I’ve done,” she told Mr. Wu, “I’ve done on my own, not because of you.”
Even by Dongguan standards, Liu Yixia was in a fearful rush. In the nine months since she had left Mr. Wu’s school she had held six teaching jobs, a whirlwind tour of the various incarnations of managerial incompetence. In one job, she took the initiative to visit other schools to observe different teaching methods; her boss accused her of moonlighting on the sly and fired her. At her next job, someone thought it would be a good idea to run a language school without scheduled classes. Whenever a student showed up, Liu Yixia would have to teach a lesson on the spot. “I taught five to six hours a day, all different levels,” she said. “One minute I would be teaching elementary level, the next I would be teaching advanced.” She was so exhausted that she quit after a month without getting paid.
In her current job, Liu Yixia taught two hours every evening and had the rest of the day to prepare lessons and study on her own. She earned 1,500 yuan a month—almost two hundred dollars, a respectable sum. But she was already clashing with the school’s director. He wanted her to cover a lot of material quickly; she thought the students should gain confidence in speaking first. He overruled her teaching style, which featured games and student participation, in favor of lectures. The school director did not speak any foreign languages.
All of Liu Yixia’s employers thought she was a college graduate with a degree in English, because that was what she told people in job interviews. The most impressive thing about her—that she had found a way to acquire a foreign language without formal study—was something she hid from almost everyone she knew.
SIX MONTHS AFTER WE FIRST MET, I visited Liu Yixia at her school in Shijie—yet another industrial district of Dongguan where I had never been. She had grown out her hair; she wore silver-rimmed glasses, a no-nonsense pinstripe dress, and black heels. She looked quite grown-up, although she wobbled a bit when she walked. Over spare ribs and rice at a fast-food restaurant, we talked, in Chinese, about English. Liu Yixia wanted to get a job as a translator at a factory so she could improve her English—How do you say international trade?—but without factory experience no one would hire her. She was obsessed with the language; our dinner conversation never strayed from this subject.
After we had finished eating, Liu Yixia looked at me and asked, “How do you think I should improve my English?”
“You should talk with native speakers as much as you can,” I said. The moment I spoke, I realized this was basically useless advice, since I had rarely seen a Westerner in Dongguan outside the lobby of the Sheraton. In truth, the best way to learn English was to date a foreigner—untold numbers of xiaojie had attained fluency this way—but I could not say that to Liu Yixia.
“How about the travel industry?” I asked her.
She placed her palm flat against the top of her head. “Look at me. I don’t meet the minimum height requirement. Tour guides must be at least 1.6 meters tall.”
Right—that was another dumb suggestion. I had forgotten about all the ways in which height could affect the utility of English in a place like Dongguan. Meanwhile, Liu Yixia worried that her language skills were deteriorating; working as a teacher in the commercial schools of Dongguan felt like a dead end. In a city dominated by factories, private schools were just another low-level service. In the official school system, teachers enjoyed prestige and benefits, but Liu Yixia would never gain entry to their world. “They have their own system,” she said. “They can’t accept that I got my experience in society.”
After lunch, Liu Yixia took me back to her school—a four-story office building that was almost deserted at this hour. A few teachers were shooting pool in one classroom; two young men sang karaoke in another, their reedy voices echoing down the hallway. The classrooms filled up only in the evenings when people got off work. Schools were usually dead at night, but in Dongguan the schedule for learning had been turned upside down, as if these institutions were tied to a time zone half a world away.
In her classroom, Liu Yixia showed me her English textbooks. She pointed out one that she liked because it encouraged students to practice what they had learned; she criticized another for covering too little material in each lesson. From ABC to English Conversation contained a sample conversation that bore no relation to Dongguan reality:
Are those factories?
No, they aren’t. They are parks.
Liu Yixia picked up a piece of chalk and started scrawling words on the blackboard. What was the difference, she asked me, between the s sound in television and the ge sound in change? Where should the stress be in the word consultant? How was the s in sea different from the ts in cats? Television. Change. Sea. Cats. These were strange and unrelated questions, but that was what happened when your teacher was a machine.
She lived upstairs from the classrooms in a dorm with two other women. The room had two bunk beds, a small bathroom, and more textbooks: on Liu Yixia’s desk, under her bed, in a backpack on the floor. She was an English-textbook junkie. “I probably have thirty books for learning English,” she said. “No single book can have everything you need to know.” One of her few possessions that was not a textbook was a photo album. It featured Liu Yixia in standard migrant poses: standing in front of a municipal building, visiting a park with girlfriends. She pointed to one of the pictures. “These two girls have now determined to ‘soak themselves in English.’ They want to spend the next year or two just learning it.” Both of the young women were enrolled at Mr. Wu’s school. They had shaved their heads to express their commitment, as Buddhist monks did when joining a monastery. To learn English, it was necessary to renounce the world.
* * *
Assembly-Line English was not the only dubious language enterprise in Dongguan. The English craze, pairing a feverish desire to learn the language with complete ignorance of how to go about it, was tailor-made for frauds. One company called Ladder English targeted ambitious parents. For a fee of 5,500 yuan—almost seven hundred dollars, a large sum for a Chinese family—the school supplied English teaching materials for children and regular home visits by “educational consultants” to track a child’s progress. As a marketing tool, the school invited parents and children to free classes that had the energy of direct-sales meetings. Child-development experts lavished praise on the school’s methods, while parents fought to sign up their children. A few teachers would take the children into another room and teach them a few English phrases; when the youngsters returned, babbling in a foreign language, their parents were usually moved to sign up on the spot.
In truth, Ladder English was riddled with deceptions. Its child-development experts and some of the most enthusiastic parents at the free classes were actually company employees, according to articles in the local press. Its “educational consultants” did not visit families more than once or twice, and they were not teachers but salespeople, who earned a commission of one thousand yuan per customer. The salespeople had to put up considerable money when they joined the company to buy educational magazines, pay transport fees, and rent rooms for the free classes. Ladder English was essentially a pyramid scheme, fueled by the desperation to learn English.
No one at the company, which operated on a franchise model, would agree to speak with me. As part of her tour of managerial incompetence, Liu Yixia had worked briefly for Ladder English and described its tactics. Salespeople were instructed to wait outside elementary schools as they let out for the day, to approach the parents who drove their own cars and feign affection for their children. “When the child came out, you would play with the child,” Liu Yixia told me. “Then the parents and child together would be invited to attend the Ladder English lecture.” Liu Yixia left the company after ten days. “I thought in some way it was cheating people,” she said.
A different deception involved foreign teachers. Young black men who said they were from Canada or England showed up at schools around Dongguan, offering their services as English instructors. It could have been a watershed moment in China’s march toward racial diversity, except that it wasn’t. One parent told me her daughter’s kindergarten class cried at the sight of their new teacher, because they had never seen a black person before. The school fired him.
One day I was visiting Liu Yixia when Joseph, her fellow teacher ostensibly from Canada, came into the room. He was black, about thirty years old, with a handsome face and an easygoing manner. He greeted me in heavily accented English.
“Are you married?” was his first question.
“What is your cell-phone number?” was his second.
After Joseph breezed out of the room, I asked Liu Yixia, “Where is he from?”
“He said he’s from Canada.”
“He’s not originally from Canada,” I said. “I can tell by the way he speaks.”
She thought for a moment. “He also mentioned another country. Gan Da . . .”
“Uganda?”
“Yes. Uganda.”
I finally understood the mystery of the black teachers. They were Africans, coming to backwaters and passing themselves off as native English speakers to school administrators who didn’t know the difference. Over the years, more than thirty thousand African students had attended university in China, as part of Beijing’s policy to support its allies in the developing world. It made sense for them to stay on as foreign teachers. At Liu Yixia’s school, Joseph earned more money than she did and taught fewer hours.
Liu Yixia admonished me for giving Joseph my phone number. “You should be careful,” she said. “He will be calling you all the time.” She said that Joseph frequently hit on his female students; when he asked one for her number, she usually responded by never attending class again. Occasionally one of Joseph’s students would ask Liu Yixia how to say a sentence in English: I can be your friend but not your girlfriend.
* * *
On Thursday evenings Liu Yixia taught English at a Japanese-owned electronics factory, and one evening I went with her. The four men and two women in the class worked in sales or management, and all were older than she was.
She handed back their test papers. “Don’t worry too much about your scores today,” she said, immediately breaking with a thousand-year tradition of grade worship. “The test of your English is not in that. It is in how much you can use.”
The students started to review a lesson from the week before. Liu Yixia turned to a student in the front row and asked, in English, “What did you learn?”
“You want me to speak in English?” he asked, in Chinese—not a promising start. He struggled, then finally said in English, “I learned some stories. It is very interesting.”
“Can you tell some English stories to me?” she asked.
A long silence. Then, in Chinese: “I have forgotten.”
The next student said, “I learned some new words and expressions.”
“What else?”
A long silence. Then, in Chinese: “I don’t know how to say it.”
“Okay, your turn,” Liu Yixia said to a woman in the second row.
In Chinese: “It’s hard to say.”
Liu Yixia switched to Chinese. “Learning English is speaking English. If you are not speaking English, you are not learning English. You must not be afraid to make a mistake. I make many mistakes. I have never been afraid of this.”
It was true. Liu Yixia could not distinguish between the l and r sounds. She couldn’t even say the word pronunciation—she called it “pronuntion.” She sometimes didn’t understand what her students said; occasionally she corrected them when they were in the right. Often she answered their questions incorrectly. But she had the right instinct when it came to teaching, and somewhere along the way she had figured out the secret of learning a foreign language, which started with being unafraid.
THE STUDENTS CLUSTERED AROUND ME during a break. I had given a short speech in English at the start of class, introducing myself and speaking slowly enough that they could understand me. They were, after all, college-educated, and they had been taking this class for months. But after watching them struggle through the lesson, I realized they had probably not understood a word I said.
The men took the lead. “Which is better, China or America?”
“American cities are much safer, right? And the quality of the people is much higher.”
“Do you miss China very much?”
“She has lived in China six years,” the woman who had the best English in the class answered impatiently. “You still haven’t figured that out?” The students asked me many questions about America. But not a single one ventured to speak to me in English.
After the break, they moved on to a lesson about a camping trip. Liu Yixia asked them to either read a passage aloud or tell the story in their own words. Every student chose to read the passage—they read well, much better than they spoke. Then she asked the students to retell the story to her. The woman with the best English in the class had memorized the entire text, word for word. The next student tried to pull off the same stunt. But when he forgot a single word in the text he stopped, a record thrown off by one faulty groove, until Liu Yixia prompted him.
It felt strange to me to sit in a Dongguan factory and watch young people so constrained by their own timidity. The city was built on making do and getting by; the secret of success was learning just enough to talk your way into a clerk’s job or a teaching position or whatever else you wanted. But in Liu Yixia’s classroom I saw the limits of that way of thinking. Learning a foreign language properly took time, and there were no shortcuts. You could not fake your way into English.
* * *
Misfortune dogged Mr. Wu. His school was evicted from the science museum after he fought with his landlord, and most of his students dropped out. His wife abandoned him and their nine-year-old son. He moved the operations of Assembly-Line English into his own home. Classes were crowded into the top floor of a four-story tenement building; his workroom was on the third floor and his apartment on the second. On the day that I visited, the stair landing was piled high with garbage, mostly cardboard boxes and old newspapers. Mr. Wu greeted me cheerfully and ushered me into his workshop, where we sat on metal stools and talked in the summer heat, surrounded by large pieces of scrap lumber.
His physical world had been compressed to humble dimensions, but Mr. Wu’s ambitions were as expansive as ever. His latest breakthrough sat on a table: an English-language teaching machine wrought entirely of orange and turquoise plastic, from a mold he had designed himself. Assembly-Line English had entered the industrial age. The machine could now be mass-produced, and I learned that Mr. Wu had already manufactured five hundred of them; they were wrapped in newspaper and stored all over his apartment. He planned to lease them out to students so they could learn English at home. Mr. Wu’s innovations had rendered teachers obsolete, and now classrooms were no longer necessary either.
I told him I wanted to learn more about his theory of teaching English.
“This is no longer just to learn English,” he interrupted. “It is to develop the cerebrum. You can learn mathematics, history, anything from this. That is the wonder of the thing,” he said, patting his invention fondly.
Suppose, Mr. Wu said, a history student wanted to learn about Japan’s 1937 invasion of China. First he would read a text about the event that had been printed on cards and placed on the machine’s moving panels. Another set of cards would move by with questions testing his mastery of the material: When did the invasion happen? What was the meaning behind it? Other prompts would appear, pushing the student to come up with new ideas, which he would write down in the form of a composition.
I asked Mr. Wu why this was better than reading the same information on a printed page.
“When your right hand is writing, your left brain is working,” he answered. “When your left brain is working, your right eyeball is working. When you read a book, your eyeballs just stare at the page. But when you read on this machine, your eyeballs move quickly.” He explained that he was developing a comprehensive curriculum for the machine and planned to look for investors.
“Is anyone interested?” I asked.
Yes, he said. An American had expressed interest.
“Who?”
“He was from Seattle. Michael.” Mr. Wu looked vague suddenly. “I have his business card somewhere.”
He took me upstairs to see his school. Ten Assembly-Line English machines were now squeezed into a single cramped room, set up on tables with only a few feet between them. Half a dozen students read aloud words and sentences, like a roomful of telephone operators murmuring in a language that almost resembled English if you listened hard enough. These were the diehards, all young women who had followed Mr. Wu from the science museum into the confines of his home. They leaned forward into the machines, pushed by their impatience to learn. In front of each student sat her evening’s sustenance: bottled water, three plums. The place was stifling.
I trailed Mr. Wu around the room. I thought he was going to introduce me to some students, but he walked me over to one of the machines instead. “These are much more unwieldy than my new machines,” he said. “It takes two people to carry one.”
By now it was early evening, and I commented that it was getting a little dark to read without light.
“That’s not bad for the eyes,” he said. “Bright sunshine is bad for the eyes.”
“I’m not saying bright sunshine is good for the eyes,” I said. “I’m just saying it’s not good to read in the dark.”
“That’s not true,” he said heatedly. “That’s only if your eyeballs are not moving. If your eyeballs are moving, it doesn’t matter how dark it is.”
I learned a few things about Mr. Wu that day. He had no background at all in education; before he set up the school, he had worked in a factory that made heating appliances. His English was poor, possibly nonexistent—several times when I used English terms during our conversation, he nodded and hurriedly changed the subject. The only English word I ever heard him use was “okay,” as in: “
okay.” The word sounded strangely isolated at the end of a sentence like that. It meant, “Once you connect to your cerebrum, everything will be okay.”
Mr. Wu was not good at dealing with people. He had angered his landlords at the science museum, and he had angered Liu Yixia, his star pupil. It was a good bet that he had driven away his wife, though it was hard to know if that was before or after he had mass-produced five hundred Assembly-Line English machines and stored them in their apartment. In the short time I had known him, he had angered me too; it was infuriating to interact with somebody so dogmatic. Mostly I could tell that human beings frustrated him. He preferred to talk about them in parts: their eyeballs, their hands, their brains. But people as a whole did not make sense to him. They were inefficient; they used only 5 percent of their cerebrums; they had a maddening aversion to sitting in front of a machine eleven hours a day to learn a language. People basically didn’t work—it was as if their creator had used first-rate parts but then botched the assembly.
Machines were another matter. Someday with enough tinkering, Mr. Wu would construct a perfect assembly-line learning machine that would allow people to acquire the whole of human knowledge without ever leaving home. His faith in technology was absolute; he knew that machines were the answer. It was especially poignant that this man had been expelled from the science museum.
* * *
Self-improvement took Liu Yixia in new directions. At the Dongguan public library—which I hadn’t even known existed—she checked out books like Whole Brain Learning and The Bible of Jewish Home-Schooling. She wanted to improve her memory and learn how to do business based on the teachings of the Talmud. She started taking pills to strengthen her cerebrum, because overwork caused dandruff and made your hair fall out. She was thinking of studying Japanese.
“I’ve heard it takes a Chinese person one year to learn English but only three months to learn Japanese,” she told me. “I’ve heard that Beijing college graduates can earn one thousand yuan more a month for each language they speak. Is that true?”
I told her she should probably focus on improving her English first.
“I’m killing myself trying to increase my vocabulary,” she said. “I am memorizing fifty words a day.”
“Fifty words a day?” I repeated, amazed.
“Is that a lot or a little?”
The last time I saw Liu Yixia, she had engineered yet another makeover. She had dyed and permed her hair so it was long and crinkly, like caramel taffy. She had decided that an English teacher with ordinary black hair was tu, unsophisticated. “I did this to look more Western,” she said. She had memorized an entire book of Grade Six vocabulary, five thousand words. The young women at Mr. Wu’s school had shaved their heads again to express their dedication to learning English. And Mr. Wu had offered Liu Yixia a partnership in his new venture and promised her a third of the profits, but she didn’t trust him. His people skills had not improved.
“With your level of English,” he had told her recently, “you can muddle along for at most a year or so as a teacher. After that, there will be no more room for you here because I will have cornered the entire market. You can still go teach elsewhere, though.”
“Why would he say something like that?” I asked.
“I think he was trying to force me to go back to work for him.”
“That’s awful.”
“Yes,” she said, “but I feel sympathy for him. He is all on his own.”
She rejected Mr. Wu’s offer. Instead she jumped to an Internet company to run its English-language Web site aimed at foreign clients. A month after she arrived, the company collapsed and the owner disappeared, owing more than one hundred thousand yuan in staff salaries. Liu Yixia had joined a lawsuit with the other employees to get their back pay, though they were not hopeful about it.
Some months later, in the spring of 2007, Liu Yixia landed a job in the international trade department of a factory that made microphone parts. She dealt with foreign customers, accompanied them on factory visits, and attended trade fairs. The job required Grade Six English and a college diploma. “I don’t have those things with me,” she had said when she interviewed for the position. In the evenings now, Liu Yixia taught English to her colleagues or to private students at home. Counting all three jobs, she made five thousand yuan a month—$625, an excellent salary for Dongguan. She planned to save money and set up an English-language kindergarten. That was her five-year plan.
After she got the job in international trade, Liu Yixia sent me her new contact information by e-mail. It was the sixth mobile-phone number she had given me since we met. Sometime I feel very tried, but sometime I feel very enrich, she wrote. Her English was still full of mistakes; she was moving too fast to correct herself. But who was I to criticize her? In the two years I had known her, she had gotten exactly what she wanted.
