LETTER FROM CHINA
BOOMTOWN GIRL
Finding a new life in the golden city.
by Peter Hessler
MAY 28, 2001
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M
a Li couldn’t tell me exactly why she had left
her home town after graduating from the local
teachers college. “There was something in the heart,”
she said. “My mother says that I just won’t be
satisfied with a happy life. She says that I’m
determined to chiku—eat bitter.” In any event, she
wouldn’t have been satisfied with life as a local
schoolteacher. “Teaching is a good job for a woman,
and it’s easy to find a husband, because men like to
have teachers as their wives,” she said. “It could
have been a very comfortable life. But, if it’s too
comfortable, I think it’s like death.”
She was slipping away even when I first met her.
That was in 1996, when I taught English at the
teachers college in Fuling, a small town on the
Yangtze River in Sichuan Province. My students
were training to become middleschool teachers, and
one day I asked them to respond to a hypothetical
question: Would you rather have a long life with the normal ups and downs, or an extremely
happy life that ends after another twenty years?
Nearly all my students took the first option. Most of them came from peasant homes in the
Sichuan countryside, and several pointed out that their families were so poor that they couldn’t
afford to die in two decades. Ma Li, though, chose the short life. At nineteen, she was the
youngest student in the class. She wrote:
It seems to me that I haven’t been really happy for quite a long time. Sometimes I owe my being dispirited to the surroundings, especially
the oppressive atmosphere in our college. But I find the other students can enjoy themselves while I am complaining, so I think the problem is in
myself.
Everything she wrote that year marked her as different. She contradicted her classmates; she
skirted the Communist Party line; she had her own opinions. She wrote about her father, a math
professor who had spent the Cultural Revolution in political exile, working in a coal mine; and
she wrote about her older sister, who had gone to the city of Shenzhen, seven hundred miles
away, to look for work. When I asked my students to compose a business letter to an American
organization, Ma Li chose the Country Music Association, in Nashville. She told me that she
was curious to learn what country music was like. Another time, she asked if I had any black
friends, because she had never seen a black person, except on television. When my literature
class performed “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” she played Titania. She was a good actress,
although she had a tendency to play every role with a touch of a smile, as if she were watching
herself from a great distance. She had high cheekbones, full lips, and dark, fastmoving eyes in
a wideopen face.
After graduation, most of my students accepted governmentassigned teaching jobs in their
home towns. Ma Li went south to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, with her boyfriend
to look for work. He was a squarefaced young man with bristly hair, hard black eyes, and a
quick temper, and he wanted to go on to Shanghai. “I hadn’t decided to break up with him yet,”
Ma Li told me later. “But I knew I didn’t want to go to Shanghai.” Instead, in November of
1997, she went to Shenzhen, and within a few months they had broken up for good. In
Shenzhen, it took her less than a week to find a position as a secretary in a factory that
produced costume jewelry for export. Her starting salary was eight hundred and seventy yuan a
month, or a hundred and five American dollars. Most of her former classmates were earning
about forty dollars a month as teachers in Sichuan.
It was not unusual for former students to call and tell me about various milestones of
independence. Often, these had to do with money and new possessions—a salary raise, a new
apartment. Once, a student called to tell me that he had acquired a cell phone. He talked about
the cell phone for a few minutes, and then he mentioned, in an offhand way, that he had also
become engaged. Five months after starting the factory job, Ma Li called to report that she had
received a raise, to a hundred and twenty dollars a month.
She laughed when I said that she now made as much money as I did. But she sounded a little
funny, and I asked if something was wrong.
”The company has an agent in Hong Kong,” she said slowly. “He often comes here to
Shenzhen. He is an old man, and he likes me.”
”What do you mean by that?”
”Because I am fat.” She giggled nervously. I knew that she had gained a little weight, and in
some ways it made her even prettier.
”Does he want you to be his girlfriend?”
”Perhaps.” Her voice sounded small on the phone.
”Is he married?”
”He is divorced. He has young children in Taiwan. But he usually works in Hong Kong.”
”How often does he come to Shenzhen?”
”Twice a month.”
”Is it a big problem?”
”He always finds a way to be with me,” she said. “He says he will help me find a job in Hong
Kong if I want one. The salaries are much higher there, you know.”
”That sounds like a very bad idea,” I said carefully. “If you want another job, you should
not ask him for help. That will only cause big problems in the future. You should try to avoid
him.”
”I do,” she said. “And I tell my coworkers to always be with me if he is here.”
”Well, if it becomes a big problem, you should leave the job.”
”I know,” she said. “Anyway, it is not such a good job, and if I have to leave I will.”
T
he city of Shenzhen is surrounded by a sixtysevenmilelong chainlink fence. Some of
the fence’s sections are topped with barbed wire. Deep in the center of downtown is a
seventyacre expanse of green called Litchi Park. At its southern end is a billboard that features
an enormous image of Deng Xiaoping against a backdrop of the Shenzhen skyline, with the
injunction “Persist in Following the Communist Party’s Basic Line for One Hundred Years
Without Change.” The billboard has become a symbol of Shenzhen, and locals and visitors
often pose in front of it for photographs. In February of 1997, when Deng Xiaoping died,
thousands of Shenzhen residents gathered to make offerings at the billboard. They left flowers,
poetry, and other memorials, and some of them sang “Spring Story,” which is the official
Shenzhen song:
In the spring of 1979
An old man drew a circle on the southern coast of China
And city after city rose up like fairy tales
And mountains and mountains of gold gathered like a miracle.
Other Chinese cities have history, but Shenzhen’s origins have the flavor of myth—the
miraculous birth, the benevolent god. In 1978, two years after the death of Mao Zedong, Deng
Xiaoping marked his rise to power by initiating what became known as Reform and Opening—
capitaliststyle innovations that ended almost three decades of Communist economics. Deng
avoided trying out the more radical changes in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, where
mistakes would be politically disastrous. Instead, he and his advisers experimented in less
developed areas, in what came to be called Special Economic Zones. Through a system of tax
breaks and investment privileges, the government hoped to encourage foreign firms to set up
shop in these zones. In 1980, they conferred this honor on Shenzhen, a sleepy southern border
town whose economy had depended mostly on fishing and farming. Shenzhen became a
“reform laboratory,” and one of its nicknames was Window to the Outside World.
In 1990, the government established the Shenzhen Stock Exchange—the first bigboard
market in China. (The second one opened later that year, in Shanghai.) Since 1980, Shenzhen’s
G.D.P. has had an annual growth rate of more than thirty per cent, and its residents enjoy one of
the highest standards of living in any Chinese city. A number of major American corporations
have plants in Shenzhen, including I.B.M., Compaq, PepsiCo, and DuPont.
Residents of Hong Kong, which is separated from Shenzhen by only a waterway and a
fence, tend to dismiss their neighbor as a cheap imitation of the former British colony. Indeed,
Shenzhen’s skyscrapers aren’t nearly as impressive as Hong Kong’s, the streets aren’t as clean,
and there isn’t the same dramatic cityscape of steel and lights shimmering across a harbor. But
few mainlanders have been to Hong Kong, and to them Shenzhen is astonishing. The city is
probably the cleanest of any in mainland China. And it is green—official statistics boast that
fortyfour per cent of the city is open space. Parks are sprinkled throughout the downtown area,
and the streets are lined with banyan trees and palms and carefully groomed strips of grass.
There are few bicycles downtown; most people can afford to take buses or cabs. The traffic
moves smoothly. The city center is intersected by Shennan Road, nine lanes of traffic bordered
by the city’s bestknown buildings: the Stock Exchange, a block of glistening bluegreen glass;
the Land King Tower, a narrow, twinspired building of sixtynine stories; and its adjoining
apartment complex, which, with a sevenstoryhigh opening in its façade, is the city’s most
architecturally innovative structure.
Over the past twenty years, Shenzhen has become home to a social experiment that is as
impressive as its economic adventure. Its population has exploded from three hundred thousand
to more than four million. The average Shenzhen resident is less than twentynine years old—a
remarkable statistic in a country whose birth policy has resulted in aging urban populations.
Because many of the factories rely on unskilled, lowwage labor, most of the newcomers are
women. Although there are no reliable official statistics, locals like to say that there are seven
women to every man in Shenzhen, and the city is sometimes described as a “woman’s paradise,”
because it offers so many job opportunites to young women. But this phrase hardly describes
the underside of the boomtown. Shenzhen is notorious as a place where workers in poorly
regulated factories often lose limbs in laborrelated accidents. China’s development over the
past decade has spurred an explosive growth in the sex industry, and nowhere is this
phenomenon more obvious than in downtown Shenzhen, where it’s impossible to walk at night
without being propositioned by young prostitutes, who are known as “street angels.”
Shenzhen feels like a city under siege. Locals, knowing that they have been the beneficiary
of unusual government patronage, are constantly worried that Shenzhen’s special status might
be revoked. (The 1997 offerings to Deng Xiaoping at the billboard in Litchi Park reflected this
fear of political change.) In the midnineteeneighties, when a series of smuggling scandals
broke out in the Special Economic Zones, conservative Communist officials complained that
the loosened restrictions on foreign investment were invitations to corruption and neo
colonialism.
Similar worries prompted the government to erect the encircling fence. It was a distinctly
Chinese “solution”: just as the Great Wall had been built to keep foreigners at bay, so the fence
was intended to keep the capitalist reforms under control. Chinese citizens entering Shenzhen
proper have to go through customs, where they must show a border pass and an I.D. that
requires approval from their home province. The completion of the fence, in 1984, had
unintended consequences. Laborintensive factories inside the Special Economic Zone began
moving to the other side of the fence to take advantage of cheaper rents and less rigorous law
enforcement. Today, Shenzhen is divided into two worlds, which are described by residents as
guannei and guanwai—”within the customs” and “outside the customs.” Satellite towns have
sprung up beyond the fence, most of them squalid and unplanned. In this sprawl of cheaply
constructed factories and worker dormitories, wages are lower, workweeks are longer, and labor
accidents and factory fires are more frequent than they are in Shenzhen proper.
It was here, outside the customs, that Ma Li got her job at the costumejewelry factory,
handling inventory, keeping track of orders, and doing some English translation. The factory
made pewter, brass, and lowgrade silver jewelry, as well as cheap plastic beads that were
painted and lacquered and packaged in ziplock bags to be sent to Hong Kong, Southeast Asia,
San Francisco, and Chicago.
H
er stories drifted up to me from the south. Every two or three weeks, Ma Li telephoned or
wrote, creating the city in my mind. Some of her tales ended abruptly, like the one about
the businessman from Hong Kong who had pursued her. Other stories lasted longer, like the one
about her older sister, who had first worked as a travelling saleswoman and then been recruited
by a company that was running a pyramid scheme. She brought Ma Li to the recruitment
meeting. “A lot of the salespeople had low cultural levels, but they had learned how to talk,” Ma
Li recalled. “I didn’t think it was a good way to make money, but it was a good way to improve
yourself and improve your confidence.” Her sister had known that it was a scam—the
government was cracking down on pyramid schemes, which had run rampant across southern
China—and she said that she had gone to the meeting simply out of curiosity. Afterward, she
had taken a job with a lonelyhearts hot line, talking on the telephone with other people who
felt lost in Shenzhen. “Some people say there is no real love in Shenzhen,” Ma Li said when I
asked why people called her sister’s hot line. “People are too busy with earning money to really
live.”
That, probably, was why a young man named Gao Ming took her by surprise. He had been
trained as a moldmaker, but he came to the jewelry factory as a purchasing agent, because he
wanted a break from manual labor. At his previous job in Shenzhen, Gao Ming had
miscalculated the weight of a metal part, which slipped when he and two other workers were
trying to lift it. Gao Ming let go. The other two workers didn’t, and they lost their fingers. The
workers were promised compensation, and Gao Ming wasn’t blamed for the accident. Still, he
decided to leave the job. Seeing the injured men around the factory made him uncomfortable.
At first, Ma Li didn’t take much notice when Gao Ming arrived at her factory, in March of
1998. He was of average height, with stiff black hair, and his shoulders were broad from
working with the molds. He wasn’t particularly handsome. He kept to himself. But after a while,
she found that she was noticing him. She liked the way he walked—there was a certain
confidence in his gait. Two months later, small gifts started appearing in the drawer of her desk.
She received two dolls and a small figurine of a sheep. She didn’t ask who had put them there.
One day in September, Gao Ming and Ma Li went out with some of their coworkers and
found themselves walking alone in the local park. Ma Li can’t remember how they became
separated from the others. Suddenly she was frightened—things were happening too fast. She
was twentytwo years old. He was twentysix.
”I don’t want to walk with you,” she said.
”Who do you want to walk with?” Gao Ming asked.
”I don’t want to walk with anybody!”
They went back to the factory. Months later, Gao Ming told her that it was then that he could
see she hadn’t made up her mind to reject him.
The jewelry factory had fifty employees. The owner was Taiwanese, as were many of the
bosses who ran plants outside the customs. He told the workers that he hated mainland China
and that he was there only because of the cheap labor. The workers didn’t like the Taiwanese
owner very much. Some of them made as little as twelve cents an hour, which meant that they
had to work overtime to earn a decent income. Whenever they talked about the boss, they used
the words that many workers in Shenzhen use to describe the Taiwanese owners: “stingy” and
“lecherous.” But the jewelryfactory boss wasn’t as bad as many of the other bosses, and
conditions at the plant were better than at many of the others beyond the fence. The workers
had Sundays off, and during the week they were allowed to leave the factory after work hours,
although everybody had to be back in the dormitory by 11 or 12 P.M., depending on the boss’s
whim.
The dormitory where Ma Li lived was on the top two floors of a sixstory building. There
were six workers to a dorm room. It was a “threeinone” factory—production, warehousing,
and living quarters were combined into one structure. This arrangement is illegal in China, and
the workers knew it, just as they knew that some of the production material stored on the first
floor was extremely flammable. What’s more, an electrician had reported to Ma Li that the
building’s wiring was faulty. Afterward, she mapped out an escape route for herself. If a fire
broke out at night, she would run to the dormitory’s sixthfloor balcony and jump across to the
roof of the building next door. That was the extent of her plan—she had no interest in
complaining to the government about the violations, and neither did the other workers. All of
them were far from home, and they knew that such conditions were common in the plants
outside the customs.
One Saturday night in October, Gao Ming took Ma Li’s hand as they were crossing the road.
Gao Ming held on tightly.
”I’m too nervous,” Ma Li said, once they had reached the other side. “I don’t want it to be
like this.”
”What’s wrong?” Gao Ming said. “Haven’t you ever done this before?”
”I have,” she said. “But I’m still scared.”
”It’s going to be like this in the future,” Gao Ming said. “You should get used to it.”
I
made my first visit to Shenzhen in April, 1999. It was a hazy morning, the sky low and heavy
with smog, when my bus arrived at Ma Li’s satellite city, twenty miles outside the Shenzhen
fence. She was waiting for me in front of a local hamburger joint—the sole Americanstyle fast
food restaurant in town and a sign that Western influence had made its way out here from
downtown Shenzhen.
Ma Li looked much the same as when I had last seen her. She wore a simple blue dress, and
her hair was tied back; she smiled and shook my hand. Much of her old shyness had
disappeared; she was the guide now, steering me briskly through town to another bus stop,
where we caught a ride into the Special Economic Zone. Uniformed guards at the border
checked our I.D.s—my passport, her border pass—and the highway led us into the heart of the
city. She was excited: she said that she went inside the fence only once a month or so, because
the city was so expensive and because her factory restricted the workers to oneday weekends.
I visited Shenzhen three more times, and it was always the passage into town and then the
return, the fencedin boundary and the routine of the checkpoint, that were the most memorable
moments of the day. On that first trip, Ma Li and I spent only a few hours downtown. We walked
past the Stock Exchange and glanced at the digital board on its façade. We went to the Safari
Park Shenzhen, where tourists paid twentyfive yuan to throw live ducks to the crocodiles. I
took Ma Li’s photo in front of the Deng Xiaoping billboard. In the Chinese way, she didn’t
smile—a sombre pose with the Old Man waving in the background.
And then we returned, catching another bus north: past the downtown skyscrapers and the
apartment blocks, watching the neighborhoods grow seedier with every mile we travelled from
the center. We cut through the green hills just before the border, where nothing had yet been
built. And then we arrived at the long, low line of the chainlink fence. There was a billboard at
the checkpoint advertising “Mission Hills Golf Club: The First 72Hole Golf Club in China.”
Beyond the fence was a rough cluster of unfinished concrete buildings. Piles of dirt stood
beside enormous foundation holes. We kept going north, the factory towns coming one after the
other: dormitories surrounded by fences, smokestacks sprouting in dirty clumps. Signs above
factory gateways identified the goods produced within: shoes, furniture, toys. We travelled
twenty miles before arriving in Ma Li’s town, where a group of Taiwanese bosses had set up
half a dozen jewelry plants in a tight group. A space of a few feet separated Ma Li’s factory and
the neighboring one.
That night, we had dinner at an outdoor restaurant on the town’s main street. It was a
pleasant evening; I had always preferred nighttime in China, and, in the Shenzhen satellite
towns, the monotony of the urban landscapes was hidden by the darkness. There was an energy
to the place at night: the streets were filled with young people, walking in packs, laughing and
flirting with one another. It was clear that they had nothing else to do—there were no families
here, no traditions. They were free.
Ma Li sent part of her salary home to help pay her brother’s school tuition, and the
responsibility had given her a new air of maturity. At twentythree, she was the oldest worker in
her factory office, which was staffed entirely by women. During dinner, she regaled me with
stories about the Taiwanese factory owners. They fascinated her—she couldn’t believe the
looseness of their lives, financially and morally, and she saw them as symbolic of the world
beyond the mainland. She told me about one of her boss’s colleagues, a ChineseAmerican who
had recently arrived from San Francisco on business, had faxed his wife a love letter from Ma
Li’s office, and then had gone out and hired a prostitute. Ma Li’s boss was always leering at the
young women in the factory; a Taiwanese businessman in a nearby factory had become so
distracted by two Sichuanese mistresses that his plant went bankrupt. In Ma Li’s opinion, they
were all the same. “All of them have failed somewhere else,” she scoffed, explaining that her
boss’s old company in Taiwan had gone bankrupt years ago. When I asked if Shenzhen had
fewer political restrictions than Fuling, she said it did, but pointed out that the labor practices
were just as restrictive. “Here it’s not the government but the bosses who control everything,”
she said. “Maybe it amounts to the same thing.”
She told me about a notorious Taiwaneseowned purse factory in a nearby city. The plant
kept the gates locked throughout the sixday workweek. Except on Sundays, the workers
couldn’t leave the factory complex.
”That can’t be legal,” I said.
”Many of the factories do that,” she said, shrugging. “All of them have good connections
with the government.”
She explained that one of her friends had worked at the purse factory, where the Taiwanese
boss often ordered everyone to work until midnight, yelling when they got tired. One worker
had complained and been fired; when he tried to claim his last paycheck, the boss had him
beaten up. Ma Li decided that she had to do something about it, so she wrote the boss a letter
that said, “This day next year will be your memorial day.”
”And I drew a picture of a—” She was speaking English, and she couldn’t think of the word.
She pushed aside her plate and sketched an outline on the table—a simple head, a narrow body.
”A skeleton?” I asked.
”Yes,” she said. “A skeleton. But I didn’t write my name. I wrote, ‘An unhappy worker.’ “
I didn’t know how to respond—back in Fuling, my writing class hadn’t covered death
threats. Finally, I said, “Did the letter work?”
”I think it helped,” she said. “Workers at the factory said that the boss was very worried
about it. Afterward, he was a little better.”
”Why didn’t you complain to the police?”
”It doesn’t do any good,” she said. “All of them have connections. In Shenzhen, you have to
take care of everything yourself.”
When we finished the meal, Ma Li looked at me and said, “Do you want to see something
interesting?”
She led me to a small street near the middle of town. Below the road, a creek flowed
sluggishly in the shadows. Dozens of people stood along the curb, smoking cigarettes. The
street was unlit, and all of the people were men. I asked what was going on.
”They’re looking for prostitutes,” Ma Li said. We watched as a prostitute appeared—
walking slowly, glancing around, until a man came up and spoke to her. They talked for a few
seconds, and then the man slipped back into the shadows. The woman kept walking. Ma Li said,
“Do you want to see what happens if I leave you here alone?”
”No,” I said. “We can leave now.”
I spent the night in Gao Ming’s oneroom apartment. He had recently left Ma Li’s factory to
start a new job, which allowed him to live in private housing. His neighborhood was covered
with boldfaced flyers advertising private venerealdisease clinics; we followed the notices up
the stairwell to Gao Ming’s apartment, on the fourth floor. The building was only half
constructed—the walls unpainted, the plaster chipping away, the plumbing unfinished. The
water heater hadn’t been installed yet. Much of the development beyond the Shenzhen fence
seemed to be like this—abandoned before it was completed. There were too many factories and
apartment blocks to build, and the contractors moved on once the bare essentials were in place.
It occurred to me that as soon as anything in this region was actually finished it was
immediately exported.
Gao Ming’s apartment was furnished with two simple wooden beds covered with rattan
mats. There was nothing on the walls. Apart from a thermos and a few books, he didn’t have
many possessions. His current job involved making molds for the production of household
appliances.
I knew that something about Gao Ming made Ma Li feel secure. Once, she had bluntly told
me that he wasn’t handsome, and this was true—acne had badly scarred his face. But his
plainness was attractive to her. She had a theory that handsome men weren’t reliable.
O
ver the next year, Ma Li’s letters and phone calls became less cheerful. She complained of
headaches; the job had become more tedious; the boss was insufferable. Her sister had
moved away, after marrying a man from Fujian Province. Ma Li’s coworkers came and went;
she was still the oldest woman in her office. By now, she had adopted a protective role,
guarding new women employees against the boss’s advances. For Christmas, she sent me
samples from her factory: bracelets made of pink and purple plastic beads. She told me that I
could give them to my sisters in America.
I sent her a story that I had written about her and her classmates, and she responded, “I’m
not confident that I’m as admirable as I seem to you. It’s true that I like to be alone. But partly
it’s because I don’t know how to join the people; I can’t share their joys and sorrows and cares.
Although I really wish to.” Another time she wrote about her job, “My head aches sometimes.
And mistakes often happen. . . . Do you know of any kind of jobs that are interesting and benefit
the whole society?”
I encouraged her to find something that required English skills, but I knew that my advice
wouldn’t help much, because there was something elusive about her unhappiness. I had
glimpsed a similar quality in some of my brightest students—most of them girls. The best
freshman student in the English department had been a quiet girl who kept apart from her peers.
After class, she often came to see the foreign teachers for extra practice with her English, which
was excellent. During summer vacation, she returned to her home town and killed herself by
jumping off a bridge. I never learned anything else about her death; nobody in the class had
been close to her. In China, more women kill themselves than men, and the suicide rate for
females is nearly five times the world average—the highest of any country in the world. Many
of them are women from remote provinces who migrate to places like Shenzhen.
One of Shenzhen’s economic innovations has been the establishment of “talent markets,” or
employment centers, which have replaced the Communiststyle system in which jobs were
assigned by the government. Although these markets encourage independence, they also
subscribe to traditional notions of how a woman should look. Ma Li complained that
prospective employers often thought that she was too short. (She stands 1.53 metres tall—just
over five feet—and in China talent markets generally advertise jobs that require women to be at
least 1.6 metres tall, especially if they want to be employed as receptionists, secretaries, or
waitresses at expensive restaurants.) Ma Li also said that she had been cursed with eyes that
were too small and lips that were too big, and this reduced her chances of getting jobs that
required female applicants to be blessed with wuguan duanzheng, meaning that “the five
senses”—the ears, the eyes, the lips, the nose, and the tongue—are regular. In the first letter she
wrote to me after starting work at the jewelry factory, she introduced her coworkers by
carefully describing their appearance:
Lijia is the most beautiful, able and shortest girl, who is liked by everyone. Huahui is a classical beauty, most private telephone calls from
boys are for her. But I don’t like her very much, for her word sometimes hurtful. Lily is the other secretary, who came two days earlier than me.
She leaves us an impression of stupid and irresponsible. So she is not very popular in the office. Xinghao is the fattest girl concerning much
about losing weight.
Although conventional notions of beauty can make things uncomfortable for women in the
Shenzhen job market, they can enjoy freedom in the city which most women in other parts of
the mainland cannot. In Shenzhen, it is not uncommon for young people to live together before
marriage. Divorce is more acceptable, and many women are in no hurry to get married. During
my wanderings around the city, I picked up two copies of a women’s magazine entitled Window
to the Special Economic Zone. Its articles carried such headlines as ”ONE NIGHT’S LOVE,” “I AM
NOT A LADY,” “A TRAP SET BY AN OLD MAN,” and ”WHY HAVE AN ABORTION?”
W
henever Ma Li talked about difficult personal issues, she mentioned a radio callin show,
“At Night You’re Not Lonely,” and its host, Wu Xiaomei, who is an idol to the young
women of Shenzhen. In 1992, when she was twenty, Wu Xiaomei had left her home, in a remote
coalmining region of the Chinese interior, for a seventydollaramonth job in a Shenzhen
mineralwater plant. One night, she telephoned a callin show. Unlike most callers, she didn’t
want advice—she just wanted to tell listeners about her longheld dream of becoming a radio
show host. Wu Xiaomei was a good talker, and after she was finished she gave the listeners her
work address and phone number.
”The next week, I got stacks of letters and more than a hundred phone calls,” Wu Xiaomei
told me when I interviewed her during one of my trips to Shenzhen. “But the mineralwater
plant fired me for using their phone for personal reasons, so I had no job. I took all the letters,
bundled them together, and brought them to the radio station.”
Wu Xiaomei paused and took a long drag on her Capri menthol superslim. We were sitting
in a private room in a downtown Shenzhen restaurant. A pretty, petite woman with long black
hair, she is the type of Chinese smoker who can eat and smoke simultaneously. She exhaled a
thin menthol stream and continued: “They said I was too young—I was only twenty years old
and I had no experience. But one official decided to give me a chance. I told him that I was only
twenty and that I didn’t understand many things, but that many listeners were the same as me,
so maybe I’d understand them.”
Nine years later, a million people tune in to Wu Xiaomei’s show every weeknight, and many
of them are young factory women who work outside the fence. Even though the Shenzhen radio
station is governmentowned, like all media in China, Wu Xiaomei often gives blunt advice that
rankles traditionminded officials—for example, recommending that young people not be
afraid of living together before marriage. She has written a book; she often appears on
television; and she exudes an air of sophistication. When I asked her which writers she admired,
she mentioned the stories of Raymond Carver. (“You can tell so much from a very small detail,”
she said.) Like many women I met in Shenzhen within the fence, she is worldly, selfmade, and
confident. She had once broken off a longterm romantic relationship partly because, she said,
“he didn’t like it that people knew him as Wu Xiaomei’s boyfriend.”
All the women at Ma Li’s factory listened to Wu Xiaomei’s show religiously, and the next
day they discussed the callers whom they had heard the night before: the wives who were
having affairs, the mistresses who wanted a way out, the women who couldn’t decide whether
or not to move in with their boyfriends. Ma Li was most impressed by the individuality of Wu
Xiaomei’s responses. “She doesn’t make blanket judgments,” she said. “She looks at each
caller’s specific situation and then decides.”
But even with the help of Wu Xiaomei, Ma Li didn’t find it easy to adapt to Shenzhen’s
freedom. She said that she thought it was acceptable for young people to live together before
marriage but not to tell anybody about it. Wu Xiaomei had once told a caller the same thing, and
Ma Li agreed that this decision should remain completely unspoken. “It could influence the
way people see you, especially if you break up later,” she said. “It’s better if you just don’t say
anything about it.” One day, when she remarked that sex was more open in Shenzhen than in
other parts of China, I asked her whether this was good or bad. She thought for a moment and
then said, “It’s better than it was in the past. But it shouldn’t cross a certain line.” When I
pushed her to explain what that line should be, she said, “Traditional morality,” but she
couldn’t define what that meant.
O
ne day, I gave Ma Li a copy of a popular Shenzhen novel, “You Can’t Control My Life.”
The book, which was published in 1998, follows the fortunes of its migrant heroine in
Shenzhen from her first job, as a secretary, to a life of luxury as the mistress of a wealthy Hong
Kong businessman. The author, a twentynineyearold woman named Miao Yong, grew up in
western China and migrated to Shenzhen after graduating from a teachers college. She found a
job as a secretary, wrote fiction on the side, and became rich when “You Can’t Control My
Life,” her first novel, became a bestseller. The government banned the book, because of its
portrayal of drugs, gambling, and casual sex. Like many book bannings in China, this actually
boosted sales—although all of the copies were bootlegs. Outside the Stock Exchange, migrant
venders sold blackmarket copies of the novel alongside Chinese translations of “Mein Kampf.”
I met Miao Yong at a trendy Westernstyle café near her apartment in a Shenzhen luxury
highrise. She reminded me of Wu Xiaomei: she chainsmoked Capri menthol superslims, drove
her own car, and had the same worldly air. She told me that her writing had been influenced by
the novels of Henry Miller. “His books were banned, too,” she said.
Miao Yong responded to the ban with great resourcefulness: she turned her novel into a
popular television series, purging the most sensitive material and changing the title to
something more ambiguous—”There’s No Winter Here.” The first detail in her book jacket’s
author bio is her blood type; like many hip young Chinese, she believes that blood type helps
determine character. When I asked her what most distinguishes Shenzhen from other parts of
China, she said, “In the past, China was very collective. It was all about group thought. But now,
in places like Shenzhen, you can decide exactly what kind of person you want to be.”
Shenzhen’s strain of individualism can take extreme forms. Outside a WalMart store—
Shenzhen was the first Chinese city to open the franchise, in 1996—private venders were
selling bogus bachelor’s degrees for something less than a hundred dollars. It was possible for
any young woman to redefine herself here, but doing so could be risky. I interviewed one
Sichuanese prostitute who was hoping to limit the job to an eightmonth run; she was making
seven hundred and forty dollars a month, and she figured that soon she’d have enough saved up
to return home and start a small business before anybody knew what she’d been up to. She had
been a virgin when she first arrived in Shenzhen. She was twenty years old and obsessed with
the notion of getting her old life back. I talked with another young woman who was working as
a “threeaccompany girl,” a nightclub job in which women accompany men as they drink, sing
karaoke, and dance. It’s a notoriously vague profession, and more than a few threeaccompany
girls are willing to perform a fourth service as well. But this woman said that she hadn’t
accepted money for sex, and she spoke nostalgically about her old job at a shoe factory, where
she had earned a hundred dollars a month and slept in a dorm room with seven other workers.
“My heart was more open in those days,” she said. Now she was earning thirtyfive dollars a
night, and on her evenings off she liked to get drunk and go dancing in night clubs, entirely by
herself.
After reading Miao Yong’s novel, Ma Li said that she felt no connection with the world it
depicted. The heroine had no heart—all she cared about was money—and she went from one
man’s bed to another. “It’s too chaotic,” Ma Li said. “You need to control this part of your life.”
I asked her where she thought these new notions of morality had come from. She shrugged.
“Most people say that they came from the West, after Reform and Opening. I think that there’s
probably some truth to this.”
”What do you think the book’s philosophy is?”
”It’s saying that Shenzhen is a new city without any soul,” she replied. “Everybody in the
book is in turmoil— they can’t find calmness.”
A
year ago, Ma Li and Gao Ming started living together. They rented a threeroom apartment
in a small factory town about thirty miles beyond the Shenzhen fence, near the
householdappliance plant where Gao Ming worked. The apartment building was closer to being
finished than most of the neighboring structures. The concrete stairways were cracked, but
everything worked, and the kitchen was well equipped. It was the first decent home that Ma Li
had had since coming to Shenzhen.
Another young Sichuanese couple also lived in the apartment. Each of the couples had their
own bedroom, but they shared the living room, which was furnished with a bed that doubled as
a couch, a low table, a color television, and a VCR. All four of them got along well. One of the
bedrooms had a laminated poster of a topless foreign couple making out. Such posters are
popular in China; they’re considered romantic, and they’re inoffensive because the couple is
not Chinese.
Ma Li didn’t tell her parents about the apartment. Back home in Fuling she never would
have moved in with a man before marriage. But one day, during a phone conversation, her
mother asked if she and Gao Ming were living together. “I didn’t say anything,” Ma Li told me.
“She knew from my silence that it was true.” After that, neither of them said anything more
about it.
Ma Li still spent weekday nights in the jewelryfactory dormitory, but on weekends she
stayed at the new apartment. Gao Ming had been promoted to a supervisory position in his
factory, and he was earning three hundred and sixty dollars a month. Ma Li’s salary had risen to
two hundred and forty dollars a month, but she was sick of the job. She didn’t like the way the
boss occasionally asked her to work overtime, and she didn’t like being restricted to the
dormitory at night.
One weekday evening, Ma Li broke curfew and spent the night with Gao Ming. The next
morning, the boss called her into his office.
”He asked me what time I came back last night,” she said. “That’s the way he was—it was
never direct. He didn’t ask me whether or not I had come back—he just asked what time. I said,
‘I came back this morning.’ I didn’t make any excuse or explanation. He didn’t know what to
say. I don’t think he knew whether to get angry or laugh. He looked at me, and finally he just
walked away.”
A few weeks later, another young woman followed Ma Li’s lead and started breaking
curfew. Not long after that, the boss took a pretty worker off the production floor and made her
his personal secretary. The worker was from Hunan Province, and she was eighteen years old.
Ma Li told the Hunan girl about the boss, and one day he confronted Ma Li. He asked her what
people were saying about him behind his back, and then he said, “Do you tell the other workers
that I’m lecherous?”
Ma Li said, “Yes.”
He tried to laugh it off, but it was clear that he no longer liked having her around. Ma Li
started spending her free time searching for work. A few weeks later, she found a position as a
nurseryschool teacher. Like the jewelry factory, the school was outside the fence, but there
were no Taiwanese bosses, no factory dormitories, and no evening shifts. The salary was
roughly the same as what Ma Li had been making at the plant. She was going to teach English.
When she told her boss that she was quitting, he gave her a dressingdown.
”You’ve changed,” he said. “You used to be obedient. Everything changed after you got a
boyfriend.”
”I didn’t change,” Ma Li said. “I just got to know you better.”
O
n the final night of my last visit to Shenzhen, Ma Li and I took a walk. Gao Ming had
returned home late from a bad day at the factory, during which a worker under his
supervision had been injured. The plant was working overtime on a new product—a thermos
bottle—and accidents were more apt to happen at such times.
When Gao Ming said that he wanted to be alone, Ma Li suggested that she and I go outside
and listen to Wu Xiaomei’s callin program. It was a warm, clear night, and the stars were bright
above the dormitory lights of the factories. We climbed a hill where we could look out over the
town. It was a typical outsidethecustoms factory settlement: a cluster of shops and apartment
buildings wedged into a dusty cut in the hills and, fanning out along the two main roads, strips
of factories and their dormitories. There were shoe and clothing factories, and a computer
accessory plant whose top story had been gutted in a recent fire. The smoke had left the plant’s
white tile walls streaked with black. Ma Li said that nobody had been hurt in the fire, but down
the road in another factory several workers had died a few years ago in a massive blaze. That
factory had been producing Christmas decorations and lawn furniture.
Ma Li was about to start her teaching job, and she was apprehensive. She was worried about
her English, which had slipped during the years at the factory, and she wondered whether she
would be able to discipline the children. But she liked the school campus, and she smiled
whenever she talked about the new job. She kept her hair short now, her bangs pinned back with
plastic barrettes. Around her neck she wore a simple necklace that Gao Ming had given her—a
jade dragon, her birth sign.
We sat together on top of the hill and listened to “At Night You’re Not Lonely.” It was after
eleven o’clock, the volume control on the radio was broken, and the voice of Wu Xiaomei
crackled thinly in the night air. We strained to hear.
The first caller started crying, because she regretted the way she’d treated an old boyfriend,
who had left her. Wu Xiaomei told her that the experience would be good for her and that
maybe the next time she’d get it right. The second caller talked about missing his highschool
girlfriend, who was far away, working in another part of the country. Wu Xiaomei said that he
shouldn’t believe that every feeling was love. She told the third caller that, at twentythree, she
was wrong to feel as though she had to get married immediately.
I remembered a conversation that Ma Li and I had had a couple of days earlier. We were
talking about how the migrants were handling the new personal freedoms in Shenzhen, and she
said that she admired the way that people here had learned to help themselves. This was a
comment that she had often made in the past, but now she added that sometimes the isolation
frightened her—all these people living on their own. “In original society,” she said, “people
lived in groups. Eventually, these groups broke down into families, and now they’re breaking
down again, into so many different people. Finally, it will be just one single person.” A few
days earlier, she had remarked that the changes in Shenzhen—the independence of young
people, the shift from control by the Communist Party to control by the factory bosses—had
come too abruptly. “If you could have some kind of perfect socialism, that would be the best,”
she said. “But it’s impossible. That was just a beautiful ideal.”
Now, sitting on the hillside with her, I asked if she wanted to leave Shenzhen. She shook her
head quickly. I asked how she thought the new pressures of the city would change the people
who lived here.
”The result is that people will have more ability,” she said. “And they’ll have more
creativity. Afterward, there will be more different ideas. It won’t be a matter of everybody
having the same opinion.”
I asked, “How do you think this will change China?”
She fell silent. Beyond us, the lights in the dormitories were going out. I had no idea how I
would have answered the question myself, although I liked to think that, once people learned to
take care of themselves, the system would change naturally. Still, I had seen Shenzhen’s
fragmentation—the walled city, the locked factories, the people on their own, far from home—
and I wondered how all of it could ever be brought together into something coherent.
I looked at Ma Li and realized that the question wasn’t important to her. Since coming to
Shenzhen, she had found a job, left it, and found another job. She had fallen in love and broken
curfew. She had sent a death threat to a factory owner, and she had stood up to her boss. She
was twentyfour years old. She was doing fine. ♦
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ASSIGNMENTS
1. DISCUSSION (10%) Participation in daily discussions of the assigned readings during class
2. WEEKLY READING POSTS: (20%): Every week that we have assigned readings, with the exception of April
25 (the day we cover the novel Northern Girls), students will post their reflections, responses and
questions related to the assigned readings to an online discussion forum. Students should submit their
posts to the "Discussion Board" in Blackboard. These posts should raise critical questions and issues that
you find are important about the readings. The point of the posts is not to discuss what you find
interesting, but to go further and think critically about what is important about the readings in relation to
the themes, concepts, and ideas we are discussing in class. Take what you find interesting in the readings
and try to connect it to the bigger questions we are trying to answer. Your posts should demonstrate that
you have read and thought about the assigned materials. Postings are due by 5am on Tuesdays.
3. 4 ESSAYS (40%): 2-3 pages long
• 1 FILM ESSAY: You will select and write a review of one of the films watched during the course. Film
essays are due at the beginning of class on the Tuesday after we watch the film.
1 NOVEL ESSAY: Everyone will write a review of the novel Northern Girls. The novel review is due
Tuesday, April 25 at the beginning of class.
2 READING ESSAYS: Everyone will select two weeks during the semester (one week before Spring
Break and one week after spring break) and write an analytic essay on the readings assigned for the
chosen week. These papers should engage with the critical issues and themes that connect the
assigned texts for that week. In other words, rather than describing or summarizing one text at a
time, you should think about some of the common themes, questions or issues that run through the
different texts. Your papers should engage with those critical issues and discuss what each of the
texts reveals about those issues, what they reflect about Chinese women's lives, or what ideas they
convey about Chinese women in society. You may skip the reading discussion posts on the weeks you
write these essays.
4.2 EXAMS (30%): Due February 28 & May 16. Instructions will be provided a week prior to the exam due
date.
RESOURCES
WRITING CENTER: A significant portion of your grade in this course depends on writing. Most people,
however, feel quite challenged by the process of writing. The BU Writing Center has resources and tutors that
can help you improve your writing skills. You should make appointments with the writing tutors well in
advance of the assignment due dates as they often book up very quickly, particularly during midterms and
finals.
ACADEMIC HONESTY: Sociologists draw upon the writings and thinking of others all of the time. To use other
people's writing without giving them credit and citing their published work is plagiarism and constitutes a
violation of academic honesty that can result in expulsion from the university. Such violations in this course will
be handled in accordance with BU's academic honesty violation procedures. For further information on what
constitutes plagiarism and how to avoid it by citing properly, see the BU Library Guide on Academic Honesty
and Plagiarism, which includes tutorials on how to avoid plagiarism and how to practice proper citation.
DISABILITY ACCOMODATIONS: If you qualify for classroom accommodations because of a disability, please get
an Accommodation Authorization from Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) and submit it to me in
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