A Village with My Name

by Scott Tong

  “I was pretty sure they were monitoring me and knew I was home alone,” Cecilia later tells me. She was given two choices of where to meet: the city’s central police station, or a coffee shop on Wujiang Road near our office. She picked Wujiang Road. The woman on the phone showed up with two other men. None gave their names. The older man was clearly in charge. What did you do abroad in Canada? Why did you come back? How does the bureau work? How are story topics chosen? What will you report on next? Why did you take this job? What do you do in your free time?

  Cecilia didn’t give up much. “I was like: ‘I have to make money. I need a job, just like everyone else. I’m no different from anyone else—I just watch cartoons for fun.’”

  She laughs as she tells me this part. What she’d failed to tell the minders was what she was reading at the time: Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962, a book on the Great Leap Forward that was banned on the mainland.

  Implicit in the conversation was that the Public Security Bureau wanted her to be their source on the inside of the bureau, to tell them what stories we were doing. “And I’m like, ‘All right.’ But inside I really told myself, ‘I’m really not going to tell you anything.’” Before their meeting ended, the minders told Cecilia not to tell me about the meeting—at which point she went back and promptly told me.

  After the first meeting, Cecilia was no longer nervous. The minders called less frequently, and when they did, they asked uninformed questions. They were bureaucrats ticking boxes. Cecilia started rolling her eyes when they called and began to ignore them. From the outside, Chinese censors and minders are often considered savvy operators, but not in Shanghai. I came to believe that the eavesdropping authorities are simply not very good at their jobs. Either they’re lousy data collectors, or they don’t have the expertise to connect the dots. Or perhaps the minders in Shanghai are second rate compared with those in Beijing. If they’d been paying attention, they’d have disrupted our reporting on slave labor. But we heard nothing then. Nor did anyone call Cecilia after our story on a sensitive factory strike outside Shanghai.

  One assignment turned out particularly challenging for Cecilia. It had nothing to do with the actual story and everything to do with the dirty old man traveling with us. For a series on the thirtieth anniversary of the one-child policy, we traveled for two days with a noted demographer. He was somewhat famous for opposing the strict policy and advocating a less harsh, voluntary program. Our story focused on a secret family-planning experiment in northern Shanxi province, a bone-dry area of hills made from windblown loess silt. For twenty-five years, the city of Yicheng allowed rural couples to have two children instead of one—so long as they spaced out the births. It succeeded. Yicheng kept under its population target, but Beijing ignored the experiment for decades.

  The demographer helped us schedule key interviews. He was in his sixties, and by tradition referred to us as Little Chen (Xiao Chenr) and Little Tong (Xiao Tong). On our first day in the Shanxi hotel, he and Cecilia were alone in the hotel elevator when it suddenly got stuck. The elevator was quite small. The respected demographer looked Cecilia up and down.

  “Xiao Chenr . . .” he said slowly. “Does this . . . mean anything?” This sixty-something man assumed his academic stature entitled him to this moment. I wonder how often this kind of thing occurs in China. This is another occupational hazard for fixers: Cecilia needed his help, and he’d suggested civilization’s oldest quid pro quo. Mercifully, the elevator restarted and nothing more happened.

  But that wasn’t all for Cecilia. On that same trip in that same hotel, I made the mistake of abandoning her during a dinner banquet. A group of local government officials hosted us—and the demographer—at the hotel restaurant. After the meal and a nasty shot of sorghum alcohol, I excused myself from the table. This early departure required a bit of diplomacy. “I’ll drink for him,” Cecilia said jokingly, even though she’s allergic to alcohol. Nonetheless, they pressured her into drinking. The next morning I learned she drank two shots and threw up before leaving the table.

  She recovered in time for the next morning. The demographer took us to a village where he seemed to know everyone. He complimented middle-aged village women on their appearances, and they laughed nervously. Then he led us to a local two-child policy enforcer; even a relaxed population policy requires muscle.

  Her name was Che Yuelian, a solid, immovable woman in her sixties with ebony black hair. Che lived in a large house with a gate and a Chinese national flag in the front. It seems she’d been rewarded by the nation for a job well done. Che brought out an old, dusty binder, with a series of index cards, lined up one after the other. Each card was entitled “Childbearing woman fertility condition registration card.”

  The sections read:

  Name:

  Name of spouse:

  Work unit:

  Political status:

  Age:

  Male children:

  Female children:

  Date of most recent birth of child:

  Date of sterilization:

  Date of intrauterine device implantation:

  Each card corresponded to a village woman of childbearing age.

  “The campaign was hard at the start,” she said. “Villagers teased me, but I wasn’t ashamed. One year, I convinced seven women to get IUDs, six to have abortions. And once we needed five women to get sterilized. We did a great job. The best year was when every single woman gave birth to her second child after the age thirty. Yes, that was our best year.”

  One year, Che explained, she’d faced a personal dilemma. Her niece in the village had married and conceived at the age of twenty-two—too young for either marriage or conception. If she carried the pregnancy to term, not only would she be fined, but her aunt Che Yuelian would also have to pay a fine of about $15. Money was the key enforcement lever: if a local official prevents a birth, she gets awarded financially. If not, she personally pays. This was a more complex incentive structure than I’d realized. Perhaps it was easier to dole out financial carrots than enforce with sticks.

  Che did not tell us what happened in the end, but said in general she’d avoided paying personal fines. That meant she, or her colleagues, had terminated many pregnancies. “If I couldn’t convince them all to have abortions,” she said, “I would have to pay all the fines from my own pocket.”

  ***

  Whenever I go out to eat with my cousin Tong Chengkan, he finds a way to pay. I never win, and for this I blame my father, whose own success rate is low. He once told me that historically, the most skilled operators used one hand to lunge for the check and the other to grab the opponent’s right wrist. That way the opponent could not reach into the outside right pocket of his jacket and pull out his money (he says men back then kept their money in their outside right pockets). But there also charlatans: if a person grabbed another person’s left wrist—a useless hand for wallet purposes—he was faking his intention to pay. I don’t know where he got the story.

  Tong Chengkan is quick on the draw one summer in 2014. He’s off this weekday, and I visit him at a Taiwanese restaurant near his parents’ apartment. I’m just back from the Delingha labor camp out in Qinghai. “I should pay,” he says, slipping the waiter his debit card with a very quick reaction time. “You can pay next time.” Sure.

  Interestingly, he is a traditionalist seeking to preserve cultural tradition. And yet at the same time he is a great consumer of modern products and technology. He wants it both ways—the kind of East-West hybrid our great-grandfather from the Tong village might have appreciated. In a way, my cousin is asking a question Chinese reformers have been asking themselves for at least a century: how to be modern and Chinese all at the same time.

  On this day, my cousin wants to take me somewhere and make a history point. In his bie-ke LaCrosse we ride a couple miles to an expansive, wide-open part of the city I’ve never seen. It’s in the northwest part of Shanghai, a spot curiously devoid of traffic lights, apartments
, and office buildings. The area stretches as broad and wide as the grounds of the Washington Monument. “Shanghai Sports College,” he mumbles as we walk past a few tennis courts and a soccer field.

  Then a majestic, imperial-era building rises up as we approach. Deep-blue shingles slope down from a gold roof line. Orange porcelain animals perch on the ridge line, atop a giant building held up by thick red pillars.

  “It’s from the min guo period,” he says, the time when the Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Guomindang Party ran the country from 1927 to 1937. Here, the GMD had planned to design a new Chinese Shanghai, far north of the old foreign devils’ concessions. A China for Chinese people. This is what he has brought me to see—something Chinese and not copied and pasted from an outside influence. “Why does everyone like everything Western?” he asks.

  His griping strikes me as refreshing. In China’s fast-forward dash for scarce resources—jobs, spouses, college spaces, affordable housing—the importance of something so vague and subjective as historical preservation generally cannot compete. Why keep up an old, decrepit building when you can knock it down and build seventy apartment units?

  Once, Chengkan fumed when I told him my fixer could not recall the old folk story about the origins of sweet, sticky dumplings during mid-autumn festival. Even I knew this one: a government bureaucrat named Qu Yuan was so distraught about the emperor’s military failings that he committed suicide in protest. Qu Yuan threw himself into a Hunan river. As the story goes, loyal members of the public jumped into boats and paddled madly to find his body (the origins of the Dragon Boat race). And people in boats threw rice into the water so the fish would eat the rice instead of Qu Yuan’s remains. Ladies and gentlemen: the origins of sticky rice dumplings.

  “What? She doesn’t even know about Qu Yuan?” Tong Chengkan shakes his head. “We’ve forgotten our history.”

  The classically Chinese building was once the city hall of Shanghai, until war interrupted the story. The Japanese invaded Shanghai in 1932 and again in 1937. “If there weren’t these wars, it would have been a lot better here,” he says. My cousin has a certain independence that makes me wonder if he was born in the wrong era. Today’s China seems to have no space for above-average sons who play clarinet, ride fancy road bikes, and think about history. These pursuits hold value in the States, but not so much here.

  After returning home, I researched the old city hall. In 1927, the Guomindang made its return to national relevance. The blueprint for the nucleus was a cross-shaped intersection that resembles the Chinese character zhong, or “middle,” for a proud Middle Kingdom. Four buildings were meant to anchor each corner of the main intersection: a city hall, a museum, a library, and a hospital. But there was a surprise. For all the Chinese symbolism, the city plan was drawn up by an Englishman named Ebenezer Howard, founder of a global garden-city movement (his ideas influenced the design of cities including Greenbelt, Maryland, near DC). In addition, the architect who designed the city hall, Dong Dayou, studied at the University of Minnesota. The city hall exuded Olde China on the outside, but inside there were Western features: the entrance and the reinforced concrete walls. Dong described this hybrid style as “Chinese Renaissance.”

  As Tong Chengkan suggested, the war derailed the whole plan. Japanese forces first attacked Shanghai in January 1932 and interrupted construction. The full-on invasion came five years later, damaging the buildings and the entire district of Yangpu in general. When the war ended in 1945, the GMD returned to Shanghai but abandoned the Ebenezer Howard plan. Instead it set up the city government in the old Shanghai municipal council building in the former International Settlement. Later, when the GMD itself was driven out in 1949, the Communists did not reinstate the plan either. Today, the grand imperial city council building belongs to the Shanghai Sports Academy. The architectural dream of a Chinese Shanghai flopped.

  ***

  In 2009 Cecilia and I fly to western Hunan to look into a case of mass lead poisoning of village children. This is a follow-up trip to a previous story in the same place. The boss of a manganese smelting plant had been found guilty of using an illegal smokestack. It was too short, so concentrated pollutants belched upward and then fell to the ground, leaching into the soil and groundwater. “The smoke was black and thick, darker than a thunderstorm,” one mother told us. More than a thousand children were diagnosed with lead poisoning. The local government pledged to pay for medicine and treatment, and now we are returning to update the story.

  We try to enter quietly. For embarrassing industrial stories like this, local jurisdictions are known to send cops or thugs to intercept reporters. One way to track journalists’ locations is by employing cell tower technology to geo-locate their phones. Our evasion strategy is to turn off our phones and to remove the batteries and SIM cards. Hours before we approach the village of Wenping, we buy brand-new SIM cards. And we hire a local cabbie on a friend’s recommendation. We are feeling very smart.

  Cecilia and I tape a few follow-up interviews with parents. As we suspect, after the public spotlight has dimmed, so has the government assistance. “The government gave us one hundred dollars, paid for one treatment, and that’s it,” says one mother, Hu Xianghong. Her son always seems to have a cold now, and he hardly eats. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests lead poisoning can result in long-term damage to a child’s attention span and IQ, but local officials have told the parents that lead has “been eliminated” from their children’s systems. We want to interview these officials.

  This is the kind of story many Chinese nationals hate to tell the outside world. They want to keep the ugliness inside the family, at a time when there are so many other positive stories to tell about China. But Cecilia has no compunction exposing the dark side. She is as critical as I am. But it’s a lonely position. More than once, she’s expressed disappointment about failing to contribute to Emerging China “from the inside.” Instead, she’s spent so many years on the outside, in Canada or working for foreign companies. Chinese nationals have a keen, instinctive sense of who the team players are and aren’t.

  On our way to the government building, we detour briefly to an adjacent apartment complex. Something has happened in this complex. A few weeks prior, Chinese news websites had reported that a midlevel government official had mysteriously died. The reports said he’d committed suicide by jumping off the roof, but his widow called reporters and denied he’d killed himself. Cecilia tracked this widow down, who said her late husband “had been suicided” because he held incriminating information about corrupt officials. The idea was, this man and his information were eliminated. But after a couple days, the widow stopped taking Cecilia’s calls.

  We approach the suicide spot. The complex is quiet. It’s clear the apartment building in question is tall enough for a suicide jump—or push. But there is no blood on the ground, no sign of foul play, no police markings. No one answers when we knock on their doors. So Cecilia and I start to make our way back out.

  Then a uniformed man rushes at us. He is very angry. “Who are you? What are you doing here? This is a private complex!” The man is very small and looks like he might be in his sixties. He is wearing a security guard uniform, with his name tag over the left pocket. He’s quite rude, and by now I’m quite tired—of the Hunan heat, of evasion strategies, of alternate phone SIM cards. I throw his attitude right back at him.

  “Private?” I shouted. “The gate is wide open.”

  “You can’t be in here.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “What’s your name? I’m going to report you.”

  Fine. I pull out my notebook. “What is your name?”

  Cecilia joins in. “Why are you so rude?”

  “Tell me your name!” The man blocks us from getting by, and then gets up in our business and flings curses. We curse back, but there is a problem. Even though I’ve descended to his level, I’m not trash talking very clearly in my second language. “Who taught you to spe
ak that way?” seems to lose something in the translation, as does “Go home, look at yourself in the mirror, and see who you really are.”

  Then he shocks us. “I’m going to call the police, and tell them the American journalists are here.”

  American journalists? Have we been followed? Monitored? How does this very small man know who we are?

  Cecilia tries to call his bluff. “You don’t know who we are.”

  I turn the conversation back to him and repeat: “What’s your name? Is that it?” I point to the three words above his pocket and start writing them down. The problem is, I don’t recognize one of the characters, and as I squint, the man whips his right palm over his heart to block his name tag.

  And then the thugs come. Four young men in white T-shirts approach from out of nowhere and surround us. I’m scared, but only a little. They are the youngest, skinniest thugs I’ve ever seen, yet they still outnumber us.

  “Is there anything wrong?” one thug kid asks.

  I put away my notebook. The small security guard is emboldened, like a small dog who barks ferociously and then retreats behind his owner’s leg, continuing to yap. Finally, another kid speaks up.

  “It’s best that you leave,” he says. Cecilia and I look at each other, then walk out.

  Our driver speaks up after we get back in. “When you got out of the car, someone immediately went to follow you. I saw him mention ‘American journalists.’” We have no answers for what just happened. It’s the only time in China I’ve knowingly been tracked on the road.

  Fortunately, we escape unharmed and with a story. And we are on our way to the next meeting a few hours away: a visit with a convicted baby seller.