English Language Boom in China/One

Shanghai: If there’s a single person in Shanghai’s eleven million population who’s not into learning English, I didn’t run into him on my daily walks throughout every nook and cranny of the sprawling metropolis. If you walk like an American (sly Maoist disguises like wearing People’s Liberation Army clothing are useless), you are accosted unceasingly by friendly Chinese hungry to improve their “Yingwen.” (The less said about the level of “Chungwen” I achieved after a month of mornings Berlitzing myself in Mandarin from 8:00 a.m. to noon, the better – for Sino-American relations. Suffice to say, I broke up my Chinese hosts by honestly confessing that after three weeks I had mastered only three words – wo bu dong “I/not/understand.”

I especially relish an encounter in Hongkow Park, where lies the mausoleum and Museum of Lu Xun (pronounced “Shun”) – I learned that much). The so-called Thomas Jefferson of the New China. He gave up medical studies in Japan to help unthrone the Qing dynasty in 1911 as a pamphleteer, and – most interesting to me – as the Sol Hurok of the woodblock print, a genre that thrived before Liberation because it didn’t require expensive canvas, oils, and studio space.

The highpoint of my month in China was finally tracking down a copy of a two-volume collection of these woodblocks edited to honor the centennial of his birth in 1881, but already out of print because of its high quality and low price ($20 for over 400 woodblocks!) And I only got a copy by tracking down the editor of the volume and the publisher of the People’s Fine Arts Publishing House in their recycled “capitalist’s” house on a back lane of Shanghai. Once I found them, Chinese hospitality performed the miracle of acquisition.

In Hongkow Park, I had been taking early morning pictures of that stunning, slow motion ballet of traditional Chinese exercises. While I slapped a new roll of high speed Ektachrome into my Nikon EM, a man in his sixties, speaking slightly ornate, High-Vic English chatted me up. As I (understandably) apologized for my crummy Chinese, he deftly parried my embarrassment – from a series of pleasantries about the weather to the elegant beginning of philosophical discourse. I assumed he was like myself a retired professor seeking peer contact, or at the very least, one of the 10 million who follow “Follow Me”, a thrice weekly BBC-TV import carefully rehabbed by a consortium of professors and specialists at the Beijing Foreign Language Institute for transmission on China Central Television Network.

That’s some audience when you realize there are only 10,000,000 TV sets in this country of a billion potential viewers. (Variety, 1/5/83 p.35, col.2.) But no, Jan Wu Wing, as he primly and painstakingly printed his name in my calendar/datebook was a repairman at the First Textile Machinery Works, 178 Zhong-Shan Road (Western). After inscribing his address so I could repay his hospitality eventually with a copy of the photo I shot of him, he just as meticulously proofread it.

(I wish I could identify the cloth that must unroll perfectly from his well-tended machinery.) By now we were the eager focus of a crowd of twenty early morning defectors from communal exercise, many of whom were lobbing friendly volleys of English phrases at my ears. Oh, the marvel of high motivations, this ex-Professor of Literature who split from teaching after getting regusted by the competition of rock muzak, Pac-Man, dope, vidiocy, and other low tech distractions.

There is even a Hyde Park Corner in Downtown Shanghai’s People’s Park (the recycled Concession Era racetrack) where locals gather every Sunday to “polish”, a verb the Chinese have picked up from the trade of jade carvers. It was there that Richard Fong (name changed to discourage police surveillance) beguiled himself into becoming our impromptu translator for a day of taxi-ing between the far-flung spots of Shanghai that hadn’t been included on the itineraries set up by our sponsor, the U. S. China Education Foundation. Then we learned, the three of us – the other a middle school principal/English teacher from Portland, Maine and a divinity school activist from Louisville, Kentucky – how hard indeed it was to learn English during the Cultural Revolution.

Since Richard had the bad luck to be born to a college-educated couple, he was banished to Beijing at age sixteen to couple and uncouple coal cars in a steel mill freight yard. His father taught him on the sly, so that he could qualify for English teaching when the colleges and institutes reopened after the madnesses of the Cultural Revolution ebbed in 1976. He teaches two classes of fifty middle school students aged 14. Very rote curriculum, very mandated from on high. Richard’s supple English, only slightly askew with Chinglish, the term the “foreign experts” (U.S. and U.K. journalists on short term contracts) use to chide the local journalists for China Daily (when their locutions are not polished enough at the rewrite desk) towards a mythical Standard English.

(I hadn’t seen prissy stylistics in action for twenty years like the “self-criticism” comments on the daily crit board in the Beijing office of CD.) Richard’s parents have “moved” to the United States, where the father is luckily practicing his old despised profession. Fong was eager to show off his fiancé, a fellow English teacher, whom he will wed when they have found an apartment to live in. He is not optimistic. When we went to her family’s apartment for an “early” pre-nuptial dinner, we were abashed by a feast that must have cleaned them both out of ration coupons for months.

He expects to eventually get an immigration/exit visa because the regime needs the hard currency he and his wife will dispatch back to relatives. Family closeness endures through every flip-flop of ideology. Not the least of China’s liabilities is losing winners like Fong. If I were in his shoes, I’d be panicky; terrified I’d do something to irritate the smug functionaries who dole out exit visas. Fong’s patience, nurtured in those eight horrendous years with frozen fingers and an aching back in a switching yard, is elemental; his confident smile would disarm a tyrant.