Broken Earth by Steven W. Mosher

Author:Steven W. Mosher [Mosher, Steven W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2008-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

The exodus of Guangdong youth to Hong Kong is only one of many forms of escape prevalent among the young in China. The escape fantasies of other youth, especially those of other provinces, focus less on fleeing to Hong Kong than on deliverance to America or Taiwan, and I was often asked about these possibilities. The only question that was put to me more often than how to emigrate to America was how to learn English, which I came to understand to be no less a symptom of youthful alienation than actual escape.

Wenfang popped the inevitable question the second time we met. “Will you teach me English?” she asked, regarding me with great intensity.

“I am only going to be here in Guangzhou a few days,” I replied. “I spend most of my time in the countryside.”

She was visibly disappointed, but the subject of English was plainly one that fascinated her, for once launched upon it, she could not easily leave it aside.

“I want to learn English very much,” she said animatedly. “We had English in school but didn’t really learn it. Actually, I didn’t learn anything in school during the Cultural Revolution. None of us did. All they taught us was how to shout slogans. Even my English class was devoted to learning the same slogans in English. I can’t even carry on an ordinary conversation. Last year I studied under a tutor. We used a Hong Kong textbook, English Essentials. Do you know it?”

I had to admit that I didn’t.

“I paid 10 rmb a month to the tutor for eight hours of group tutoring a month. This went on for eight months, but stopped because the other students dropped out. I have just signed up for a course in English in night school,” she went on, taking out her student card and showing it to me. “The course is 8 rmb for half a year.”

Yet for all Wenfang’s enthusiasm for English, she had no clear idea of how she was going to put her language skill to use after she succeeded in acquiring it. “Maybe I can get a job here in which English is required,” she said without real conviction, “or maybe I can go abroad to study.” In other parts of Asia such as Taiwan or Japan these would have been reasonable goals that stood an excellent chance of being realized. But in China, as Wenfang knew better than I, skills aren’t marketable because work assignments are handed down by the state, while opportunity for study overseas is so limited that it requires genius or official connections to go. There seemed something unreal in Wenfang’s determination, which she shares with millions of her generation, to learn English, until I saw it was an end in itself. Studying English may open no doors of opportunity, but it is still an enchanted key.

Like her agemates, Wenfang knows only scattered bits and pieces about the West, but she more than compensates for her ignorance by an aching enthusiasm for this El Dorado of plenty.

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