Bill was the name he gave himself at his first job.
It was early 1998 and he just graduated with a Master's degree in computer
software. The firm was privately-owned and a joint-venture with a US company,
making the hottest computer chips and communication technologies. Just a few
blocks away from his college dorm, it took two floors of the new five-star Jade
Palace Hotel in the burgeoning Haidian high-tech district in Beijing.
Most of his colleagues were recent graduates from nearby universities. They came
from all over China but had shared a major theme of their lives: each had passed
countless tests over nearly 20 years of schooling and finally was getting rewarded
for all the effort. This age, the ancient tradition seemed to take on a new spin in
the land that invented the bureaucratic selection system. Instead of becoming
civil servants or workers in the government-owned enterprises, they were free to
strike out on their own.
Young and full of dreams, everyone was ready to stake a claim. And the world was
their oyster. Sitting in a new, clean, and air-conditioned office, enjoying free
lunches, and earning 10 times more than dad to start with made Bill giddy. It
felt too good to be true. Still, no one thought this was luck or dwelled on how
different it was from the past. It would only get better, Bill could almost hear
that whisper in the air.
His roots were in the rural suburbs of a small town south of the capital. Grand
parents from both sides were peasants and his parents the first generation
living in town. Growing up poor gave him the reason to work hard but the
single-minded pursuit of academic success left him naive in the ways of the
world and easily corruptible. He especially craved rich foods and felt entitled
to the good things in life. Only in his mid-20s, he already looked a little
pudgy. Decades of neglecting diet, posture, and dental hygiene had started
to catch up with him.
In addition to coding, the firm encouraged employees to practice English. The
leaders had western backgrounds and most technical documents were in that
language. Their main tasks involved translating these documents, called the
protocols, into computer programs. And the workforce was ready.
Unlike his dad's generation, who studied Russian in college and talked about
Gorky and Tolstoy, Bill and his cohorts had English from middle to grad school.
With China's reform and open-up policy well in place, English was the future,
they had been repeatedly told. Nobody needed to know exactly why and how.
It was one key subject in the national college and graduate entrance exams and
that was enough. Without the speaking environment, they acquired the basics
through rote learning and, over time, became adequate at reading and listening.
They rarely needed to produce content and generally wrote and spoke poorly. To
them, spelling was important but pronounciation was not; knowing the dictionary
meaning of a word was important but applying it accurately was not. Everything
was geared toward the tests.
In college, they were more exposed to western influence, through books, music,
movies, and lately the Internet, thanks to the political climate of the day.
Bookstores were stocked with English literature and, over the long summers, Bill
had enjoyed "The Godfather," "Gone with the Wind," "The Thornbirds," "The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," etc. After pop music from Hongkong and Taiwan,
English hits from Michael Jackson, The Carpenters, and Wham! won the hearts of
students.
Some had been working on their TOEFL and GRE tests to study abroad. Bill didn't
miss that boat, either. While in grad school, he had prepared for and passed the
tests with excellent scores. The only missing link that prevented him from going
abroad that year was scholarship. He needed financial support. His was the
hottest major and competition for a spot in a good US school was fierce.
Sometimes it struck him as odd that few of his relatives and old friends shared
his urge to leave the motherland. Grandma asked the rhetorical questions: "That
far? What for?" when he disclosed his plan to study in America. Mom would have
encouraged but she had passed away. Rare in his day, dad had attended college
and it was all the more strange and frustrating therefore that he offered no vision
or guidance. To Bill, dad had always led a life as if something crucial was missing
inside, something he never understood and wasn't interested enough to try to find out. Out of indecision and lack of ideas, dad would support him, however, once
Bill made his pitch. He wanted to see the world, for sure. The tests were difficult
and he liked promising challenges. He was eager to get rich, and many said he would if he went abroad. But there was something more to the idea,
something he could not put a finger on at the time.
Once a week, his group held a one-hour meetup in the big conference room, just
to practice speaking the foreign tongue. Almost everyone had an English name.
There were Victor, James, two Michaels, Sherry, Logia, Robert, Jack, Jerry,
Jane, Justin, and Vivian. One Michael even got himself a foreign last name,
Wren, which was chosen for its closeness to his Chinese name, Ren. They felt
more like Bill's new classmates and the meetings reminded him of the college
English Corner.
It was a popular weekly evening event. Students with extra appetite for linguistic
torture showed up in the square in front of the solemnly gray Soviet-style main
building and sought out partners to throw simple and broken sentences at. After
greetings and pleasantries were smoothly exchanged, they found themselves
fumbling for words for basic stuff, e.g., his breakfast, the broken bar on her bicycle
wheel, or the soldier-like wide-leaf'ed and white-bark'ed tree towering over them
as they talked. It was eventually futile even if they found them, e.g., crepe, spoke,
and poplar. The words would not stick and if they did probably would hurt by taking
up brain space. Compared with their more dignified multi-syllable cousins with
Roman or Greek blood, these Anglo-Saxon runts were unlovable because they
would not appear in exams. Only the real masochist could embrace them.
Rarely, there were topics they can jab at with something interesting to say in
sentences beyond the simplest. Great dialogs like what they saw in American
movies such as "Forrest Gump" and "Brave Hearts" never happened. There seemed
to be a barrier they couldn't break no matter how good they were at passing tests.
Often, Bill left such gatherings, wanting.
But these get-togethers were never just about knowledge. They were social
events, much like dancing where you invite someone to join you for a round and,
if everything goes well, you go for the second and possibly third round. To
invite or join someone, naturally you had to first like how he or she looked or
talked. Bill was never so blessed but he heard of lucky blokes meeting their
future girlfriends there.
Subtly, however, the right ways to utter and use a word seemed to matter at the
workplace meetups. One looked smarter than he was simply because he could
pronounce correctly with some consistency. Throwing in some quotes at the right
time, one would gain instant admiration. A line from Tagore, unleashed by Victor,
"If you shed tears for the sun, you also miss the stars." left a permanant mark
on Bill's mind. And unlike in the English Corners, one worked with the same group
of people everyday. This was the real world.
