China in Ten Words (23 page)

In their colorful history during these past thirty years, the grassroots have performed feats unimaginable to us in the past, doing things their own way, through different channels. In Western terms, “all roads lead to Rome,” and in Chinese terms, “when the eight immortals cross the sea, each displays his special talent.” Their roads to success were highly unconventional, and so too were their roads to failure; the social fabric they have created is equally peculiar. Just as the reveille wakens soldiers from sleep, so too, as “copycat” took on a rich new range of meanings, it has suddenly brought into view all manner of things that have been churning below the surface during these years of hectic development. The awesome spectacle that has ensued is rather akin to what would happen if, in a crowded square, someone yells “Copycat!” in an effort to catch a friend’s attention and everybody in the square comes dashing over, because that is the name they have all adopted.

As miracles multiply, desire swells. Tiananmen Gate, the symbol of Chinese power, and the White House, the symbol of American power, have naturally become the structures most vigorously emulated by copycat architects all across China. There is a difference, however. Mock Tiananmens tend to be erected by local officials in the countryside: newly prosperous villages convert their local government offices to miniature Tiananmens so that when the lowest-level officials in the Chinese bureaucracy are ensconced inside, they can savor the beautiful illusion of being masters of the nation. Imitation White Houses, on the other hand, supply office space for the rich and also meet their living needs. By day a company executive sits at his desk in a copycat version of the Oval Office, directing the activities of his employees by telephone; by night he takes his pretty secretary by the hand and leads her into the copycat Lincoln Bedroom.

In the course of China’s thirty-year economic miracle many poor people from the grassroots have acquired wealth and power and have begun to hanker after a Western-style aristocratic life; moving into spacious villas, traveling in luxury sedans, drinking expensive wines, wearing designer brands, and saying a few words of English in an atrocious accent. As copycat aristocrats proliferate, so too do the social institutions catering to their needs: aristocratic schools and aristocratic kindergartens, aristocratic stores and aristocratic restaurants, aristocratic apartments and aristocratic furniture, aristocratic entertainments and aristocratic magazines.… In China there is no end of things claiming an association with aristocracy.

Here’s a true little anecdote about one such copycat aristocrat. He built himself a luxury villa complete with swimming pool even though he couldn’t swim, his theory being that no rich man’s villa would be complete without a pool. At the same time he wasn’t happy seeing the pool going to waste, so he used it to raise fish, which—steamed, braised, or fried—could be served up on his dinner table each day. It then occurred to him that five-star hotels have a particular name for their most elegant and extravagantly appointed rooms. So soon a bronze plaque appeared on the door of the master bedroom, inscribed complacently with the words “Presidential Suite.” Such is the lifestyle of China’s nouveau riche.

F
inally I need to relate my own copycat story.

In China in the olden days, dentists were in much the same line of work as itinerant street performers and more or less on a par with barbers or cobblers. In some bustling neighborhood they would unfurl an oilskin umbrella and spread out on a table their forceps, mallets, and other tools of their trade, along with a row of teeth they had extracted, as a way of attracting customers. Dentists in those days operated as one-man bands and needed no helper. Like traveling cobblers, they would wander from place to place, shouldering their load on a carrying pole.

I, for a time, was their successor. Although I worked in a state-run clinic, my most senior colleagues had all simply switched from plying their trade under an umbrella to being employed in a two-story building; not one of them had attended medical school. The clinic staff numbered not much more than twenty, and tooth extractions were the main order of business. Our patients, mostly peasants from the surrounding countryside, did not think of our clinic as a health-care facility but simply called it the “tooth shop.” This name was actually quite accurate, for our small-town clinic was very much like a shop. I entered as an apprentice, and for me extracting teeth, treating teeth, capping teeth, and fitting false teeth were simply a continuous series of learning tasks. The older dentists we all referred to as “gaffers,” for there were no professors or unit heads such as you would find in a full-blown hospital. Compared with the career of a dental physician, now such a highly educated profession, my job in the “tooth shop” was that of a shop-worker, plain and simple.

My training was overseen by Gaffer Shen, a retired dentist from Shanghai who had come to our clinic to make a bit of extra money—or “bask in residual heat,” as we used to say. Gaffer Shen was in his sixties, a short and rather portly man who wore gold-rimmed spectacles and kept his sparse hair neatly combed.

The first time I saw my mentor-to-be, he was extracting a patient’s tooth; but because he was getting old and had to strain with all his might to tug on the forceps, he was grimacing so painfully you might have thought he was trying to pull his own tooth out. The clinic director introduced me as the new arrival. Gaffer Shen nodded guardedly, then told me to stand next to him and watch as he used a cotton swab to daub the next patient’s jaw with iodine and injected a dose of Novocain. Then he plopped himself down in a chair and lit a cigarette. When he had smoked it down to the butt, he turned to the patient and asked offhandedly, “Is your tongue big yet?”

The patient mumbled something in the affirmative. Gaffer Shen rose slowly to his feet, picked a pair of forceps out of his tray, and set to work on the diseased tooth. He had me observe a couple of extractions. Then he sat down in his chair and showed no sign of planning to get up again. “I’ll leave the next ones to you,” he said.

I was a bundle of nerves, for I still had only a rudimentary understanding of how to extract a tooth, and here I was suddenly at center stage. But I remembered at least the first two steps with the iodine and the Novocain, so I awkwardly instructed the patient to open his mouth wide and managed clumsily to complete the procedure. The patient watched me with a look of complete terror, as though one-on-one with a crocodile, which made my hands shake all the more.

As I waited for the anesthetic to take effect, I didn’t know quite what to do with myself. But Gaffer Shen handed me a cigarette and suddenly became quite genial, asking me what my parents did and how many siblings I had. All too soon my cigarette was finished and the conversation was over. Thank goodness I was able to recall the next line of the script, and in my best imitation of Gaffer Shen I turned to the patient and asked, “Is your tongue big yet?” When he said yes, I was struck with horror at the prospect of what now lay ahead, and a chill ran down my spine. There was no way to get out of extracting that unlucky tooth, and I also had to put on a show of knowing exactly what I was doing and avoid making the patient any more suspicious.

That first extraction is something I will never forget. I had the patient open his mouth wide and fixed my eyes on the tooth that had to be pulled. But when I glanced into the tray and saw a whole line of forceps, all of different sizes and shapes, I was struck dumb, clueless as to which one I should use. I hesitated, then slunk back to Gaffer Shen with my tail between my legs. “Which forceps?” I asked in a low voice.

He got up, shuffled forward a couple of steps, and peered inside the patient’s gaping mouth. “Which tooth?” he asked. At that point I was still vague about the names for the various teeth, so I just pointed with my finger. Gaffer Shen took a squint, pointed at a pair of forceps, then plopped himself back down in his chair and picked up his newspaper.

At that moment I had an intense sensation of being locked in a lonely, daunting struggle, without allies or sympathizers. I didn’t dare look into the patient’s staring eyes, for I was even more petrified than he was. I picked up the forceps, inserted them into his mouth, maneuvered them into position, and took a firm hold of the tooth. By a stroke of good fortune, it was already quite loose; all I needed to do was grip the forceps tightly and rock the tooth back and forth a couple of times, and it came straight out.

The real difficulty came when I was working on the third patient, for part of a root broke off inside his jaw. Gaffer Shen had no choice but to remove his foot from his knee and let the newspaper slip from his hand, rise from his chair, and come personally to attend to it. To clean out a root is much more trouble than a simple extraction, and Gaffer Shen was dripping with sweat by the end of it all. It was only later, when I knew how to deal with this kind of complication, that he could begin to enjoy a true life of leisure.

Our office had two dental chairs. I would usually call in two patients at once, have them sit down in the chairs, and then, as though dispensing equal favors to two trust beneficiaries, smear some tincture of iodine in their mouths and inject them both with a dose of anesthetic. In the dead time that followed I would take a nicotine break, and when my cigarette was finished, I would ask, “Is your tongue big yet?”

Often both patients would answer at the same time, “Yes, it’s big.” As though enforcing further terms of the trust, I would pull out their teeth one after another and then move on to the next two cases.

In those days Gaffer Shen and I coordinated seamlessly. I made myself responsible for calling in the patients and attending to their diseased teeth, while my mentor stayed put in his chair, making notations in their medical records and writing out prescriptions; only if I ran into trouble would he personally take to the field. As my skills in tooth extraction grew more accomplished, Gaffer Shen was called to the front line less and less often.

Many years later I became an author. Western journalists were always curious about my dentist past, astonished that with only a high-school graduation certificate and having had no medical education whatsoever I had proceeded directly to tooth extractions. I groped around for an explanation that would make some kind of sense. “I used to be a barefoot doctor,” I would tell them.

Barefoot doctors were an invention of the Mao era: peasants with a smattering of education were shown how to perform routine medical procedures and then sent back home with a medical kit on their backs. Why were they called barefoot doctors? Because for them practicing medicine was just a sideline activity; their basic work remained going out to the fields and laboring in their bare feet. When peasants around them came down with some minor injury or illness, they would be in a position to provide basic treatment on the spot, or if the case was serious, they would see the patient off to the hospital.

I knew it wasn’t really correct to say I’d been a “barefoot doctor,” for though I couldn’t claim to have received much more training than those peasant doctors, I had at least been engaged in dentistry full-time. The problem was that for many years I couldn’t find the right word to describe my first job, and it’s only with the emergence of new vocabulary in China today that I can finally give Western reporters a more accurate picture of my situation. “I used to be a copycat dentist,” I tell them now.

*
shanzhai

bamboozle

W
hat is
?
^*
Originally it meant “to sway unsteadily”—like fishing boats bobbing on the waves, for example, or leaves shaking in the wind. Later it developed a new life as an idiom particularly popular in northeast China, derived from another phrase that sounds almost the same:
—“to mislead.” Just as variant strains of the flu virus keep constantly appearing,
has in its lexical career diversified itself into a dazzling range of meanings. Hyping things up and laying it on thick—that’s
. Playing a con trick and ripping somebody off—that’s
, too. In the first sense, the word has connotations of bragging, as well as enticement and entrapment; in the second sense, it carries shades of dishonesty, misrepresentation, and fraud. “Bamboozle,” perhaps, is the closest English equivalent.

In China today, “bamboozle” is a new star in the lexical firmament, fully the equal of “copycat” in its charlatan status. Both count as linguistic nouveau riche, but their rises to glory took somewhat different courses. The copycat phenomenon emerged in collectivist fashion, like bamboo shoots springing up after spring rain, whereas “bamboozle” had its source in an individual act of heroism—the hero in question being China’s most influential comedian, a northeasterner named Zhao Benshan. In a legendary skit performed a few years ago, Zhao Benshan gave “bamboozling” its grand launch, announcing to the world:

I can bamboozle the tough into acting tame
,

Bamboozle the gent into dumping the dame
,

Bamboozle the innocent into taking the blame
,

Bamboozle the winner into conceding the game
.

I’m selling crutches today, so this is my aim:

I’ll bamboozle a man into thinking he’s lame
.

In “Selling Crutches” he proceeds with infinite guile, trapping the fall guy in one psychological snare after another, exquisitely employing deception and hoax to lead him down the garden path until in the end a man whose legs are perfectly normal is convinced he’s a cripple and purchases—at great expense—a shoddy pair of crutches.

When this very funny routine was performed in CCTV’s Spring Festival gala—the most-watched television program in China—the word “bamboozle” immediately took the nation by storm. Like a rock stirring up a tidal wave it triggered a tsunami-style reaction as phenomena long existent in Chinese society—boasting and exaggerating, puffery and bluster, mendacity and casuistry, flippancy and mischief—acquired greater energy and rose to new heights in bamboozle’s capacious ocean. At the same time a social propensity toward chicanery, pranks, and other shenanigans drew further inspiration from it. Once these words with negative connotations took shelter under bamboozlement’s wing, they suddenly acquired a neutral status.

Zhao Benshan put “bamboozle” on the lips of people all over the country, male and female, young and old. The word slipped off their tongues as smoothly as saliva and shot from their mouths as freely as spittle. Politics, history, economics, society, culture, memory, emotion, and desire—all these and more find a spacious home in the land of bamboozlement. It has become a lexical master key: in the palace of words it opens all kinds of doors.

Bamboozlement, of course, does not always have negative connotations. When one is in a nostalgic mood, “bamboozle” can serve to purge the word “trick” of its pejorative meaning. My mother is a case in point.

In an effort to eradicate snail fever in the late 1950s, Mao Zedong organized doctors and nurses in cities and towns into medical teams known as epidemic prevention brigades. They were sent to impoverished areas that lacked health care, where they treated snail-fever patients for free. My father was then living in the beautiful city of Hangzhou, where he had a job in the provincial-level epidemic prevention station. In his whole life my father spent only six years in school, three under the instruction of a traditional private tutor and three at a university; he acquired the rest of his education when studying on his own as a medic in the Communist armed forces. He laid claim to a dictionary as a trophy of war, and as the army marched south, he memorized new vocabulary on the go. His unit fought its way down to the southeastern province of Fujian, and afterward he made his way back to Hangzhou, where he transferred to the local hospital. There he met a nurse—later my mother. She urged him to study mathematics, physics, and chemistry; through assiduous effort he gained admission into Zhejiang Medical School, where he completed his three years’ formal training. After graduation he had no desire to continue working at the epidemic prevention station, for his dream was to be a surgeon. But he had no authority to choose his own career, and when the leadership assigned him to the epidemic prevention station, he had no choice but to go.

It was in this context that my father joined the epidemic prevention brigade, which he saw as his first step to becoming a surgeon. Fired by this burning ambition, he thought it a necessary sacrifice to pursue his career away from Hangzhou. Arriving as brigade leader in Jiaxing, fifty miles northeast of Hangzhou, he hoped to transfer to the local hospital, but the Jiaxing authorities proposed instead to make him dean of their nursing school. He refused and headed instead for a smaller town on the coast, Haiyan. There a county hospital had just been built, and it needed a surgeon. At last his dream could come true.

In Haiyan Hospital my father’s talents were given free rein, and he was kept busy removing infected spleens from victims of snail fever. This was a major operation: in city hospitals it was always the job of abdominal surgery specialists, and the grueling procedure could take up to seven or eight hours. In Haiyan my father would remove four or five spleens a day, and as he became more adept, he could do the job in just three or four hours. Meanwhile my mother continued to live with me and my brother in Hangzhou. She worked in the refined environment of Zhejiang Hospital and had no wish to leave Hangzhou and its lovely West Lake.

Every day, once he’d got a few spleens out of the way, my father would sit down in the little office adjoining the surgery and write to my mother on prescription stationery, extolling the beauties of Haiyan as though it were heaven itself. I never had the chance to read this correspondence, but after I made my home in Beijing and began to receive letters from my father, I discovered he had quite a way with words. No doubt he employed all his rhetorical skills when writing to my mother, singing Haiyan’s praises in the hyperbolic language so often used to describe Hangzhou. She was completely taken in by the honeyed words and bewitching images with which he regaled her. Mistaking the tiny, ramshackle town of Haiyan for a miniature Hangzhou, she decided to forsake life in the provincial capital and reunite us with our father. It must have taken enormous courage to do that, for in that bygone era China’s harsh household registration system permitted you to live and work only in a single place, and death alone could free you; you were like a nail that’s hammered into a wall, staying there till it rusts and snaps. My mother renounced her Hangzhou residence permit—and Hua Xu’s and mine as well—which in those days meant Hangzhou would be lost to us forever. With her two sons in tow she boarded a long-haul bus and traveled down a road of no return.

I was three years old that year, and I am sure that when my mother came out of the bus station in Haiyan, one hand in mine and the other in my brother’s, the shock must have been overwhelming. Suddenly she was confronted by the real Haiyan, a very different place from the one she had read about in my father’s letters. Later she would often sum up in this way her first reaction to Haiyan’s primitive living standards: “You didn’t see even a single bicycle!”

Sometimes my mother would wistfully share with us little vignettes from our life in Hangzhou; when she talked of the house where we used to live and the scenery a short walk away, a blissful expression would appear on her face. Such moments would plunge me into endless reverie. Though that brief, idyllic stay in Hangzhou had been erased from my young memory, my mother’s reconstruction of it brought it back to life, and during my childhood years it occupied the most beautiful place in my imagination. After every such reminiscence my mother could never stop herself from raising her hand and pointing an accusing finger at my father: “It was you who tricked us into coming to Haiyan!”