Riding the Iron Rooster

He invited me to attend Mass, and out of politeness I said I might; but I knew I wouldn't. I had no business there: I was a heretic. And I was often annoyed by Westerners who, although they never went to church at home, would get the churchgoing bug in China, as an assertion of their difference or perhaps a reproach to the Chinese—as if religious freedom was the test of China's tolerance. Well, it was one test, of course, but it was exasperating to see the test administered by an American unbeliever. So I didn't go to church in China, but sometimes when I saw a bird in the grass I dropped to my knees and marveled it as it twitched there.

A few days later, on one of my walks I came to People's Park, and as it was a Sunday, I decided to verify something that I had heard in Peking. It was said that in Beihei Park there, and in People's Park here in Shanghai, there was an area reserved for anyone who wanted to speak English. This proved to be a fact. They called it the English Corner, half an acre of Chinese gabbing in English under the trees. Originally it started when a few old men who still spoke prerevolutionary English (having gone to mission schools) met on Sundays in the park to talk so that their English wouldn't get rusty. And then they found themselves the object of attention, and they were consulted in a respectful way by Chinese youths who wanted to learn English. What began as a casual one-hour interval in 1979 had become by 1986 a full-day Sunday institution. The Chinese can be very ritualistic in these matters: no one decreed the formation of the English Corner. It just happened, and it has evolved very formally. English is the unofficial language of the new China.

There were about two hundred Chinese in People's Park, and the way they stood and the sound of their English, made them seem like geese. Some were practicing or looking for friends, but many of them I discovered to be seeking advice about jobs that required English or applications to English-language universities. English speakers, in Shanghai as in no other Chinese city, comprised a sort of subculture.

I met Leroy, who was twenty-four, and who had learned to speak English in People's Park. He had been at it for five years.

"When I first came here in 1981 a man said to me, 'What is your name?' I couldn't tell him my name. I couldn't say anything in English. I was very frustrated. I decided to learn. I bought some books and I came along every Sunday."

He spoke English well, but a question still nagged: What about his name? How long had be been Leroy?

It was a simple explanation. As soon as his English improved, this young man, Li Ren, started to call himself Leroy. He said that English names had been regarded as bourgeois during the Mao era, but with the proliferation of English they had come back. There was usually an obvious choice. A girl called Zhenli might call herself Jenny, Zhulan would become Julian and Chen would probably decide upon John. Leroy had a friend Li Bing who chose the name Bingley and made himself sound like a Tory Member of Parliament. A student at Fudan University changed his name to Rambo, and over the next few months I met several Zeldas and a Ringo. I could not resist the conclusion that for these Chinese youths this was a way of distancing themselves from a culture that until recently had been intensely chauvinistic. It was also one in the eye for the Cultural Revolution if you went around calling yourself Bill and wearing a funny hat and sunglasses. Such people frequented the English Corner.

Leroy earned 80 yuan a month as an engineer in a textile factory—he was a college graduate—but his aim was to be hired as a trainee anything at the new Sheraton Hotel, the Hua Ting, on the outskirts of Shanghai. There were thirty-one hotels in Shanghai, but the Sheraton Hua Ting was regarded as the choicest.

"What are your chances of being hired?"

"I have already been offered a job. I was one of twenty people chosen from four hundred applicants. But you know in China we cannot just quit our job. We have to get permission to resign or to change jobs. I could earn two hundred and fifty yuan a month at the Sheraton, but my boss won't release me."

"That's terrible. Isn't there anything you can do about it?"

"Well, he says he has a daughter-in-law who needs a job. He knows my father is a foreman. If my father can find that woman a job, then my boss will release me. If not, I have to stay."

It was because of this problem that he had come today to the English Corner—to see some of his friends and ask their advice. So it was a sort of Agony Corner too.

He had the nervous attentiveness of a person who is self-taught and still learning. He said he was interested in Africa.

I wondered how up-to-date he was on Africa, so I asked him the new name of the Republic of Upper Volta.

"Burkina Faso," he said.

"What's the capital?"

"Ouagadougou."

"Very good!"