Read Online Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler - Free Book Online

soap was called, in Chinese, Slander , and its characters engaged in extramarital affairs at a dizzying pace. Invariably, the mistresses were wicked and conniving, while the wives were so unknowing that it was painful to watch. In Willy’s home, the villagers often shouted out their unanimous allegiances: sympathy for the wives, contempt for the mistresses. Slander provided Number Three Production Team with its first introduction to the private lives of foreigners.
    It often rains in Sichuan, and when the weather turned bad, the spectators who couldn’t fit in Willy’s house stood outside the window, holding umbrellas. The television screen measured fourteen inches. It wasn’t long before another channel appeared:
     
    “People would shout and say, ‘Change the channel!’ And I would say, ‘No, it’s up to me to decide!’ I was just like a boss, very arrogant. I decided what we would watch. One night we were watching and suddenly the voice disappeared. There wasn’t any sound. Some people were upset and went away. I went in front of the TV and turned it off. The people shouted, ‘Don’t do that!’ But when I turned it back on, the voice came back. Later, it happened again, and I did the same thing. Sometimes once wasn’t enough, and I’d have to do it twenty times, thirty times. We were likely to break the TV. Sometimes the picture was not good, so I held the antenna. Many people took turns holding it so that others could watch.”
     
    WHEN WILLY WAS small, he saw his older brothers go off to school every day. In the early morning, Dai Jianmin and Dai Heping walked south along the dirt road, carrying a simple wooden bench between them. They disappeared for a period of several hours and then returned with the bench. From Willy’s perspective, that was school: a ritual involving brothers and benches.
    The village school had mud walls, and the teachers were poorly trained local peasants whose first priority was farming. If an instructor had something to do in the fields, the kids ran free, and everything shut down during peak agricultural periods. Neither of Willy’s brothers went beyond the fifth grade, and both became farmers and laborers.
    By the time Willy was ten years old, Reform and Opening had already begun to leave his father behind. The new economy changed so fast that windows of opportunity were brief—sometimes a certain product or a particular set of skills were valuable for only a year or two. In the early 1980s, native intelligence and diligence were adequate for small-scale construction work, and Willy’s father flourished. But soon there was more competition, and bidding for projects required shrewd calculation. Sometimes Willy’s father organized a long job and actually lost money. He often warned Willy about the disadvantages of being uneducated: “My father said it was too bad to work without education; he said you would be cheated by anybody who is literate, whoknows something. If you don’t study, you will just be a coolie.”
    The man decided to be more careful with the schooling of his youngest son. He paid extra to send Willy to the township school, which had a better reputation. Nevertheless, the key moment in Willy’s education was a “miracle”—or at least that was how he remembered it, years later:
     
    “When I was in primary school, the first four years I was not so good. The subjects were hard for me. But I think it was a miracle—from the fifth year, I was very, very good at math. I can’t understand how the situation changed so fast. The teacher would write many questions on the blackboard and ask us to do it as quickly as possible, and I was always the first. In the examination to go to middle school, I got the second prize out of more than seventy students.”
     
    Soon, Willy’s parents no longer required him to help out on their farm, which consisted of about a quarter of an acre. His brothers complained, but Willy’s father sensed that the youngest child had