Age of Ambition (27 page)

He was a proudly self-described “country bumpkin.” Unlike other prominent Chinese critics of the government, he had few ties to the West; he had visited Europe but not America, and he cared little for Western literature. He long ago recognized his “rebel” identity as a cliché—“If I were a rebel, I wouldn't drive an Audi or a BMW,” he liked to say—and he kept to quiet rhythms: he didn't smoke, barely drank, and had no interest in nightclubs.

Han's parents had worked for the government: his mother, Zhou Qiaorong, dispensed benefits at a local welfare office; his father, Han Renjun, once wanted to write fiction but dead-ended at a local Party newspaper, and he resented the path of advancement. “He didn't like the kind of life in which you have to drink every day and kiss your leaders' asses,” his son told me. Before the parents knew if they were having a boy or a girl, they agreed to name the baby Han Han, the father's abandoned pen name. As the son's work became recognized, his heckling of the establishment complicated their government jobs; he offered to support them financially, and they took early retirement.

When Han was young, his father stacked the literature on low shelves, where the boy could reach it, and kept the orthodox political tracts up high. The more he read, the more he found gaps between “the textbooks and the truth,” as Han put it. “I don't believe anyone who truly loves literature can also love Mao Zedong,” he told me. “These two things are incompatible. Even putting aside his political performance, or how many bad things he did, or how many people starved to death because of him, or how many people he killed, there is one thing for sure: Mao Zedong was the enemy of writers.”

As a student at Songjiang No. 2 High School, he wrote occasionally, and when he was sixteen a Shanghai magazine was looking for young writers to enter the New Concept Essay Contest. He'd entered contests before. “You'd be asked to write about something that you'd done that was good—say, helping an old lady across the street or returning a lost wallet. Never mind that the more realistic scenario would be you putting the wallet in your pocket.” But New Concept intended to be different, and Han's assignment in the final round was abstract: a judge dropped a plain piece of paper into an empty glass—that was the topic. “I had some random idea about how the paper falling to the bottom of the glass tells you about life,” he told me, adding, “All bullshit.” He took first place.

Then he failed his courses and was held back. On the verge of failing again, he dropped out, which made him desperate to publish his manuscript—“to prove myself,” he said. “I had told my classmates and teacher that I was a good writer and I could make a living from it, but they said I was crazy.” Just a couple of decades earlier, Han could easily have been jailed for his criticisms of the state, but when
Triple Door
was finally released, it electrified young people not just because it was an honest critique of China's education system. In the words of the Shanghai writer Chen Cun, Han's very existence gave them “the right to choose their own idol.”

The publisher Lu Jinbo believed that Han's fans gravitated to him for a simple reason: They saw in his life and writings a rare kind of truth. “In China, our culture forces us to say things that we don't really think. If I say, ‘Please come over to my place for dinner today,' the truth is I don't really want you to come. And you'll say, ‘You're too kind, but I have other arrangements.' This is the way people are used to communicating, whether it's leaders in the newspaper or regular people. All Chinese people understand that what you say and what you think often don't match up. But Han Han isn't like this. He doesn't consider other people's feelings and just says what's on his mind, or he'll say nothing.” In short, Lu said, “If Han Han says, ‘This is true,' then ten million fans will say, ‘This is true.' If he says, ‘This is fake,' then it's fake.”

Authenticity, or the appearance of it, had become the rarest of assets in China. In the five years since Gong Haiyan encountered fake bachelors online, the epidemic of fraudulence had reached into every corner of life, most dramatically in the case of the dairy industry. In 2008 a milk producer, Sanlu, discovered that farmers had been adding melamine to boost the protein levels, but the company did not order a recall; instead, it persuaded the local government to bar the press from reporting it. By the time the Ministry of Health warned the public, three hundred thousand infants had been sickened; six of them died. Chinese parents who could afford to travel started buying so much baby formula in Hong Kong that the city imposed a legal limit of two cans per person.

*   *   *

Among intellectuals, Han Han was a polarizing figure. Leung Man-tou, a Hong Kong writer and television commentator, raved that Han had the makings of “another Lu Xun,” China's most celebrated social critic. The artist Ai Weiwei went a step further, telling a reporter that “Han is more influential than Lu Xun, because his writing can reach more people.” But others recoiled at the comparison. When I asked Lydia H. Liu, a literature and media scholar at Columbia University, about him, she said, “Han Han is only a mirror image of the people who like him. So in what ways will that reflection transform them? It will not.” She added, “The first thing you see on his blog is not his writing but a Subaru advertisement.”

But serving as a mirror for his fans was perhaps his greatest strength. He articulated what others thought but didn't say. While China's boldest intellectuals and dissidents stood out for being flamboyantly atypical, Han excelled at being typical, for allowing his fans to relate to him enough that the principles he espoused felt within reach. His biography bore all the minor victories and humiliations, the reasons for aspiration and cynicism, that accompanied being young and restless in China—and that made him powerful. For two decades since Tiananmen, Chinese young people had been apolitical, not simply because the basic conditions of life had improved but also because the alternative was frightening and hopeless. Han's writing did not reorder the political life of Chinese youth, or force the hand of policymakers, but he was a powerful spokesman for the joys of skepticism.

For all his conflicts with the angry youth, Han Han had something in common with Tang Jie: both were looking for outlets to channel their discontent, and to express an idea of China. They saw themselves as occupying opposing sides of an emerging culture war inside China and yet both were indulging in the new habits of self-creation, and the tentative chance to cultivate political taste. And both were doing it online, unlike an earlier generation of activists who had filled Tiananmen Square. Han Han and Tang Jie had grown up in an era of fortune and aspiration, and despite their disagreements, neither one of them could imagine abandoning the determination to be heard.

When Han Han outgrew the confines of a blog, he started a magazine called
Duchangtuan
, which means “A Chorus of Soloists.” His publisher, fearing political repercussions, forced him to cut 50 percent of the contents in the first issue, but some interesting bits stayed in. The cleverest feature was called “Everyone Asks Everyone,” a farcical meditation on the way information was withheld in China; readers dreamed up questions—for boyfriends, for government agencies—and editors tried to find the answers, no matter how difficult this was. Ten hours after it went on sale, the magazine was number one in the rankings of Amazon China. Bookstores dedicated separate sales counters to handle the crush. The censors were unnerved. A few days later, my phone buzzed. It was a directive to news editors from the Shanghai office of the Propaganda Department:

All activities and comments related to Han Han, other than car racing, are not to be reported.

Han prepared a second issue, in December 2010, but the publisher was ordered to stop. Mountains of magazines were pulped. “People got worried,” Han told me afterward. We were in the office he'd rented, now half empty. “Maybe they thought, ‘Well, you started out as a writer published in
our
magazines, which we control. Now are you trying to take control?'” He wondered what the shutdown said about the future of Chinese culture. “We can't always use pandas and tea,” he said. “What else do we have? Silk? The Great Wall? That isn't China.”

When
Time
magazine collected candidates for its annual list of the world's most influential people in 2010, Han Han made the list. Chinese authorities were not pleased. They blocked the combination of “Han Han” and “
Time
” from Chinese search engines, and
People's Daily
asked in a headline,
IS TIME MAGAZINE SEVERELY NEARSIGHTED?
Han was not feeling triumphant; he had no illusions about what an individual was facing in China. He wrote:

Maybe my writings help people vent some anger or resentment. But beyond that what use are they? This “influence” is an illusion. In China, influence belongs only to those with power, those who can make rain from clouds, who can decide if you live or die, those who can keep you somewhere between life and death. They are the people with real influence … The rest of us are just small characters under a spotlight on the stage. They own the theater, and they can always bring down the curtain, turn off the lights, close the door, and turn the dogs loose inside.

When he posted this, he received twenty-five thousand comments, some laced with desperate devotion (“I'm willing to give my life to defend Han Han—a man with courage and integrity”). The
Time
list had hinged on a public vote, and in the final tally, Han had come in number two worldwide, behind the Iranian opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

One afternoon, after watching Han compete in a car race, I found a small, exuberant crowd of fans waiting to catch a glimpse of him. Among them was Wei Feiran, a wiry, spiky-haired nineteen-year-old from Anhui Province, who seemed on the verge of levitating with anticipation. He'd read
Triple Door
when he was in tenth grade and was deeply affected by it. He was inspired by Han's attempt to publish a magazine, and now he and some friends were trying to launch one, too, in the city of Changsha. “I really want to do it well. I'm sort of an idealist,” Wei said. “We are doing it by ourselves, with no company or anybody behind us.” For the inaugural issue, they wanted to interview Han, so Wei had ridden fourteen hours on a train to find him.

Whenever Han's fans talked to me about his work, they described it as a revelation—“a shot of adrenaline that awakens us from our apathy,” as a blogger put it. For a while, Wei Feiran had helped run a fan site that collected and commented on Han's blog posts. “We were forced to shut down by the Ningxia Internet Patrol,” Wei said. “Our site had every post he'd ever written, and they said that's too sensitive.” Overhearing our conversation, a shy girl in an orange sweater interjected, “Han Han represents the person that all of us want to become, and the things that we all want to do but are never brave enough to try.”

Spending time around Han's young admirers often made me think of Michael, the student from Li Yang Crazy English. Michael was a fan of Han's, too, and the next time I saw him, he pulled out his phone to show me an app that he had downloaded with all of Han Han's books in one place.

*   *   *

Not long after I met Michael, he started teaching classes outside Crazy English. To attract students, he bought a small amplifier and delivered free lessons in a park in Guangzhou beneath a twenty-five-foot banner that he had worded to suggest some kind of official position:
WELCOME THE OLYMPICS, CONVENE THE ASIAN GAMES. ENGLISH VOLUNTEER OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES
. Michael borrowed fifty thousand yuan from a neighborhood credit union, over the objections of his parents, who worried that it was too risky. “My whole family was opposed to it,” he told me. But, after a couple of months, he had attracted paying students. He also finagled a small contract with the local Olympic propaganda campaign, for recording a hundred sample sentences that volunteers could memorize. “I was so proud,” he wrote in his journal. “I made enough money to buy new suits and a tie.”

In January 2009 he left Crazy English and teamed up with another teacher to form a company they called Beautiful Sound English. Michael was in charge of sales, and his partner was the head teacher. Michael started booking talks in other cities, and his business gained traction.

The quality of Michael's English always startled me. For someone who had never left China, he was clear and articulate, and he made relatively few mistakes in conversation and in writing—largely because there was almost nothing he wouldn't do in the name of improvement. When a music teacher suggested he hone his pronunciation by holding up a mirror and making exaggerated movements of his mouth, Michael did it even while riding the bus. It attracted strange looks. When another teacher told him to shout even louder than Li Yang recommended, Michael tried that, too. “I didn't obtain my goal,” he wrote in his journal. “All I obtained was chronic pharyngitis.” A doctor had to prescribe inhalation treatments to repair the damage.

Most of all, Michael scoured the Internet to find English recordings that appealed to him, and then he recited them over and over to hone his accent. He read me one of his favorites: “Something amazing is happening at Verizon Wireless that will change the way America talks. Something big. Something bold. Something new.” Listening to him, I realized there was a universal quality to the sound of salesmanship, even if you didn't care what you were selling. He continued: “Introducing nationwide unlimited talk from Verizon Wireless. Now thirty dollars less than ever before, on America's largest and most reliable wireless network. Verizon.” Michael grinned.

He especially loved the voices from commercials and radio broadcasters; he switched his tone of voice and reeled off a news flash: “Five people suffered minor injuries when an earthquake measuring six-point-two on the Richter scale struck Taiwan this morning … James Pomfret reports.” He was working on emulating a particular southern accent. “Hello, this is Vic Johnson. The year before I encountered Bob Proctor's teaching, I earned fourteen thousand twenty-seven dollars.” Michael couldn't remember where he'd found it, but he loved the speaker's twang. “Within a handful of years I was earning that in a week. And now it's not uncommon for me to earn that—and a lot more—in a matter of minutes. I don't even want to imagine where my life would be if I hadn't met Bob Proctor.”