A captivating coming-of-age novel in the tradition of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
During the darkest days of Cultural Revolution, a twelve-year-old boy named Love Liu wonders what life is like beyond the region of Xinjiang in China’s remote northwest. Here conformity is valued above all else, and suspicion governs every exchange among neighbors, classmates, and even friends. Into this stifling atmosphere comes a tall, clean-shaven teacher from Shanghai, wearing an elegant gray wool jacket and carrying an English dictionary under his arm.
With the dictionary as his disposal, Love Liu turns to it for answers to his most pressing questions about love and life, and a whole new world opens up for him. His classmates—the bright, troubled Sunrise Huang and the rowdy, impoverished Garbage Li—also find hope in the unfamiliar and tantalizing sounds of English, but in an atmosphere of accusation and recrimination, one in which their teacher is deemed morally suspect and mere innuendo can cost someone his life, their ideals face a test more challenging than any they’ll take in the classroom.
A major bestseller in China, where it was voted best novel of the year independently by the critics and the general public, English is a transcendent novel about the power of language to launch a journey of self-discovery.
Read a Q&A with Wang Gang on the Penguin blog.
Around May of that year, the city of Ürümchi was bathing happily in the sunlight cascading down from the Tianshan Mountains. Like a fluttering snowflake, I drifted into the classroom through the window, then sat down and stared out at the snow and the sun. Ürümchi's often like that: Sunlight mingled with snowflakes splashes right onto your face. This was springtime in Ürümchi, when you know-it-alls from the other side of the pass have already begun to tire of looking at your peach blossoms and your open fields.
No one called out for us to stand when Ahjitai walked in. The classroom was like the wilds by a river, and we were buzzing little insects. Ahjitai walked forward a few steps. Then Garbage Li cried out, and our eyes all turned toward our teacher.
We hadn't expected Ahjitai would actually come.
I had put her chances at less than fifty percent.
Ahjitai stood on the podium, tears running down her face as she got ready to speak.
You should have guessed already that all the boys were sad that day because Ahjitai was leaving. She was beautiful, her skin snowy white—she was a "double turner." I should explain: "Double turner" is a term from Ürümchi that means the mother is Uyghur and the father Han Chinese, or the other way around.
We had stopped learning Russian the year before, and from that day we would not be learning Uyghur. We weren't really interested in any language. We were interested only in women like Ahjitai. She might have been a teacher, but her neck and her tears were things I yearned for at dawn much more than the sun.
Ahjitai was leaving. Can you imagine what that meant to us?
She scanned the classroom. At that moment all the boys held their breath as if awaiting a verdict. There had recently been rumors about Ahjitai. Someone even said she had boarded a truck and, sitting up front next to the driver, gone to Kashgar, where her mother is from. But rumors are just that. Here she was, standing on the podium, so Garbage Li was right—she would still teach the last class.
Ahjitai turned. Her waist and the area just below it brought to mind the elm trees beside the Ürümchi River, their leaves gently swaying in the summer breeze. Chalk in hand, Ahjitai wrote five words on the blackboard:
The Sayings of Chairman Mao
She'd hardly finished writing when she turned toward us and said:
"I don't want to go. I don't want to leave you."
The boys whooped and began to fly about like sparrows in the open air. Ahjitai smiled. Whose smile could match hers? Whose lips could compare with hers? Suddenly Garbage Li cried out:
"Long live Chairman Mao!"
The whole class laughed—even the girls this time. Then everybody shouted:
"Long live, long live Chairman Mao!"
Ahjitai waited for the clamor to subside, then asked: "You really want to learn Uyghur that much? You want me to stay?"
The classroom fell silent. The boys were not interested in any language—not even Chinese, let alone Uyghur—and the girls had hankered for English classes for a long time. Like the first spring rains, English would soon drift over the Tianshan Mountains and fall on the river banks of Ürümchi and the swamps of the Seventeen Lakes beside the school.
Ahjitai suddenly locked her eyes on my mine: "Love Liu, you're daydreaming. What are you thinking about?"
My face turned red. The whole class was looking at me. I stood up. This was the first time Ahjitai had questioned me like that.
"Nothing," I stammered.
She smiled and asked me to sit down.
I hesitated, then said, "Miss Ah, you..."
"I've told you many times," she interrupted, "don't call me Miss Ah. Call me Miss Ahjitai, and from now on just call me Ahjitai. Anyway, I'm not going to be a teacher anymore."
"You're not leaving, are you?" I asked.
"I am leaving," she said. "I'm going into business."
I sat down wondering what going into business meant. Did it mean she would work in a shop? Which shop?
"I want to learn English with you," Ahjitai said. "I saw your English teacher yesterday. His name is Second Prize Wang."
The boys groaned.
Ahjitai smiled. "All right," she said, "class dismissed."
She walked out under our gaze. Again I stared at her fair hair as it swayed like lake grass.
It was quiet, very quiet. No one said a word.
Russian was gone. Uyghur was gone. English was coming.
“I loved this book and can’t stop talking about it. . . . Transcendent.”
—Carolyn See, The Washington Post
