LETTEI\ FI\OM BEIJING

CONFUCIUS COMES HOME Move over, Mao.

BY EVAN 05N05

I n my fifth year in Beijing, I moved into a one-story brick house beside

the Confucius Temple, a seven-hun­dred-year-old shrine to China's most important philosopher. The temple, which shared a wall with my kitchen, was silent. It had gnarled cypress trees and a wooden pavilion that lOomed above my roof like a conscience. In

· the mornings, I took a cup of coffee outside and listened to the wakeup sounds next door: the brush of a broom across the flagstones, the squeak of a faucet, the hectoring of the magpies overhead.

It was a small miracle that the shrine had survived. Confucius, who was born

in the sixth century B.C., traditionally had a stature in China akin to that of Socrates in the West. He stressed com­passion, ritual, and duty. "There is gov­ernment when the prince is prince, and the minister is minister; when the father is father, and the son is son," Confucius said. Chairman Mao believed in "per­manent revolution," and when the Cul­tural Revolution began, in 1966, he ex­horted young Red Guards to "Smash the Four Olds": old customs, old cul­ture, old habits, and old ideas. Zealots denounced Confucius fo~ fostering "bad elements, rightists, monsters, and freaks," and one of Mao's lieutenants gave the approval to dig up his grave.

The Communist Party has decided to embrace classical ideas if authority.

30 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2014

Hundreds of temples were destroyed. By the nineteen-eighties, Confucianism was so maligned that the historian Yu Ying-shih called it a "wandering soul."

In September, 2010, nine months after I moved in, I was at my desk one morning when I heard a loudspeaker crackle to life inside the temple. A booming voice was followed by the sound of a heavy bell, then drums and a flute, and the recitation of passages from writings by Confucius and other ancient masters. The performance lasted twenty minutes.· An hour later, it was repeated, and an hour after that, and again the next day.

The wandering soul, in one form or another, has been stirring. As China undergoes an economic transformation ten times the speed of the first industrial · revolution, people are turning to ancient ideas for a connection to the past. The classics have become such reliable best­sellers that, in 2009, the company be­hind National Studies Web, a site that sells digitized Confucian texts, went public on the Shenzhen stock exchange. To appeal to entrepreneurs, Peking University .and other respected schools created mid-career courses that prom­ised to reveal "commercial wisdom" in the classics.

Confucianism has no priesthood or rites of conversion, and is not generally considered a religion, but new members of China's middle class regard an inter­est in philosophy and history as a mark of cultivation and cultural nationalism. Parents have enrolled their children at private Confucian academies; I visited a weekend school where children aged three to thirteen were learning the clas­sics by rote, reciting each passage six hundred times. Around the country, Chinese tourists flocked to the surviving Confucius Temples, where they filled out prayer cards. "The overwhelming number are about exams," Anna Sun, a sociologist at Kenyon College, who studied the cards, told me. "They are primarily wishes for the college entrance exam, but also the TOEFL, the G.R.E., law school."

It would have been anathema to Chairman Mao, but his heirs have changed their view on revolution. In the eighties, when China set itself in pursuit of prosperity, the Party studied how Confucian values had helped to stabilize

ILLUSTRATION BY VICTO NGAI

other countries in East Asia. Genera­tions of Chinese thinkers had dreamed of finding the optimal recipe for "na­tional studies"-the mixture of philoso­phy and history that might insulate China from the pressures of Western­ization. Mter the democracy demon­strations at Tiananmen Square in 1989 ended in a violent crackdown, leaders needed an indigenous ideology that might restore the Party's moral credibil­ity. Top Communists gave speeches at meetings devoted to Confucianism, and state television launched a series about traditional culture intended, it said, "to boost the people's self-confidence, self­respect, and patriotic thought." In 2002, the Party officially stopped calling itself a "revolutionary party'' and adopted the term "Party in Power." The Prime Min­ister, Wen Jiabao, declared, ''Unity and stability are really more important than anything else." In February, 2005, the Party chief, Hu Jintao, quoted Confu­cius' observation that "harmony is some­thing to be cherished."

Soon, "harmony'' was on billboards and in television commercials and in­toned by apparatchiks. In 2006, a teain of government-backed historians marked Confucius' 2,557th birthday by unveiling what they called a "standard­ized" portrait: a kindly old figure with a luxuriant beard, his hands crossed at his chest. The Chinese Association for the Study of Confucius, supported by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, introduced traditions that had never existed before. It arranged for couples to renew their wedding vows in front of a statue of the sage.

As a gentler alternative to Mao, Con­fucius has been enlisted as an avatar on the world stage. The opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics made no mention of the Chairman but featured recurring references to harmony and to the classic texts . In the past decade, China has opened more than four hundred Con­fucius Institutes around the world to teach language, culture, and history. Many universities have welcomed them; the program provides teaching materi­als and cash. (Some scholars have com­plained that the institutes seek to limit expression. In July, McMaster Uni­versity, in Canada, closed its Confucius Institute after a teacher complained that she had been prevented from prac-

tieing Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement.)

The Confucian revival has been es­pecially visible in the city of Qyfu, the sage's home town, in present-day Shan­dong Province. In 2007, the city's Inter­national Confucius Festival was co­sponsored by the Confucius Wine Company. Thousands of people filled a local stadium, giant balloons bearing the names of ancient scholars bobbed over­head, and a Korean pop star performed · in an abbreviated outfit. Near the cave where Confucius was said to have been born, a five-hundred-million-dollar museum-and-park complex is under construction; it includes a statue of Confucius that is nearly as tall as the Statue of Liberty. In its marketing, Qyfu has adopted comparisons to Je­rusalem and Mecca and calls itself "The Holy City of the Orient." List year, it received 4.4 million visitors, sur­passing the number of people who vis­ited Israel.

No one has harnessed the interest in Confucius more successfully than Yu Dan, a professor of media studies at Beijing Normal University. She pre­sented a popular series of lectures on state television and wrote a book, "Con­fucius from the Heart" (2006), that is said to have sold ten million copies. Today, she occupies a position in Chi­nese pop culture somewhere between Bernard-Henri Levy and Dr. Phil. S}fe plays down themes that irritate modern readers-such as Confucius' observa­tion that "women and small people are hard to deal with"-and writes, reassur­ingly, "The truths that Confucius gives us are always the easiest of truths." Scholars mock her work-one critic at­tended book signings in a T -shirt that read "Confucius is deeply worried"­but within a year Yu became the sec­ond-highest-paid author in China, after Guo Jingming, a writer of young-adult fiction who travelled with guards to hold back the crowds.

At Yu Dan's headquarters in Beijing, a suite of offices on a high floor at the edge of the campus, her assistant ushered me into a modern conference room. Yu Dan arrived, smiling broadly, and asked the assistant to prepare tea. Yu Dan, who is in her late forties, has high cheek­bones and a short, severe haircut. I asked what prompted her to embrace the

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classics. She said that, like others her age, she had grown up denouncing the ancient scriptures. 'When I began writ­ing 'Confucius from the Heart,' a lot of people asked me, Why are you writ­ing this?' And I said, 'I am atoning for the crimes of my generation, because we were young and we criticized him mercilessly.' "

She paused, and turned her atten­tion to the assistant, a graduate student. "Child, how could you be so stupid!" Yu said. "This tea has been steeping for too long!" She looked at me, and the smile returned. "Children today do not know how to host people," she said. Mter Yu became popular, the Party in­vited her to conferences, and she began presenting her readings of the classics in a political context. "Unlimited possi­bility leads to chaos, because you don't know where to go or what to do," she told me, adding, 'We must rely on a strict system to resolve problems. As citizens, our duty is not necessarily to be perfect moral persons. Our duty is to be law-abiding citizens.''

Confucius-or Kongzi, which means Master Kong-was not

born to power, but his idiosyncrasies and ideas made him the Zelig of the Chinese classics. His story runs through the ancient books-the Analects, Zuo­zhuan, Mengzi, the Records of the Grand Historian-with details that range from historical to mythical. His father, Shuliang He, was an aging war­rior-physically enormous arid fa­mously ugly-who was desperate for a healthy son. When he was in his seven­ties, he found a teen-age concubine, and they had a son, in 551 B.C. The baby, like his father, was unsighdy, with a crooked nose and a bulbous fore­head so peculiar that he was given the name Qiu, meaning "mound.'' (Admir­ers insisted that his head resembled a crown.)

When Confucius was three, his fa­ther died, and his mother set off with her toddler to find a livelihood. As a boy, he worked and lost himself in po­etry and imagination. He married at eighteen or nineteen, but was bored and frustrated, because he lacked the con­nections to realize his ambition of be­coming a bureaucrat. Instead, he offered to teach students of every social class. It

32 THE NEW YOI\KEI\, JANUAI\Y 13, 2014

was an era of war and corruption, and Confucius argued that rituals could teach people to reconcile their desires to the needs of family and community. He was an optimist. A virtuous ruler, he ~aid, is like the wind: "The moral char­acter of those beneath him is · the grass. When the wind blows, the grass bends." He finally earned a government post, but his reforms threatened other offi­cials, and, as legend has it, they con-

. cocted a plan to drive him out: They sent his superior eighty beautiful girls, who succeeded in occupying the boss so thoroughly (he disappeared for three days) that the righteous Confucius had to leave. Humiliated, Confucius began travelling about the country, pointing out abuses. He met a woman whose husband and son had been eaten by ti­gers, and he told his disciples, "An op­pressive government is more terrible than tigers." Confucius was so radical that a fellow-sage, Laozi (said to be the founder ofTaoism), warned him against "ill this huffing and puffing, as though you were carrying a big drum and searching for a lost child." To Confu­cius, harmony was consensus, not con­formity. It required loyal opposition. A country is at risk, he said, when a prince believes that "the only joy in being a prince is that no one opposes what one says." Warlords ignored him or tried to kill him.

Confucius never imagined that he would become an icon. "He liked con­versations. They helped him think, but he never expected anyone to write them down," the historian Ann ping Chin ob-. served, in "The Authentic Confucius: A Life ofThought and Politics" (2007). "Confucius did not wish to have his words end up as rules," she wrote, be­cause "he loved the idea ofbeing human. He loved the entirely private journey of finding what was right and feasible among life's many variables."

After thirteen years of wandering, Confucius returned home to his books, and he died, in his seventies, convinced that he was a failure. Of his three thou­sand students, only seventy-two were t~e disciples, said to have mastered his teachings, which they compiled in the Analects. His rules made him exhausting to be around. 'When the meat was not cut squarely, he would not eat," his disci­ples wrote. 'When a thing was not ac-

companied by its proper sauce, he would not eat." But in times of war or instabil­ity his dictates on how to dress, how to govern, and how to live held out the tan­talizing promise of order. A prime min­ister later remarked, 'With just half the Analects, I can govern the empire."

In the centuries that followed, Con­fucianism was manipulated and. buffeted by politics. In 213 B.C., the first em­peror of China sought to put knowledge under government control and ordered the burning ofbooks, including Confu­cian texts. People who invoked them were executed or sentenced to labor in exile. Confucianism was revived in the subsequent dynasty, the Han, and was China's state ideology for much of the next two millennia. The temple next to my house in Beijing was built in 1306, near the Imperial Academy, a training ground for officials, which remained China's highest seat oflearning until the fall of the emperor, in 1911.

A few days after I heard the loud­speaker next door, a large banner

went up in our neighborhood, identifY­ing the temple as "The Holy Land of National Studies." For the first time since the Communist Party came to power, in 1949, the temple was putting on a celebration of Confucius' birthday. The occasion featured speeches by gov­ernment officials and professors and a recitation by children. I figured that the event would probably signal the end of the daily musical shows, but in the weeks that followed they continued, and followed a regular schedule: every hour, ten to six, seven days a week, rain or shine. The sound echoed off the walls of the houses beside the temple, and what had begun as a novelty gradually wore grooves into the minds of my neighbors. Huang Wenyi, an employee at a recy­cling yard, who lived next door, told me, "I hear it in my head at night. It's like I've been on a boat all day and I can still feel the rocking."

His face brightened with an idea. "You should go tell them to turn down the volume~"

'Why me?" "Because you're a foreigner. They'll

pay attention to you." I wasn't sure I wanted the kind of

attention that comes from complaining about China's most famous philoso-

pher. But I was curious about the show and arranged to visit the head of the temple, a man named Wu Zhiyou. Wu looked less like a theologian than like an actor who'd play the kindly father in a Chinese soap opera: in his mid-fifties, he had a large, handsome face, a perfect pair of dimples in his cheeks, and a res­onant voice that sounded somehow fa­miliar. Before being posted to run the temple, he had spent most of his career in the research office of the city's Propa­ganda Department, and he had a mind for marketing. Of the performance, he said, "This show has attracted people from all levels of society-Chinese and foreigners, men and women, well edu­cated and less educated, experts and or­dinary people.''

I asked if he was involved in the pro­duction. "I'm the chief designer!" he said, eyes shining. "I oversaw every de­tail. Even1the narrator's voice is mine."

The show had been con~eived under demanding circumstances. Wu had been given only a month's notice before the birthday celebration. He hired a composer, recruited dancers from a local art school, and selected lines from the classics that could lend the performance a narrative shape. "You need ups and downs and a climax, just like a movie or a play," he said. "If it's too bland, it will never work"

Wu had succeeded in making the Confucius Temple into his own com­munity theatre, and he was savoring his role. "In junior middle school, I was al­ways the student leader of the propa­ganda section of the student council," he said. "I love reading aloud, and music and art." In his spare time, he still did cross-talk comedy routines, the Chinese version of standup. He had plans for the temple's future. 'We're building a new set that will have ceramic statues of the seventy-two disciples. And we need more lighting. Then, maybe, I can say it is complete."

Wu checked his watch. He wanted me to catch the three-o'clock show. He gave me a book on the history of the temple and said, "Mter you read this book, your questions will no longer be questions."

The stage, in front of a pavilion on the north side of the compound, had been fitted with lights. The cast con­sisted of sixteen young men and women

in scholars' robes; each song-and-dance routine was named for a line frorri the classics-the Analects, the Book of Songs, the Book of Rites, and others­and had an upbeat interpretation: "Hap­piness" was based on the line "Good fortune lies within bad; bad fortune lies within good." (The stage version omit­ted the ominous second clause.) The finale, "Harmony," linked Confucius and the Communist Party. A pamphlet explained that it conveyed the "harmo­nious ideology and harmonious society of the ancient people, which will have a positive influence on the construction of modern harmonious society."

I read the book that Wu gave me, and the depth of detail about ancient

events was impressive: it recorded who planted which trees on the temple grounds seven hundred years ago. But it was conspicuously silent on other mat­ters, including the years between 1905 and 1981. In the official history of the Confucius Temple, most of the twenti­eth century was blank

During tny time in China, I had learned to expect that renderings of his­tory came with holes, like the dropouts in an audio recording when the music goes silent and resumes as if nothing

had happened. Some of those edits were ordained from above: for years the peo­ple were barred from discussing the crackdown at Tiananmen Square or the famine of the Great Leap Forward, which took between thirty million and forty-five million lives, because the Party liad never repudiated or accepted responsibility for those events. Ordinary Chinese had few choices: some accepted the forgetting, because they were poor and determined to get on with their lives; some raged against it, but lacked the political means to resist.

There were other books about the Confucius Temple, and these filled in the blanks-especially about the' night of August 23, 1966, during the opening weeks of the Cultural Revolution. The order to "Smash the Four Olds" had de­volved into a chaotic assault on author­ity of all kinds. That afternoon, a group of Red Guards summoned one of Chi­na's most famous writers, Lao She, to the temple's front gate.

Lao She was sixty-seven and one of China's best hopes for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He had grown up not far from the temple, in poverty, the son of an imperial guard who died in battle against foreign armies. In 1924, he went to London and stayed for five years,

"Usually I'd be nervous, but the rest of his apartment is so nice."

"Can you give me some sort of metaphor for how you're feeling?"

•

living near Bloomsbury and reading Conrad and Joyce. He wore khakis be­cause he couldn't afford tweeds. In 1936, he wrote "Rickshaw Boy," about a young rickshaw puller whose encoun­ters with injustice turn him into a "de­generate, selfish, hapless product of a sick society." Lao She also lived in America, for more than three years--on Manhattan's Upper West Side-but he eventually returned to China and be­came to Beijing what Victor Hugo was to Paris: the city's quintessential writer. The Party named him a "People's Art­ist." He resented being asked to produce propaganda, but, like many, he was a loyal servant who poured criticism on his fellow-writers when they fell out with the Party.

Now he was the target . A group of Red Guards-mostly schoolgirls of fifteen and sixteen-pushed him through the gates of the temple and forced him to kneel on the flagstones beside a bonfire, among other writers and artists. His accusers denounced him for his ties to America and for amassing dollars, a common accusation at the time.

They shouted "Down with the anti­Party elements!" and used leather belts with heavy brass buckles to whip the old men and women. Lao She was bleeding frqm the head, but he remained con-

34 THE NEW YOI\KEI\., JANUAI\Y 13, 2014

•

scious. Three hours later, he was taken to a police station, where his wife re­trieved him.

The next morning, Lao She rose early and walked northwest from his home to a pond called the Lake of Great Peace. He read poetry and wrote until the sun set. Then he took off his shirt and draped it over a tree branch, loaded his pockets with stones, and walked into the lake.

When the body was discovered the next day, his son, Shu Yi, was sum­moned to collect it. The police had found his father's clothes, his cane, his glasses, and his pen, as well as a sheaf of papers that he had left behind. The official ruling on his death declared that Lao She had "isolated himself from the people." He was a "counter-revolution­ary'' and was barred from receiving a proper burial. The body was cremated without ceremony. His widow and chil­dren put his. spectacles and his pen into a casket and buried it.

I wondered about the son, Shu Yi. H~ would be in his seventies now, older than his father was when he died. I asked around and discovered that he lived only a few minutes' walk from my house. He invited me over. Shu Yi had white hair and a heavy, kind face, and his apartment was cluttered with books and scrolls and paintings. As we talked,

a soft breeze blew in the window from a nearby canal. I asked if he had ever learned more about his father's suicide.

"It's hard to know exactly, but I think his death was his final act of st:f)lggle," Shu Yi said. "Many years later, I came upon an article called 'Poets,' which he had written in 1941"-a quarter century before he died. "He wrote, 'Poets are a strange crowd. When everyone else is happy, the poets can say things that are discouraging. When everyone else is sorrowful, the poets can laugh and dance. But when the nation is in danger they must drown themselves and let their deaths be a warning in the name of truth.'"

This sacrifice was a tradition in China, dating to the third century B.C., when the poet C2ll Yuan drowned him­selfin protest against corruption. Shu Yi told me, "By doing so, they are fighting back, telling others what the truth really is." His father, he said, "would rather break than bend."

After I talked to Shu Yi, I went back to see Wu Zhiyou, the head of the tem­ple, and asked him about the story of Lao She's final night. He gave a short sigh and said, "It's true. During the Cul­tural Revolution, there were struggle sessions here. Afterward, Lao She went home and threw himself in the lake. This can be described as a historical fact."

Why had the temple's written history made no mention of it?

Wu s_truggled to find an answer, and 1 braced myself for a dose of propa­ganda. But then he said, "It's too sad. It makes people too sad. I think it's best not to include this in books. It's factual, it's history, but it was not because of the temple. It was because of the time. It doesn't belong in the records of the Confucius Temple."

I understood his point, but the expla­nation felt incomplete. Lao She was beaten in the temple because it was a place oflearning, ofideas, ofhistory, the permission to attack one of China's most famous novelists was, like so much of the Cultural Revolution, the permis­sion to attack what it meant to be Chi­nese, and in the decades since then the Party and the people had never recon­ciled all that they lost in those moments. Even if someone wanted to mark the site where Beijing's greatest chronicler

L

ended his life, it would be difficult; the Lake of Great Peace was filled in de­cades ago, during an extension of the -subway system. I have often marvelled at how much people in China have managed to put behind them: revolu­tion, war, poverty, and the upheavals of the present. My neighbor Huang lived with his mother, who was eighty-eight. When I once asked her if she had pho­tos of her family, she said, "They were burned during the Cultural Revolu­tion." And then she laughed-the par­ticular hollow laugh that the Chinese reserve for awful things.

T he Cultural Revolution dismantled China's ancient belief systems, and

the economic revolution that followed could not rebuild them. Prosperity had yet to define the ultimate purpose of the nation and the individual. There was a hole in Chinese life that people called the jingshen kongxu-"the spiritual void."

Every day, I noticed groups of civil servants from the hinterlands and stu­dents from around th~ city visiting the Confucius Temple. One young guide with a ponytail spoke to a group of mid­dle-aged Chinese women. She held her hands out before her. ''This is the gesture for paying respects to Confucius," she said. Her visitors did their best to copy her. For many people in China, I real­ized, the gaps in history had made Con­fucius a stranger. It was difficult to know where his life ended and the mythology and the politics began. Annping Chin wrote, 'We give him credit for all that has gone right and wrong in China be­cause we do not really know him."

In that vacuum, some in China have been eager to put the philosopher to more useful political purposes. In Octo­ber, 2010, the dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, who is serving an eleven-year sentence for subversion, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. That enraged the Chinese government. In response, a group of nationalists organized what they called the "Confucius Peace Prize," and awarded it, the next year, to Vladimir Putin, for bringing "safety and stability to Russia." At times, the embrace of Con­fucius has turned hostile. In December, 2010, a group of ten well-known classi­cal scholars denounced a plan to build a large Christian church in Qufu, Confu­cius' home town. 'We beseech you tore-

spect this sacred land of Chinese culture, and stop the building of the Christian church at once," they wrote. The govern­ment tried to argue that there was a prec­edent for having a church in town, but the protest attracted the support of grass­roots Confucian associations and Web sites, and construction was postponed.

In China, the official embrace of Con­fucius has come to be seen by some as suffocating. When, in the name of pro­tecting political stability, censors remove critical comments from the Chinese Web, savvy users say that their words have been "harmonized." The Party's conception of Confucian harmony leaves little room for the politics of negotiation, for an honest clash of ideas. After the pop scholar Yu Dan became a sensation, Li Ling, a Pe­king University professor, published "Stray Dog: My Reading of the Analects," in which he criticized the "manufactured Confucius." He wrote, "The real Confu­cius, the one who actually livt::d, was nei­ther a sage nor a king . .. . . He had no power or status-----i>nly morality and learn­ing-and dared to criticize the power elite of his day. He travelled around lobbying for his policies, racking his brains to help the rulers ofhis day with their problems, always trying to convince them to give up evil ways and be more righteous . . . . He was tormented, obsessed, and driven to roam, pleading for his ideas, more like a stray dog than a sage."

When Li's book came out, in May, 2007, he was denounced by other classi-

cal scholars, such as Jiang Qlng, a prom­inent Confucian political thinker, who called the author "a cynical doomsday prophet who deserves no response." One ofLi's defenders was Liu Xiaobo. Before Liu went to prison, he warned of a mood in which "Confucianism was venerated and all other schools of thought were banned." Instead ofinvoking Corili.Icius, Liu wrote, intellectuals should be vener­ating "independence of thought and au­tonomy of person."

The longer I lived beside the Confu­cius Temple the more I sensed the gap between what people asked of it and what it provided. The Chinese came to the temple, to the Holy Land of Na­tional Studies, on a quest for some kind of moral continuity. But it rarely gave them what they wanted. The Party, to maintain its hold over history, offered a caricature of Confucius. Generations of Chinese had grown up condemning China's ethical and philosophical tradi­tions, only to find that the Party was now abruptly resurrecting them, with­out granting permission to discuss what had happened in the interim. Hu Shuli, a progressive editor, described a "collec­tive amnesia'' surrounding the Cultural Revolution. "Files on that episode in our history remain 'secret,'" she wrote. "Older generations do not dare look back, while our younger generations don't have the remotest inkling of the Cultural Revolution."

There were signs that liberal intellec­tuals were not the only ones losing pa­tience with the official rendering of Confucius . In November, 2012, Yu Dan appeared before an audience at Pe­king University after a performance of Chinese opera, and the students booed her. They shouted that she didn't de­serve to be onstage with serious schol­ars. "Get out of here!" someone yelled, and Yu made a hasty exit. The previ­ous winter, a large statue of Confucius appeared beside Tiananmen Square, the first new addition to such a sensi­tive spot since Mao's mausoleum was erected, a generation ago. Philosophers and political scientists wondered if it signalled an official change to the Party platform. But then, four months after it arrived, the statue disappeared. It was moved, in the middle of the night, to a much less prominent site, in the courtyard of a museum. The reason for the move remained a mystery, because the Central Propaganda Department barred Chinese journalists from writing about it. People were left to joke that Confucius, the itinerant teacher from Shandong Province, had been caught trying to live in Beijing without the proper permit. +

NEW YORK ER.COM / GO/ OUTLOUD

A conversation with Evan Osnos.