Age of Ambition

Whenever a new idea sweeps across China—a new fashion, a philosophy, a way of life—the Chinese describe it as a “fever.” In the first years after the country opened to the world, people contracted “Western Business Suit Fever” and “Jean-Paul Sartre Fever” and “Private Telephone Fever.” It was difficult to predict when or where a fever would ignite, or what it would leave behind.

In the village of Xiajia (population 1,564) there was a fever for the American cop show Hunter, better known in China as Expert Detective Heng Te. When the show appeared on Chinese television in 1990, the villagers of Xiajia started to gather to watch Det. Sgt. Rick Hunter of the Los Angeles Police Department go undercover with his partner, Det. Sgt. Dee Dee McCall. And the villagers of Xiajia came to expect that Det. Sgt. Rick Hunter would always find at least two occasions to utter his trademark phrase, “Works for me”—though, in Chinese, he came across as a religious man, because “Works for me” was mistranslated as “Whatever God wants.”

e fever passed from one person to the next, and it affected each in a different way. Some months later, when the police in Xiajia tried to search the home of a local farmer, the man told them to come back when they had a warrant—a word he had learned from Expert Detective Heng Te.

جهت استعلام قيمت و سفارش چاپ اين محصول لطفا با انتشارات گنج حضور تماس حاصل فرماييد