Liu Yixia

“She was thinking of studying Japanese.
“I’ve heard it takes a Chinese person one year to learn English but only three months to learn Japanese,” she told me. “I’ve heard that Beijing college graduates can earn one thousand yuan more a month for each language they speak. Is that true?”
I told her she should probably focus on improving her English first.
“I’m killing myself trying to increase my vocabulary,” she said. “I am memorizing fifty words a day.”
“Fifty words a day?” I repeated, amazed.
“Is that a lot or a little?”
“The last time I saw Liu Yixia, she had engineered yet another makeover. She had dyed and permed her hair so it was long and crinkly, like caramel taffy. She had decided that an English teacher with ordinary black hair was tu, unsophisticated. “I did this to look more Western,” she said. She had memorized an entire book of Grade Six vocabulary, five thousand words. The young women at Mr. Wu’s school had shaved their heads again to express their dedication to learning English. And Mr. Wu had offered Liu Yixia a partnership in his new venture and promised her a third of the profits, but she didn’t trust him. His people skills had not improved.
“With your level of English,” he had told her recently, “you can muddle along for at most a year or so as a teacher. After that, there will be no more room for you here because I will have cornered the entire market. You can still go teach elsewhere, though.”
“Why would he say something like that?” I asked.
“I think he was trying to force me to go back to work for him.”
“That’s awful.”
“Yes,” she said, “but I feel sympathy for him. He is all on his own.”
She rejected Mr. Wu’s offer. Instead she jumped to an Internet company to run its English-language Web site aimed at foreign clients. A month after she arrived, the company collapsed and the owner disappeared, owing more than one hundred thousand yuan in staff salaries. Liu Yixia had joined a lawsuit with the other employees to get their back pay, though they were not hopeful about it.”