Lauren Hilgers reports on how fame has affected the life of a child whose heroics during the Sichuan quake made him a celebrity:
Like most people around the world, I first saw Lin Hao on television, gripping Yao Ming’s hand as the Chinese Olympic team marched into the stadium on the opening night of the August 2008 Games. He was nine, at the time, and next to the basketball-playing giant, Lin looked tiny and slightly bewildered. He waved a small Chinese flag that had slipped on its pole and turned upside down. Lin looked out at the crowd and wrinkled his forehead seriously.
While the Olympics may have introduced Lin to the world, China had been talking about him for months--the tiniest hero of the Sichuan earthquake. In a disaster that was well-recorded and televised nationwide, Lin was a star from the moment he was first captured on film.
When the earthquake hit on May 12 last year, Lin was in school in the town of Yingxiu in Wenchuan county, the epicenter of the disaster. When the ground started bucking, the Yuzixi Primary School -- like many throughout the province -- began to collapse, debris falling around Lin and his classmates as they ran for the exit. Lin pulled himself out of the rubble only to go running back to rescue two of his classmates, helping carry them to safety.
Later, famously, Lin explained his heroics: "I was the hall monitor," he told a television reporter. "It was my job."
Answers like these, simple and direct, propelled Lin to national stardom. He embodied China's heroics during the disaster (and provided a counter-example to "Runner Fan," the teacher that panicked and bolted out of his classroom as soon as the earthquake started, leaving his students behind).
In the West, Lin's explanation of his actions was taken in a different light. Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson held up Lin as an example of collectivism in China. "That answer may tell us more than we want to know," Meyerson wrote in an August 13th Op-Ed. "He could have gone back because his friends were still inside. Instead, he went back because he was a responsible little part of a well-ordered hierarchy."
But Lin became more than just a tiny cog in a monolithic machine. What some Western analysts missed was how Lin's story made him the nation's darling, due partly to the fact that he was such great TV. He wasn't the only child to act heroically that day. When the Chinese government recognized student heroes, 19 other children received medals. Still, nine-year-old Lin -- with a bald patch on the side of his head, a memento of slight injuries he sustained during the calamity -- stood out. He charmed talk-show hosts and stared down television personalities, telling them he hoped one day to go to Harvard and that his greatest wish was to get rid of the bald patch in his scalp. At nine, the kid was a great interview.
Meyerson's take on Lin wasn't totally off the mark, though. The communist party in China has a long history of celebrating child heroes. The story of the "Little Soldier Zhang Ga" has inspired three movies documenting the heroics of a little boy caught up in the Japanese invasion and occupation of China before and during WWII. Another little boy, Lai Ning, was part of a propaganda campaign launched by the government to distract from Beijing's negative image after the crackdown on Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in 1989. (Lai had died helping to save his village from a forest fire in 1988.) This is the kind of patriotism Beijing wants Chinese citizens to emulate.
Surviving as a living hero, however, can be complicated. I met Lin Hao in Chengdu at his primary school on a recent spring afternoon. I arrived as kids poured out of the gates, running into a thick crowd of waiting parents. Lin, however, was being interviewed by the state-run China Central Television, a school security guard explained. I would have to wait. "I don't think he'll be in there much longer," the guard said. "They've already been interviewing him for an hour."
After the Olympics, Lin had been offered free school tuition at an elite school in Shanghai, so his family moved there. In Shanghai, the child celebrity acquired his own following of Chinese paparazzi. His mother, a round-faced and serious woman named Chen Li, said the city proved too much for the family. "We're from the country," she said, sitting in the guard's booth, waiting to take her son home. "Everyone in Shanghai was very nice to us, but we weren't comfortable."
Despite Lin's fame, the challenges that his family faced in Shanghai reflect some of the challenges facing other grassroots citizens displaced by the earthquake in Sichuan. His parents, whose previous job experience was mainly in farming, had difficulties finding work in Shanghai, and rent was expensive. They had made the transition to the new city at the start of the financial crisis. Lin's older sister also had difficulty adjusting to her new school. All of them found themselves troubled by the memories of the earthquake. "We still can't talk about it," said Chen. "If we talk about it, we just start crying." After six months in Shanghai, the family moved back to Sichuan.
Back at the primary school in Chengdu, CCTV finished with Lin and he emerged from his interview ready to go home, a red bandana tied neatly around his neck. The school guard introduced me as a friend and I told him I was a writer. Lin looked at me, nearly exasperated, and asked, "What do you want to ask me?"
The media has been very nice to him, Lin insisted. But they can sometimes bother him. He told me his favorite school subjects were math and athletics, and that in the future he hoped to be an architect. His father, he explained, worked outside of the city on a construction site. "I'm just a normal person," he said, when I asked about all the attention he had gotten over the last year. The child ended the interview on his own, when he asked politely if we could be done so he could go buy a snack.
"Don't tell him you're a reporter next time," his mother advised me. "He talks a lot more if he thinks you're just a friend." Lin returned with a packet of dried fish and ripped me off a piece. "You should take more," he said, and then handed some to the guard, to his mother, and to another man who happened to be sitting nearby. "I'm going to play," he announced. "When you want to leave, come get me."
Chen admits that her son's fame has helped the family. They rent a flat in Chengdu while most of their family and friends still live in temporary housing outside of Yingxiu. They're not sure when they'll be able to move into permanent housing, she said.
She said Lin has always been single-minded, and at ten years of age he doesn't seem much interested in fame. Offers have poured in asking him to do commercials -- one promoting chocolate bars, she remembered -- but the family tries not to accept anything that might sidetrack Lin from regular schooling. "He's cute now," Chen Li said. "But what about when he's 50? He is just like anyone else--school is the most important thing."
