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Essay: Braveheart Boy

Illustration by Michael Marsicano
/
Milwaukee Magazine

This Friday, Lake Effect will air a one-hour special about the proposed Foxconn factory in Racine County, recorded on site at the Prairie School in Wind Point.  Our Across the Divide broadcast, produced in association with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, examines questions about the project as it moves forward.

There are not a lot of people in the area with direct experience with the Taiwanese company.  But Milwaukee writer Dan Simmons has some indirect experience, having taught someone who went to work for Foxconn in China:

Among the hundreds of students I taught in a Chinese village, Brad stood out. He gave his final speech first semester singing Christmas carols through the voice of an origami frog he’d made. He acted alongside me in “The Three Little Pigs,” he a pig, I the Big Bad Wolf. The last time I saw him, he had given a final speech spring semester in the voice of William Wallace in Braveheart. His clarion call to freedom in his second language stirred his classmates to sustained applause – common for Brad. He stood maybe five-foot-five and wore the same red flannel shirt, khakis and easy smile every day. You couldn’t help but like him. His real name was Feng, but I chose his English name in honor of another Brad, one of my best friends.

In the Q-and-A after the Braveheart speech, a young woman asked the kind of absurd question that populates Chinese textbooks about the English language: “If you were on a bridge, and you saw a woman drowning, and you jumped in to save her, would you consider yourself a hero?” “No,” came Brad’s immediate reply. “It is every man’s responsibility.” The answer captured Brad’s essence: so cheesy, and yet it came off as totally genuine. Everything he did carried the sweet scent of altruism, and his sunniness seemed real, a rarity in an authoritarian country where smiles can feel state-mandated. As I was leaving the village after a year there, I put “write a letter to Brad and tell him how awesome I think he is” on my to-do list. To my eternal regret, that letter never happened.

The next I heard about him, I was back in the States, five years after my time in the village. Nancy, a classmate of his, called me as I drove from Indianapolis to Chicago and asked if I remembered “Braveheart boy.” She had news: He had jumped to his death from the 14th floor of his dormitory at a factory where he worked in the southern China boomtown of Shenzhen. A brief newspaper account said he left behind a handwritten note in his room: “Too much pressure from work, really in a bad mood.” Coworkers found him. He jumped at 8 a.m.

That somber occasion introduced me to Foxconn, Brad’s employer...

You can read more of Dan Simmons' essay in the November issue of Milwaukee Magazine.