Crazy English

By Evan Osnos
The New Yorker, April 28, 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

Li Yang is the founder, head teacher, and editor-in-chief of Li Yang Crazy English.

Li is China’s Elvis of English, perhaps the world’s only language teacher known to bring students to tears of excitement. He has built an empire out of his country’s deepening devotion to a language it once derided as the tongue of barbarians and capitalists. His philosophy is flamboyantly patriotic: “Conquer English to Make China Stronger!”

Li, 38, has made his name on a technique that one Chinese newspaper called English as a Shouted Language. Shouting, Li argues, is the way to unleash your “international muscles.”

To his fans, Li is a testament to the promise of self-transformation. In the two decades since he began teaching, he has appeared before millions of Chinese adults and children. He routinely teaches in arenas, to classes of ten thousand people or more. His students throng him for autographs.

The global headquarters of Li Yang Crazy English is in the southern city of Guangzhou. Li is rarely there. He likes hotels. Even in Beijing, where he shares an apartment with his wife and their two daughters, he often keeps a hotel room nearby so that he can work without distraction.

In the presidential suite on the top floor of Guangzhou’s Ocean Hotel, Li explained to me a list of new projects, including a retail plan that would create the Starbucks of English education: “People would get off work and just go to the Crazy English Tongue Muscle Training House and then go back home. Just like a gym.”

Li’s name adorns more than a hundred books, videos, audio boxed sets, and software packages, such as the “Li Yang Crazy English Blurt Out MP3 Collection,” and his motivational memoir. He encourages companies to buy the memoir, whose Chinese title translates as “I Am Crazy, I Succeed,” in bulk for employees.

China has been in the grip of “English fever” for more than a decade. A vast national appetite has elevated English to something more than a language. China today is divided by class, opportunity, and power, but one of its few unifying beliefs is the power of English.

Li’s indispensable asset is his voice, a full-throated pitchman’s baritone. He delivers it in an accent of his own creation that veers between Texan and Midwestern, stretched by roomy vowels. He has spent only a few weeks in the United States and Great Britain, but he makes few mistakes.

On the couch at the hotel, Li turned one of our interviews into a lecture for his employees: “How can we make Crazy English more successful? We know that people are not going to be persistent, so we give them ten sentences a month, or one article a month, and then, when they master this, we give them a huge award, a big ceremony. Celebrate! Then we have them pay again, and we make money again.”

In late January, China faced its worst winter weather in half a century. Still, some 700 adults and children made it to a college campus in Conghua for Li Yang’s Crazy English Intensive Winter Training Camp. The camp had a military motif: supervisors dressed in camouflage, with megaphones, escorted students in formation around the campus. Li’s face could be seen on oversized posters everywhere, accompanied by English phrases.

Li’s parents were committed Communists who heeded Chairman Mao’s call, in the late sixties, for students to train the peasantry. After college, they settled in the remote northwest province of Xinjiang. Li’s father, Li Tiande, ran the provincial broadcasting bureau, and his mother was a senior engineer there.

Li developed a crippling shyness. In high school, he grew his hair to his shoulders and considered dropping out, but, ultimately, he enrolled in the mechanical-engineering department at Lanzhou University, in one of China’s poorest provinces. He failed his classes.

Toward the end of 1987, with a mandatory English test looming, Li and a friend decided to practice reading in an outdoor campus pavilion every day at noon. Li discovered that the louder he read, the better he felt. “I could concentrate, I felt really brave,” he recalls. “If I stopped yelling, I stopped learning.” When the annual English test came around, Li told me, he took second place: “I became instantly, instantly famous.”

After graduation, Li soon moved to Guangzhou as an English-language host on radio and television. After two years on the air, he was well known but bored. He quit and founded a company whose name was a phonetic spelling of “crazy”: the Li Yang-Cliz International English Promotion Workshop.

In 1997, Li was trooping from city to city. In the soot-stained industrial redoubt of Zhuzhou, he met Ouyang Weijian. They were an improbable pair: Li, the scion of a cosseted cadre family, and Ouyang, one of five children raised in a dirt-floor farmhouse. After Li spoke in Zhuzhou, Ouyang quit his job and joined him as general manager of the company.

Li was teaching in the northern coal city of Jilin, in June, 1999, when he met Kim Lee, a tall, confident brunette from Florida. Within days, Kim was teaching beside Li onstage. They had a natural rapport. Her dry wit and all-American looks were the perfect foil. They married four years later, in Las Vegas.

Last year, the Beijing Organizing Committee appointed one of Li's companies to teach as many volunteers as possible. Beijing wants half of its hundred thousand volunteers to be able to speak a foreign language.
 

AR   I spent a year teaching English in Japan and I can well imagine how Li goes down in China.